AERA Open (Jun 2022)

Community-Centered School Leadership: Radical Care and During COVID-19

  • Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez,
  • Taeyeon Kim,
  • Sonny Partola,
  • Paul J. Kuttner,
  • Amadou Niang,
  • Alma Yanagui,
  • Laura Hernández,
  • Gerardo R. López,
  • Jennifer Mayer-Glenn

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221096465
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8

Abstract

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We share school leaders’ perspectives on Zoom videos concerning the needs of immigrant and refugee families in Title I schools. In these videos, participants crafted and shared personal narratives about their leadership experiences during the COVID-19 era of education. Rooted in participatory design research methods, the process of designing these videos were both a research project and an intervention to assist families and school leaders to better understand each other. We present a close analysis of administrators’ perspectives and describe how our codesigned video methodology enabled participants to coconstruct new meanings of school-community relationships during the pandemic through a radical care framework. We conceptualize these reimaginings as aperturas—cracks in the dominant family engagement paradigm that allow us to collectively work towards transformative ends which we term community-centered school leadership. We conclude the article with recommendations for how both school leadership and research can approach and reimagine family engagement postpandemic.