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

• Main Authors: Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez (Author), Taeyeon Kim (Author), Sonny Partola (Author), Paul J. Kuttner (Author), Amadou Niang (Author), Alma Yanagui (Author), Laura Hernández (Author), Gerardo R. López (Author), Jennifer Mayer-Glenn (Author)
• Format: Book
• Published: SAGE Publishing, 2022-06-01T00:00:00Z.
• Subjects: article
• Online Access: Connect to this object online.
• Notes: 2332-8584; 10.1177/23328584221096465
• Keywords: Education; L
• Source: AERA Open, Vol 8 (2022)

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.