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

Authors

Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez, University of Utah
Taeyeon Kim, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Sonny Partola, University of Utah
Paul J. Kuttner, University of Utah
Amadou Niang, Salt Lake City School District
Alma Yanagui, University of Utah
Laura Hernández, Community Advocate Network
Gerardo R. López, Michigan State University
Jennifer Mayer-Glenn, University of Utah

ORCID IDs

Taeyeon Kim https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2020-9851

Sonny Partola https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4192-4114

Paul J. Kuttner https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4739-1358

Date of this Version

2022

Citation

AERA Open January-December 2022, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1– 14

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221096465

Comments

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC

Abstract

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.