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

Document Type

Article

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.