Content area
Abstract
This study advances understandings of the goals of education as evolving from the individual to the collective, centering community as a framework for reimagining educational structures that advance equity. In doing so, this study explored the purpose of schooling beyond the transformation of the individual to understanding how teaching and learning practices sustained communities, and how the practices of schooling, following its rootedness in communities, is understood in terms of enhancing student engagement, relationship building, agency, and equity in education. This study addressed the overarching question, how do community pedagogies of a high school (Truth High School in the South Bronx, New York City) and partnering community organizations foster dialogic relationships to advance opportunities to learn for its youth that sustain its surrounding community? Understanding that learning is not neutral or politically innocent (Giroux, 1983) and that education is shaped by one’s sociopolitical context (Lamont Hill, 2016), I answer this question within the critical theoretical traditions of culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) youth participatory action research (Cammarota & Fine, 2008), and community frameworks stemming from African centered epistemology (Karenga, 1988). Methodologically, this study used an ethnographic research design to thickly describe the process by which participants construct meaning and the substance of what those meanings are. The study used empirical observations to grasp the basic interpretive nature of the school-community relationship as it gets carved out of human behavior and experience.
