.jpg){kind=small}
Engaging the Community
The way a community goes about building a school helps to determine the quality of the finished structure, helps to determine whether or not that structure will continue to inspire that same community over time. The act of building a school sets a tone for years to come.
Teachers, administrators, and community members must join together in answering some important questions: What makes a school significant? How do we know when a school’s physical structure reinforces the established goals of teaching and learning? Do we understand why certain spaces work and others do not? As participants debate what is most important and necessary, parents and other community members come to appreciate educators’ knowledge of learning and teaching. Further, the experience taps the interests and skills of citizens. Research and scholarship to date underscores the important role active community involvement plays in designing and building quality schools and in strengthening communities (Bingler, 1995; Bingler, Quinn; & Sullivan, 2003; New York Institute for Education and Social Policy & Pratt Institute for Center for Community and Environmental Development, 2005; Ortiz, 1994; Sanoff, 1990, 1993, 2002; Tanner & Lackney, 2005; Tom-Miura, 2004).
Planning teams, composed of informed users, must first document the existing conditions of a problem, define its context, and collect relevant data. Any solution will be linked to how the problem is perceived, defined, and articulated. The people who will live in a school must be the ones to undertake the work of determining outcomes and crafting the means to reach them, and even then, the process must be ongoing as new staff is hired and new students are enrolled.
Early on in the process, community engagement is important for reasons of exchanging information and building community ownership over the project. The convening of public forums and planning workshops is more efficient than relying on information gathered piecemeal. They allow for the identity of points of consensus as well as points of conflict.
This brings us full circle to the importance of communication and the manner in which the school community and the community at large involves itself and is intentionally involved. Absent this process whereby we discover, absent specific and particular community dialogue, we lack an understanding of how communities define purpose and intent, how they see the past and what they expect for the future.
Your browser does not support web standards, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This site (and many others) will look better if you upgrade your browser. We recommend Mozilla - it's free, standards-compliant, and fast.