Revealing the community within: valuing the role of local community structures within evidence-based school intervention programmes

Schools and the families they serve are sometimes perceived as deficient and in need of fixing. One response has been the implementation of evidence-based family intervention programmes, which may be highly regulated and prescriptive as a condition of their (often philanthropic) funding. This article seeks to explore and bring to the foreground the often hidden role of the pre-existing, informal community networks with a view to more authentic evaluation of these externally imposed programmes. The article draws on a range of qualitative data reflecting the lived experiences of participants—including parents and other community members—in a family and parenting programme at an English primary school. The analysis uses the work of Tönnies as a theoretical lens. It suggests that while there are tensions caused by the rigid requirements of external programmes, these are overcome in many cases by the highly effective, but often unacknowledged, contributions of the informal aspects of community. It is argued that these operate within and complement the formal programme. Far from subverting the more overt procedures, they actually enable it to function successfully, leading to additional, unanticipated transformations among participants. The article concludes that these organic, often invisible connections need to be identified, documented and nurtured if their full potential is to be recognised and realised when evaluating similar interventions

“This Was Different, and I Wanted to Learn”: A President’s Response to a Student Hunger Strike at a Hispanic-Serving University

The purpose of this chapter is to consider the responses of Ricardo Romo, a former president of the University of Texas at San Antonio, to a student-led hunger strike in 2010 in relation to his own experiences as a student during the Civil Rights Movement. Drawing on Latina/o Educational Leadership and Applied Critical Leadership, this study utilizes historical methods to shed light on how past lived experiences frame the responses of university leaders from racially minoritized backgrounds. In connecting the past with the recent past, this chapter adds to the understudied body of work on Latinx leadership in higher education and provides an example for how university leadership may respond to student activists on their campuses.This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of a chapter published as Doran, Erin. "“This Was Different, and I Wanted to Learn”: A President’s Response to a Student Hunger Strike at a Hispanic-Serving University." In: Examining Effective Practices at Minority-Serving Institutions. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham (2019): 141-160. The final authenticated version is available online at DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-16609-0_9. Posted with permission.</p

'Red dirt' schools and pathways into higher education

One of the predominant themes that pervades much of the literature on remote education is one about Indigenous ‘disadvantage’. It has been defined specifically as ‘the difference (or gap) in outcomes for Indigenous Australians when compared with non-Indigenous Australians’ (Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision 2012, p. xiv). The concept then extends to ‘closing the gap’ (Council of Australian Governments 2009) in a general sense and in a more specific educational context (What Works: The Work Program 2012). Combining ‘Indigenous disadvantage’ with ‘remote’ adds a different meaning – those who live in remote communities are doubly ‘disadvantaged’ because of their geographic location and their race, and indeed some indexes of socio-economic advantage place disproportionate weight on location and race