critical place of community development in school transformation: The story of the Vaughn family center and Pacoima urban village, The

Teacher Education Quarterly, Fall 1999 by Oppenheim, Matt

Educators must take the lead in insisting that ways be found to build genuine community participation and community development practices into community schools. They must bring to the surface the philosophical and practical implications of the culture of consumerism for community schools, and oppose to this the more appropriate philosophy of democratic participation.

The Vaughn Family Center and Pacoima Urban Village together offer a significant contribution to the issues of community development in school-based family centers for three reasons. First, they present a successful example of community development. Parents and community members who once sought services were employed there and directed many of their programs. They were the primary agents in a process of transformation. They learned to recognize and build upon the talents and expertise of residents in their community, to nurture and support initiative and innovation, and to help people set and achieve goals for their future.

Second, the Center has been successful in lessening the social barriers to education. Since its beginning, both school attendance and academic assessments have risen. In a 1994 survey (Family Care Healthy Kids Collaborative, 1994), teachers, school administrators, agency staff, parents, and community participants involved at the School said that the Center had significantly affected student performance, how families were treated by School staff, how problems were solved, and the ways teachers interacted with children.

Third, family centers engaged in community development are also in the process of becoming a "learning organization" (Senge, 1992). School reformers look to notions of learning organization or the way that staff in schools work together: collaborating, setting goals, creating guiding values and discourses about learning in creating a school climate that is receptive to the community (Fullan, 1995; O'Neill, 1995; Starrat, 1995). Advocates of school reform assert that increased attention to and partnership with the community, and pedagogy that is participatory and attuned to community ways of learning, enhances the chances for student success. The family center as a community development project is an ideal context for schools and their communities to build a common learning community together, yet no research to date has focused on the family center as a learning organization. In this particular case study, conflicts between the School and the Center were not resolved, and for the community development process to continue, many parents left the Center to form their own non-profit organization. Thus educators are presented with a critical scenario with which to contemplate, debate and hopefully dialogue with their communities.

In the early stages of this study parents and staff expressed their concern that many program evaluators gathered statistics but never wrote about people's experiences or portrayed their points of view. They believed that the significance of their project could be best understood in the detailed experiences and expressions of individuals, not in statistical generalizations. My task as anthropologist was to look for a way to describe and organize their philosophy. Hence I listened to the words people used and watched the people who worked at the Vaughn Family Center and the emerging Pacoima Urban Village in order to find themes that represented their underlying philosophy. The themes that emerged reflected the language used by the staff at the Center and included "sharing our dreams"; "we are the experts"; "telling our story"; "we are here for the children"; "how do you walk a mile in our shoes?"; "I am a cheerleader, a mentor, and a coach"; "to get together and think"; and "helping others to fly."