Chapter 13 The Spatialities of School-Parent-Community Engagement
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Abstract
School-parent-community engagement is known to be critically important for educational outcomes. When school personnel, parents, and members of local communities engage with one another there are significant dividends – social capital, trust, and mutual understanding among them. When those dividends multiply, children and young people tend to engage – both more and more often – in their school communities, families, and wider social milieux. In the process, education and learning extend across generations. Evidence suggests that engagement also either flourishes or is attenuated as a result of the settings in which interactions occur. Yet, in the scholarly and policy literature, engagement is often written or reportedly spoken about as though it was an aspatial phenomenon. The aim of this chapter is to explore this tendency to elide the spatialities of engagement by reference to a two-year research project based in 12 public schools in Tasmania, Australia. Our foundational premise is that engagement is always already spatialized. The question we consider in particular is what evidence is there that school personnel, parents, and community members have or do not have explicit or implicit understandings of the spatialities of engagement?