Abstract
This article presents a 2-year critical case study of an urban high school innovating to enhance the academic performance of low-income Latina/o students, highlighting high-leverage practices that promote boundary crossing between school and community. First, we highlight foundational elements of school logic, mission, and community ethos that enabled boundary crossing. Second, we identify a key set of boundary-crossing practices that tap and build community wealth, and forms of capital that are shared, by bringing community into school and fostering youth engagement in community. We also reveal opportunities afforded and complexities arising from boundary crossing between school and community.
Latina/o students are often underserved by schools, resulting in high drop-out rates, an achievement gap, and low college-going rates (Gándara & Contreras, 2009). Researchers have documented how schools attended by Latina/o youth distribute resources in ways that limit Latina/o students’ academic success and create boundaries between schools and their communities, divesting Latina/o students of social and cultural resources and community wealth (Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Doucet, 2004; Valenzuela, 1999; Yosso, 2005). Educators increasingly call for connections that link schools with their communities to promote educational achievement and improved utilization of communities’ resources for learning (Coalition for Community Schools, 2009; Honig, Kahne, & McLaughlin, 2001). However, few studies have investigated high-leverage practices that promote boundary crossing between school and community as a means to access and build community wealth in service of Latina/o youth, the school, and the broader community. Drawing on a case of one high school, our study contributes to this work. Our analyses reveal ways links can be forged between schools and communities to strengthen opportunities to learn for low-income, Latina/o youth, and to build on and develop capacities of both school and community.
Purposes and Research Questions
This article features a case study of Mario Molina High School (MHS) 1 , a California school with documented success advancing low-income, Latina/o students’ academic performance, where we found permeable boundaries between school and community. We sought to answer the following questions:
Framework and Related Literature
Scholarship on boundary crossing, as well as resource distribution and community wealth, frame this article.
Boundary Crossing
The concept of “boundary” is central to theories of both learning and organization. Learning theory treats boundaries as marking domains in which particular knowledge or skill-sets are relevant; hence, crossing boundaries opens new knowledge domains, creating opportunities for learning (Akkerman & Bakker, 2008). When people cross boundaries they carry objects, including both tangible and representational artifacts, creating intersectional spaces where new, hybrid forms of knowledge can emerge (Gutiérrez, 2008). Intersectional spaces arise when people from different communities with particular socio-historic identities and practices interact in the overlapping margins of various social settings. Through these interactions those on both sides of boundaries can reap benefits of reciprocal learning.
Organizations, such as schools, are open systems; they rely on external environments not only for operational resources, but also to absorb the products of their work (Scott, 2003). However, organizations also maintain boundaries to delimit themselves from their external environment and to signal knowledge or skills relevant to the organization’s operation (Scott, 2003). Combining conceptualizations of “boundary” from learning and organization theory provides a lens for examining how schools support activities in which reciprocal learning can occur by enabling participants to cross boundaries that separate schools from their external environment.
Boundary crossing between school and community broadens learning opportunities for youth. Honig et al. (2001) highlight learning opportunities youth derive from community-based organizations (CBOs), families, and other settings:
Opportunity to learn and opportunity to teach in their fullest sense, then, incorporate and depend upon more than the resources found in the school. They implicate a broad array of community-based resources and supports as well as youths’ and teachers’ abilities and willingness to use them. (p. 1000)
The authors note that links between schools and communities benefit youth by providing a variety of academic and non-academic supports, which honor youths’ needs and interests, while also expanding their exposure to varied funds of knowledge as offered by “teachers” both in and out of schools.
Community schools can facilitate boundary crossing. A community school typically is open to all, 7 days a week, before, during, and after school hours, all year long; operates through a partnership between a school district and community agencies; and uses activities designed by school and community members to promote educational achievement and utilize the community as a learning resource (Coalition of Community Schools, 2014). Community schools provide five key learning conditions: (a) a rigorous core instructional program, (b) student motivation and engagement in learning, (c) services supporting students’ basic physical and mental needs, (d) mutual respect between families and school staff, (e) and community engagement (Blank, Melaville, & Shah, 2003). Community schools have been linked to positive student outcomes, including lower drop-out rates, higher test scores, improved attendance, decreased discipline challenges, positive student attitudes, and a sense of collective trust (Adams, 2010; Castrechini & London, 2012; IFC International, 2010).
Just as individuals can engage in reciprocal learning with their counterparts across boundaries (Gutiérrez, 2008), so can social collectivities, including schools and their communities, mutually benefit by crossing their boundaries. Research has tended to be school-centric, emphasizing how boundary crossing, whether initiated by schools or communities, can benefit schools. Much of this research examines school-initiated efforts. For example, Honig et al. (2001) explain that schools can utilize their communities to enrich both academic activities and non-academic support services. Other studies document how schools engage parents to support children’s education (e.g., Routé-Chatmon et al., 2006). An emerging body of research highlights community-initiated efforts to cross school boundaries, examining how CBOs transform schools (e.g., Heath & McLaughlin, 1994; Oakes & Rogers, 2006; Warren & Mapp, 2011). Heath and McLaughlin (1994) argue that schools should harness the expertise of community organizations regarding effective strategies to engage and empower youth by responding to their lived realities. Researchers have tended to pay less attention to ways communities can benefit from school-community boundary crossing.
Resource Distribution and Community Wealth
By sharing resources across boundaries that typically separate them, schools and their communities can reap reciprocal benefits. Thus, our framework draws on research examining how resource distribution and community wealth can contribute to the well-being of students, schools, and communities.
Research on schools identifies four types of resources, or capital, that schools possess: (a) physical capital, which includes financial resources, time, and materials (Spillane & Thompson, 1997); (b) social capital, which involves trusting and collaborative relationships with entities within and beyond school (Bryk & Driscoll, 1988; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001; Spillane & Thompson, 1997); (c) human capital, which includes the background, knowledge, skills, and commitments of personnel (Ingersoll, 2003; Spillane & Thompson, 1997); and (d) cultural capital or cultural knowledge, which confers power and status as embodied in what is considered legitimate school knowledge, curriculum, and teaching practices (Bourdieu, 1977).
We expand the concept of cultural capital to include resources in non-dominant cultural communities, which, with dominant-culture capital, constitute “multicultural capital,” or resources to navigate and affirm diverse cultural contexts (Achinstein & Aguire, 2008; Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011a, 2011b). Drawing on conceptions of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), our framework highlights the capital of families and communities of color who act as “holders and creators of knowledge” (Delgado-Bernal, 2002, p. 106). Such conceptions shift from a deficit view of communities of color. Community wealth is also linked to learning opportunities afforded Latina/o youth by drawing on “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992). Yosso (2005) identifies various forms of wealth in Latina/o communities (e.g., social, linguistic, familial, and navigational capital). We conceptualize and expand these forms of wealth as physical, social, human, and multicultural capital. Physical capital involves monetary assets and time that communities can contribute to and invest in schools. Social capital lies in networks of people and community resources that can provide both instrumental and emotional support to negotiate society’s institutions. Human capital takes the form of resiliency in maintaining hope in the face of barriers and knowledge/skills employed to maneuver through institutions. Multicultural capital is found in the ability to communicate in more than one language, cultural knowledge fostered through heritage, and a commitment to community well-being. Research documents that schools often deny students access to “community cultural wealth” and thus to multicultural capital. Students from non-dominant cultural communities can experience a mismatch between norms and resources of schools and those of their families and community (Dyson, 2008; Heath, 1983). Schools thus deny students from culturally non-dominant communities access to multicultural capital (Achinstein & Aguire, 2008; Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011a, 2011b). Studies reveal how schools divest Latina/o students of social and cultural capital and thwart academic success (Stanton-Salazar, 2001; Valenzuela, 1999).
The resources of schools’ and communities’ wealth can be shared when the border between school and community is crossed. Research reveals that schools and communities possess different forms of physical, social, human, and cultural capital. Honig et al. (2001) explain that stores of capital in schools and communities can be combined to enhance academic experiences and non-academic support provided to youth. We explore how schools and communities can share capital across boundaries in ways that support the general well-being of both.
Method
For 3 years, we studied urban, public high schools, investigating promising cases and moving beyond “damage-centered” research on historically marginalized populations (Tuck, 2009). Our case schools beat the odds in promoting college-going for low-income, Latina/o youth by employing asset-focused practices. Here, we examine how one school’s unique boundary-crossing practices amplified community wealth, thereby strengthening education for lower-income Latina/o youth.
The case study approach offers opportunity to describe participants’ conceptions and the nature of schooling experiences (Yin, 1989). As such, it generates an in-depth, emic understanding of meanings, processes, and contexts (Merriam, 1988). Although not generalizable, findings enable hypothesis generating and theory building about relationships that may otherwise remain hidden (Yin, 1989). Our research investigates critical cases (Flyvbjerg, 2001), purposively selected by these criteria: (a) located in California, the U.S. state with the highest concentration of Latinas/os; (b) located in an urban, high-need area; (c) a predominantly Latina/o student population; (d) an explicit mission to advance education of youth from non-dominant cultural communities; (e) a state-funded budget; and (f) a record of some success with Latinas/os, such as college-going rates, course completion rates for admission into California universities, achievement scores, retention, or honors. Based on nominations from educators and researchers, we identified possible schools, visited sites, and selected three schools.
At MHS, we collected: 220 hours of observations of school, classroom, and community activities; 42 semi-structured interviews with leaders, teachers, students, parents, and community partners; a faculty survey; a staff listserve archive; and school documents. At the classroom level, we followed 7 focal teachers (3 math, 3 humanities, 1 Spanish), seeking diversity in ethnicity/race/gender. We observed/videotaped four to six lessons per teacher and interviewed teachers three times. To sample youth perspectives on ways MHS may have supported Latina/o students, we conducted student focus groups to uncover trends obscured by surveys and to aid theorizing about phenomena (Fern, 2001). Unlike surveys and structured individual interviews, focus groups allow participants to take some control of the conversation by articulating ideas in the context of others’ remarks (Bergin, Talley, & Hamer, 2003). This approach allowed youth voices to be more dominant in the research process and enabled youth to co-construct meaning through dialogue in small cohort settings (Fern, 2001). At the school level, observations included professional development sessions, parent gatherings, assemblies, advisories, after-school program, and graduation. We conducted five principal interviews. Members of humanities and math/science departments participated in faculty focus groups. At the community level, we observed activities held beyond school (e.g., internships at hospitals, field trips, civic activism). In addition, we held six semi-structured interviews with staff from community-based partners.
Our analysis focused on understanding unique features of the school organization that supported Latina/o student success. While we started with some notions of “success” from initial selection criteria, we also considered the school’s definition of success. Drawing on constructs from our conceptual framework, we analyzed data on four levels. First, we summarized data segments that referenced (a) school history and normative social structures, including values, norms, formal structures, and roles (e.g., Scott, 2003); (b) school resources, including physical, social, human, and multicultural capital (e.g., Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011a; Spillane & Thompson, 1997); (c) instructional interactions; (d) successful outcomes; and (e) underlying tensions. To systematize coding from a large number of interviews, we utilized NVivo, a qualitative data analysis software package. We distilled salient themes from NVivo code reports and wrote synthesis memos for each strand. Memos also included analysis of the school-wide survey (100% response rate) using mean scores and standard deviations of items addressing key constructs from the framework, including normative social structures and school capital.
Second, drawing on these memos, we used the constant comparative method (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to generate emergent pattern codes and distilled two salient themes regarding school-level factors supporting Latina/o student success and community wealth: foundational elements and boundary-crossing practices. Third, we re-analyzed data exploring dimensions of foundational elements and boundary-crossing practices, identifying specific elements and examples of boundary-crossing practices; opportunities associated with boundary-crossing practices at the student, school, and community level; and complexities that arose related to boundary-crossing practices. Finally, we incorporated feedback from member checks.
School Context
MHS is a small, urban, Title 1 public high school located in California. Of MHS’s 262 students, 87% received free/reduced-price lunches, 76% were Latina/o (predominantly Mexican descent), and 33% were English learners. Teachers were racially diverse; of 17 teachers, 47% were teachers of color: 5 Asian, 2 mixed race (African American/Mexican and East Indian/White), and 1 Latino. Teachers were predominantly prepared in university teacher education masters/credential programs with a smaller subset from alternative pathways.
The school’s 2012 State Annual Performance Index was 719 out of 1,000. 2 From 2010-2012 MHS’s Latino/a high school cohort graduation rate averaged 69%, outperforming its district’s rate of 50%. Similarly, an average of 59% of MHS’s Latino/a graduates from 2007-2011 fulfilled University of California and California State University required “A-G” courses compared with the district average of 43%. In its online state-mandated school accountability report card, MHS reported that it led the district for 5 years in A-G completion rates and college attendance rates. During the year of our study, 84% of the graduating class was college-bound.
The school is located in a large, urban, high-minority, high-poverty district, which has faced severe fiscal crises, serial leadership upheavals, and dramatic restructuring efforts. The district faced intense No Child Left Behind accountability pressures, evidenced by the fact that 80% of its high schools were designated “Program Improvement” schools during our data collection year. Against this backdrop, the principal expressed his hunch that MHS’s relatively higher graduation rates and academic performance yielded a certain degree of autonomy, explaining: “You get left alone when you’re doing well.” MHS utilized its relative independence to enact innovative instruction, sidestep accountability pressures, and successfully procure extramural funding.
Findings
Based on our findings, we developed a model that describes how MHS’s permeable boundaries facilitated boundary crossing between school and community. The model begins with the school’s foundation for boundary permeability. The foundation includes (a) the logic undergirding the school’s design, (b) the mission expressing the school’s strong community ties, and (c) the school’s ethos of within-school collaboration, which fostered trusting relationships. The logic, mission, and collaborative ethos of MHS engendered boundary-crossing practices between school and community. Through these practices, people shared capital, opening intersectional spaces where new hybrid forms of knowledge emerged, affording benefits to students, the school as a whole, and the community.
Although our findings might suggest that elements of our boundary-crossing model are linked by a series of linear and unidirectional relationships, that is not the case. Instead, the constitutive elements—logic, mission, collaborative ethos, boundary-crossing practices, capital exchange, and benefits to community wealth—are interrelated reciprocally and dynamically over time. In this manner, the movement we observed across permeable boundaries blurred categories like school/community and insider/outsider.
We highlight foundational elements that enabled boundary crossing across school and community. We also emphasize a key set of boundary-crossing practices that tap and build community wealth. We identify distinct features of practices and forms of capital that are shared. We also touch upon opportunities that the sharing of capital across boundaries affords to students, school, and community. Finally, we examine complexities embedded in boundary crossing.
Foundational Elements of Boundary-Crossing Practices
Three foundational elements of permeable boundaries emerged from our study: institutional logics, mission, and collaborative ethos.
A logic model of community organizing and small schools
The history of an organization is important because elements of the initial organization become “imprinted” (Stinchcombe, 1965). These imprints become socially cemented, forming the core around which the organization operates. The founding and evolution of organizations are influenced by “institutional logics”—principles and models for organizing that exist in a given organization’s field (Scott, 2008). MHS’s origins were deeply influenced by two “logics” present in its district and in the broader educational environment. The first emphasized collaboration among stakeholders committed to equitable schooling. The second reflected the small-school reform movement’s dedication to personalizing education for the whole child. These logics rooted MHS in permeable boundaries from its inception.
MHS grew from the work of a CBO collaborating with parents, a school reform group, and funders to address inequities and advocate for small schools. City Community Organization (CCO) organized events where lower-income parents from communities of color came together to hold “one-on-ones” to discuss challenges confronting their children and envision alternatives. CCO mobilized hundreds of parents and educators to gather data demonstrating the disparities between higher- and lower income parts of the city regarding school finances, school size (high-income schools enjoyed small sizes averaging 360 and low-income schools had more than 1,400 students), and student achievement. These activists successfully lobbied city and district officials for policies establishing small, autonomous, innovative schools, and leadership development for parents and educators.
Meanwhile, a large comprehensive high school in the city, serving predominantly low-income, culturally non-dominant communities, adopted a strategy then employed by many high schools to improve academic performance: It developed small, theme-oriented “academies.” Educators, who later founded MHS, worked in one such academy aimed at health career preparation. After 6 years, health academy staff concluded that their host high school severely hindered their efforts to improve students’ academic progress, prompting them to leave and become an autonomous, small high school.
From its beginning, the logic of a CBO—political activism, commitment to community transformation, and interest in partnership with various stakeholders—animated MHS. The principal explained,
[CCO] has been instrumental all throughout the way of our school in terms of working with parents, organizing parents, creating an organizing platform, and actually having access to . . . an organization that is politically connected that can get people like the mayor and . . . the county supervisors [to work with us].
Dolores, a CCO leader who coached the school since its founding, has continued to support MHS and organize the community for high-quality education. Her presence underscores how permeable boundaries forged between the school and its community have remained robust.
School mission to transform injustices in community
The mission of MHS has its roots in both the community-based movement for greater social justice and the health academy described earlier. MHS’s principal and many teachers readily recited their school’s mission: to fundamentally alter inequities and injustices experienced by the low-income, racially and culturally diverse communities it serves. The school pursued this goal by exposing students to “transformative learning experiences” geared toward science, health, and medicine.
Teachers’ full embrace of this mission surfaced in survey data (100% response rate). Teachers “strongly agreed” that the school’s goals were clear. Teachers “strongly agreed” on the importance of three school goals aligned with dominant culture: academic success, graduation, and attending college. They also “strongly agreed” or “agreed” on the importance of goals, which aligned with non-dominant culture and reflected its community-based roots. These items included students’ socio-emotional development, being agents of social change, giving back to the community, being an active citizen, and having a strong cultural identity. Leonardo, a Latino Spanish teacher, expressed commitment to the mission:
The school has its own mission and values . . . as a school, we want to—and I believe this with my whole heart—we want to interrupt the inequalities that most students of color have. We want to interrupt those social injustices in education, in our community . . . We don’t just want to make students to go to college, but we also want to make great people out of them . . . That’s why we are a science school. We want to have more kids of color become doctors [and] nurses.
Leonardo’s invocation of the mission and clarity about the school’s role in interrupting injustice highlight how MHS conceived itself as inextricably bound and in service to its community.
Collaborative ethos within school
In fulfillment of MHS’s logic and mission, organizers stressed internal collaboration marked by trusting and caring relationships among students, staff, and community partners. Strong ties within the school, exemplified by a family-like feel and vibrant professional community, provided a basis for fostering connections beyond school. We found an ongoing cycle: While stakeholders built trusting relationships within the school, that internal trust reinforced collaboration with the broader community.
MHS stakeholders characterized the school as “family,” highlighting strong ties among multiple constituents. This sense of familia appeared especially important given the context of surrounding Latina/o communities. Luz, a community organizer who worked at MHS, explained,
What I fell in love with is the family attitude. These teachers love these kids. It’s not just the teachers. The kids love each other. There is a sense of community and responsibility . . . Because I’m an immigrant, I know how important it is to create a sense of belonging.
Similarly, the principal observed, “A network of care is ingrained in this vision of school. Once you identify personalization as a goal, [then] every kid is known by at least one adult.” A student reported, “The teachers seem to be supporting you a lot more. They’re almost like another parent or aunt and uncle . . . They don’t give up on you; they really don’t.” Parents also noted this sense of family: “We get here and it’s like our house. We know everybody. We talk.” Echoing these sentiments, one teacher, recalling his decision to join MHS, shared,
The staff seemed really happy. The kids seemed really happy. It seemed like a big family . . . I definitely chose to stay mainly because of the familial atmosphere, with staff and students, but mainly amongst the staff . . . We trust each other, we can challenge each other, we have fun together; we’re also very serious. We have a pretty similar mission and vision. It’s kind of rare to have that, one singular-mindedness.
These remarks convey the interconnection between the collaborative ethos of the school and its compelling mission. Moreover, this account of how the “familial atmosphere” allowed staff to work productively together suggests how the collaborative ethos of MHS lent itself to the reciprocal work/practice of boundary crossing.
Foundational element complexities
What the above description does not capture fully are the challenges that community organizers, educators, and parents confronted in their struggle to achieve institutional change on behalf of underserved youth from lower-income communities of color. There were years of organizing, exhausting campaigns to mobilize parents, and complex political terrains to navigate. Further, educators had to negotiate exiting a host school, forging new ties, co-designing a school with community partners, identifying a sustainable mission, and maintaining partnerships. Thus, the foundational elements entailed hard-fought battles, as unlikely partnerships were forged among often disenfranchised parents, CBOs, reformers, funders, policy makers, and educators. Furthermore, MHS had to fight for a campus locale, developing ties in one neighborhood, only to be evicted and transferred to another site. This shift necessitated building new alliances. Another complicating factor was the district’s retreat from a small community schools model, which jeopardized MHS’s future. State and district funding crises further threatened MHS’s existence, as many small schools were forced to close. MHS drew upon its community-organizing logic and its collaborative ethos in taking a proactive stance to such pressures. They launched a campaign to open a middle school connected with their high school, to expand their vision of schooling into younger years and secure fiscal viability.
MHS also had to uphold its collaborative ethos, addressing breaches to community norms when student conflicts or faculty disputes emerged. MHS members engaged in “Restorative Justice” circles where students and staff, along with outside collaborators, confronted conflicts and devised solutions to repair rifts. The staff also confronted challenges. For example, there were tensions about the creation of a “medical assistant” class, which meant some seniors took “college writing” while others took a more “technical” course. Some teachers lamented how the division between medical assistants and college writers reinscribed the traditional divide between vocational tech and college prep tracks, contending this move undermined MHS’s vision to interrupt historic patterns of tracking, status differentiation, and limited access to higher education. Other faculty felt the medical assistant class supported career opportunities in medicine and bolstered the school’s mission. Thus, sustaining MHS’s community partnership, commitment to mission, and collaborative ethos was no easy labor.
Boundary-Crossing Practices to Access and Build Community Wealth
MHS’s foundational elements—its logics, mission, and collaborative ethos—opened up permeable boundaries between the school and its surrounding community. We turn next to exploring how the school exploited these permeable boundaries to create hybrid, intersectional spaces where capital was reciprocally shared between the school and community, and where participants encountered new learning opportunities. Specifically, we describe a set of boundary-crossing practices that enabled participants to access and build community wealth, providing illustrative examples and discussing their complexities. Boundary crossing occurred in two directions—inside out and outside in. While we describe these practices separately for analytic purposes, they are interrelated and reinforce each other.
Bring community into school
By opening its doors, MHS faded boundaries between school and community, allowing for infusion of community capital that benefited students, school, and community. We highlight two types of such boundary-crossing practices. First, the school and its teachers incorporated funds of knowledge from the community in the curriculum. Second, MHS partnered intensively with CBOs to enhance youth development.
Access multicultural capital in curriculum
Often-rigid boundaries between schools and communities separate classrooms from communities in which students live. At MHS, boundaries became more permeable through practices linking community members and their multicultural and human capital to classrooms. MHS encouraged boundary crossing by providing intersectional spaces, such as an immigration film festival where the community viewed student films featuring interviews with local immigrants. The festival resulted in MHS having access to multicultural capital from the community. Viewers gained a window into immigrants’ struggles in home countries and journeys to the United States, understanding diverse paths of Mexican, Salvadorean, or Ghanian refugees/immigrants. Many films celebrated heritage language by featuring Spanish narration. Community members, who were the subjects of the films, also attended the screening. Through these films, community wealth became a centerpiece for academic learning.
MHS teachers drew upon human and multicultural capital of parents and community members in multiple ways. Students undertaking a My City project interviewed their parents and community members about issues facing their city, wrote poems based on these interviews, and published them as a book. Further, they contacted city officials, suggesting policies to address residents’ concerns. Similarly, in the Spanish for Heritage Speakers class, students conducted interviews for an immigration project. One participant explained,
We had to interview someone, un inmigrante, and I picked my dad . . . I never had got the chance to really sit down . . . and ask him [about] his childhood, and when I did that poem and he gave me all that information, it made me think, “Wow, I know where you’re coming from.” I know where all that happiness and that sadness is coming from . . . So it [the immigration project] makes us value the things that we have.
Curriculum-oriented boundary crossings like these enhanced learning opportunities by legitimating human and multicultural capital provided by parents and community members and by broadening the varied intersectional spaces in which learning occurs.
Partner with CBOs for youth development
Recognized by the district as “best community partnerships for outstanding community engagement,” MHS’s work with CBOs represents an “outside-in” boundary-crossing practice. Through these collaborations, the school and CBOs exchanged physical, social, human, and multicultural capital. The capital that MHS garnered from these exchanges enriched students, the school as a whole, and the community.
One partnership joined MHS with a youth development CBO, Community Action (CA), to extend learning opportunities beyond the school day. Through this partnership, MHS provided social capital in the form of access to its students, the human capital of its teachers, and the use of its facilities in exchange for the social capital embedded in relations with CBO staff and the multicultural and human capital that staff members possessed. For example, most of CA’s staff came from low-income, Latina/o communities and thus possessed multicultural capital that enabled them to act as role models and co-advocates to navigate non-dominant and dominant cultures. CA’s staff crossed the school-community boundary to work on the school site, importing the capital they possessed. They employed their physical, social, human, and multicultural capital to collaborate with the school’s staff to run an extended-day program that provided tutoring, extra support classes, leadership development, cultural and athletic enrichment programs, and parent academies. Many CA staff also participated in “regular” school activities such as student advisories, professional development, curriculum development, and school-wide events. Luz, CA’s director, acted as the school’s co-principal (e.g., facilitated staff retreats, student assemblies, parent meetings; managed discipline; solicited grants). Through grants, Luz and the principal procured over $250,000 annually to provide a wide array of extra services to youth and their families. These monies enhanced MHS and CA’s capacities to innovate outside the constraints of district level and Title 1 categorical funding. For example, CA financially supported many academic staff to run activities in the extended-day program, allowing teachers to work within and beyond school hours to support Latina/o students’ academic and socio-emotional needs, as well as promote teacher remuneration for after-school work. Overall, the MHS and CA partnership allowed for extensive capital exchange.
Luz describes how she forged this partnership by forcefully crossing the school’s boundary, building social capital and sharing human and financial capital:
[I know] a school can be [open] from 6 in the morning to 6 o’clock at night, be vibrant, and then kids will be excited all the time. But I knew in order to do that, I needed to be in [the school]. So I started to force myself into every meeting, whether I was invited or not. I started to slowly integrate some of my staff into the school. I became very close to certain key teachers. And then I started to really show [the principal] that this is not just [a director of a CBO]. That might be the title that they told me, but let me show you what the partnership means . . . [So I’m] involved in the school day helping teachers. Fifty percent of my staff in the [after-school program] is day-school [academic] teachers that I pay for.
Luz drew on her human capital to develop social and multicultural capital with students:
. . . Every day, I will [start] them with that. “All of you who want to be a babysitter or clean somebody’s toilet, you may want to go home right now. Because the rest of us are going to prove the system wrong.” So that is a ritual, every day doing that speech. It’s a mantra. Every night I finish with “Reading and writing is revolutionary.”
As a Latina immigrant, Luz understood the need for belonging in an immigrant community. Hence she created the teen center, a re-purposed classroom to convey to students, “You belong here.” She also established a parent meeting space.
MHS partnered with another CBO committed to promoting high school graduation and college enrollment for underrepresented youth. Like CA, this CBO operated on-site in a resource center where college counselors and college-student interns served as role models and multicultural navigators (Carter, 2005), sharing their extensive human and multicultural capital with students and families. This college-focused CBO provided assistance to students and families regarding college applications, financial aid, and the Dream Act, while also offering workshops to prepare students for college life. This CBO thus connected families with college funding and resources, expanding community wealth. In addition, the CBO trained MHS staff on the college-going process and encouraged them to promote college in classrooms. These services especially helped first-generation, college-going students negotiate the college application process.
As a “full-service community school,” MHS also collaborated with health-related CBOs to ensure students flourished psychosocially and physically. MHS had an onsite, free health clinic providing extensive services and jointly funded by a CBO and the County Public Health Department. A psychology college also offered on-site counseling. These CBOs’ staffs were integrated into MHS by participating in advisories, curriculum development, and school-wide events. The Health Center coordinator explained,
We provide integrative care for our students, meaning that our students can get medical, dental, health education, youth development, and mental health resources all under one roof. Especially working with underserved populations, those things are so interwoven. They can’t be separated. That’s the theory behind school-based health, that if we put all those things in one place, we can increase students’ success in school.
The principal reported appreciation that the psychology college had a social justice bent:
The work that their interns did last year was absolutely amazing. They connected so deeply with the kids in the community; and they’re running support groups . . . When you have such an area of high trauma and violence and issues that the kids are negotiating, . . . teenagers in general need to have access to mental health services.
Furthermore, students’ families were able to access the health clinic and once there were guided to other resources to support better health care access.
These community partners played a leadership role and collaborated extensively with MHS teachers. Their involvement transformed teaching and learning opportunities for Latina/o youth, affirming the richness of cultural and community resources and catalyzing activism among students, staff, and parents to uplift the larger community.
Foster youth engagement in the community
The permeable boundaries of MHS facilitated another set of boundary-crossing practices that plunged MHS’s students into the community through two paths: community-based internships and student activism. Together, these boundary-crossing practices produced exchanges of capital benefitting students and school, while also contributing to the community’s wealth and well-being.
Engage youth in workplace internships in the community to enhance community well-being
All MHS students ventured beyond the school’s doors into workplace internships, mostly in health care settings. This practice enabled the school to exchange its social capital (its relations with both students and community), human capital (knowledge and skills of both its teachers and students), and dominant cultural capital, which the school possessed by virtue of its institutional position in public education. In return, the community provided social capital (linkages to organizations and individuals that placed interns), human capital (skills and knowledge of professionals who mentored interns), and dominant cultural capital, which rested in the preparation of students to join the workforce. Through these exchanges of capital, workplace internships afforded two related opportunities: preparation of students for health care careers and diversification of the medical professions, thereby contributing to public health. Ultimately, the sharing of resources generated community wealth.
MHS’s emphasis on transformative learning, centered on health and bioscience, anchored efforts to place students in workplace internships. Evidence of transformation surfaced in students crediting their aspirations for medical careers to internships. One student explained how her desire to become a bilingual oncologist arose from a patient interaction at her internship:
I learned what parents go through when children have cancer and leukemia [and are] going through a transplant. It hit [my] heart spot and made me want to be an oncologist . . . My story from a patient was that it was hard for the mom to understand [from the English-speaking doctors] what her daughter was going to go through, because she spoke another language and [was] not that educated.
This vignette illustrates how boundary-crossing internships inspired bilingual youth to transform communities by diversifying the medical profession. One health organization offering a substantial number of MHS internships described its focus as increasing diversity among health care professionals. At its student orientation, the organization’s Latino manager explained,
In order to get the best health care possible, people need to be able to go to people who look like them, who they can relate to. We want to show you how to do that . . . We can change the health care profession. We have to start at a young age. It shows that when people like yourself, when they become medical professionals and when they come back home to work, they heal their communities. And that’s why we’re here today.
Lower-income communities of color often have limited access to health care, particularly with providers who reflect their own population and language. MHS sought to build community wealth by growing the next generation of health care professionals; even as interns, MHS students made a contribution toward community well-being.
Promoting activism and Latina/o empowerment
MHS students contributed to the community in many ways beyond their internships; in fact, they regularly utilized the school’s permeable boundaries to engage in boundary-crossing practices that entailed activism and Latina/o empowerment. Luz spoke to this trend, remarking,
There is a sense of community and responsibility, the sense of ownership that the problems not just of the school but of [our city] are for them to be solved. The kids feel that they have an active role to solve them. They are really hopeful.
Her comments highlight how MHS students took on responsibility to solve problems in the city and thereby enhance community wealth.
By engaging in activities that served the community, MHS students became agents for exchanging valuable capital between their school and community. The school shared social capital that resided in students’ relations with classmates and teachers; students brought human capital in the form of skills and knowledge they gained in school, and they carried the dominant cultural capital to which they were exposed in school as well as the non-dominant cultural capital that came from their families and communities and was cultivated by MHS. In exchange, the community offered the social capital embedded in relations among families, CBOs, and even political leaders, the human capital possessed by students’ families and CBOs, and the non-dominant cultural capital accrued by families and community members from their experiences enduring injustice.
By engaging in the boundary-crossing practice of community activism, MHS students benefited in several ways. They experienced a relevant curriculum, which honored the multiple worlds they traverse. Students also learned proactive strategies to address the challenges of their communities, including poor health care, limited access to higher education, and violence. Moreover, the school with the support of CBO partners and families developed the capacity to respond to tragedy in a way that promoted learning and change. Finally, this boundary-crossing practice benefited the community by improving the health and well-being of the local community.
MHS students’ activism to uplift the community took many forms. Students launched a statewide ballot initiative for free college education. They dialogued with sixth graders about healthy eating and the dangers of fast food. Some students and staff partnered with CCO on a citywide campaign to win district-wide policies guaranteeing local school decision-making. Still other students voiced their views on public radio, making the struggles of urban youth more visible to the broader community. Yet another group of students successfully secured funds for a community soccer field to replace the asphalt of the school’s physical education area. Still more students formed a group called “The Real Dreamers” who agitated in Washington, D.C., and locally for legislation allowing undocumented youth to apply for college financial aid.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of MHS student activism surfaced during the “Peaceful City Campaign.” While many urban schools wall themselves off from the harsh realities of their environment to protect students, MHS instead directly confronted poverty, violence, and racism. The school mission drove this focus. Faced with the tragic loss of multiple students to gun violence, students, teachers, and CBO partners joined together to combat violence and hopelessness in the community. The movement began after a recent graduate (and brother of a senior) was shot in November. When his death went unpublicized in local newspapers, the MHS community (students, teachers, staff, CBO partners) convened in advisory groups and a school assembly to interrogate why youth-on-youth gun violence in the urban core had become normalized and also to share ideas about interrupting poverty and other root causes of violence. César, a Latino CA coach, voiced the dismay of many when he lamented the silence of the media on gun violence, “This too is unacceptable, and it is painfully obvious that we cannot only demand change, but that it’s up to us, everyone sitting here in this auditorium, to stand up and make the change that we need.” These conversations were resurrected when the kindergarten sibling of an MHS student was killed in January. Outraged, students organized a 74-day fasting-relay, involving over 200 people; a day of service attended by the school board president, chief of police, and other community members; a peace pledge signature drive; and a massive city march with Aztec dancers and a rally where the mayor and César Chavez’s grandson spoke.
The Peaceful City Campaign generated myriad instances of activism-focused boundary crossing. The touchstone of the movement transpired during a daily ceremony honoring students and adults who had fasted for 24 hours to bring attention to peace. These ceremonies commenced with the César Chavez unity clap and featured fasters sharing insights. Importantly, fasters also blogged about their experiences, broadcasting their movement beyond the school’s walls. Similarly, students created press releases and a webpage to inform others. Another proactive strategy students adopted was a peace pledge drive. Students canvassed neighborhoods, engaging residents in conversations and seeking signatures from those willing to build up the community and pursue enduring peace. The campaign culminated with a march and a rally where political dignitaries, before a fleet of TV media, acknowledged the hard work of MHS youth and the importance of confronting gun violence. Explaining the impact of this activism, one student said,
It helped the community realize that there [are] a lot of people who want to change the way our neighborhoods are with the violence and it got awareness to them. It called attention to the mayor [who] came to the march that day. There was a whole bunch of news reporters . . . I think it’s good to have a school that is actually more focused on you, as in your neighborhood. Because I’ve had friends who have died in violence in [our city]. So it’s good to see that our school also cares and wants to change things like that around.
In the spring, Ernesto, a MHS junior, who had played a central role in the Peaceful City Campaign, became another victim of gun violence. Again, the school-community rallied, creating a memorial, organizing more peace-building efforts, and raising funds for the family and a peace-builders scholarship in Ernesto’s name. Students planned to transform the corner where Ernesto was shot, by constructing a mural. Community partners worked with MHS to launch a peace garden in his honor. Reflecting at graduation on Ernesto’s death and the peace campaign, César spoke,
Only when we keep people uneducated do you get to violence, which is linked to buying unhealthy things and forgetting about relationships . . . Our job is to not only get a job, but our job is to confront injustice in our community and take responsibility . . . We must celebrate our community to push through tough times and find creative solutions. Our relationship to family, friends, and community are way more valuable, and capable of providing us with happiness and peace.
César’s words reflect how MHS encouraged students to engage in activism, drawing strength from community wealth while also amplifying that wealth. Evidence that students had partially succeeded in this endeavor surfaced the following fall, when the principal stood before students with a map displaying how their peace-building efforts had impacted the area:
The peace you are building . . . This map shows areas in [our city] with high stress and high need. Wherever this school goes, it changes [our city]. [Pointing to map and school’s location.] There is a little spot in the black where we live now. Anyone can ask your parents about what the neighborhood was like 15 years ago. It is much safer today, where we live . . . Wherever we go, you leave a legacy of greatness and peace. At this point, we’ve been called to action because we’ve lost students and in our community that’s not OK. Do not feel sad, but empowered. What you are doing is amazing stuff.
Complexities in practice
The permeable boundaries between MHS and the community not only promoted opportunities, they also reveal three complexities. First, negotiating power relations between school actors with dominant cultural capital and community actors with non-dominant cultural capital was an ongoing challenge. Traditionally in schools, non-school actors have been disenfranchised in school decision-making. MHS sought to reduce traditional patterns of power by at times privileging the expertise of community leaders. For example, Luz, who came from the community, coached school personnel to adopt new practices such as restorative justice to mediate conflict. However, at other times when tensions emerged between non-school actors and teachers, the latter maintained their decision-making authority. For instance, during a staff discussion about publicizing class rank, Luz argued that it was important for youth of color to know where they stand and experience how the dominant culture sorts people. Some faculty countered that such ranking practices conflicted with the school’s commitments to non-competitive educational practices. Ultimately, teachers decided not to rank students. It is noteworthy, though, that such a discussion was held publicly and that school and community actors had opportunities to dialogue.
Power struggles also played out in balancing the value of academic learning and community-based learning. Some teachers were frustrated that academic learning got short shrift when internships cut into instructional time. A related conflict surfaced when teachers balked at CA staff requests to remove students from class for various activities, especially when students were struggling academically. For example, one teacher wrote to the school listserve,
Jorge is not passing my class and needs to turn in a final revision this week. Should he miss this [CA activity]? At the same time, I know he’s been dealt some tough cards at home right now and I’m sure his after-school program lifts him up.
In this manner, teachers, understanding that participation in CA-sponsored activities helped students stay engaged in school, wrestled with how to strike the right balance.
A second challenge surfaced in the internships intended to advance the school’s mission to transform inequities. A select group of students participated in an elite hospital-based, medical internship, complete with blue coats and greater access to higher status medical learning opportunities (e.g., rounds with doctors), but other students held lower-status internships (childcare and tutoring). While the elite medical internship urged participants to become doctors to return to their community, thus building community wealth and well-being, it also reproduced status inequalities that overlapped with the school’s academic hierarchy. Youth who wore the blue coats of the elite program at school were also placed in higher status classes (college writing and physics vs. medical assistant class). Thus internship tracking reinforced academic tracking in school. Despite the staff’s efforts to avoid tracking and its public deliberation about this problem, this issue remained.
Third, sustaining hope in the face of continued violence in the community represented another challenge. After the school/community engaged in months of peace-building, Ernesto’s murder proved especially devastating. While the school still united to claim peace, some confessed the difficulty of remaining hopeful. Sylvia, a teacher close with Ernesto, sent an email sharing, “I am deeply saddened, pissed off, and feeling lost. I cannot believe our community has to deal with this BS again this year.” And Luz, Ernesto’s closest adult ally, declared, “I am out of words . . . He was mine and violence took him!” Not only did tragedy diminish adults’ hopes, but every death also threatened MHS youth’s sense of stability. Several students reported the debilitating anguish of witnessing murders and losing friends and family to violence. The principal noted that it was sometimes a challenge for graduates to remain in the community, given economic and safety opportunities found elsewhere. The specter of violence and limited economic opportunity continually challenged the MHS community, highlighting how boundary crossing is fraught with risks and yet also illustrating how the absence of such practices might further contribute to community insecurity and depletion of community wealth.
Discussion
Our findings make two important contributions to existing literature. First, permeable boundaries between school and community emerge as a promising framework to support Latina/o student success, school improvement, and community development. Second, our study exposes complexities of boundary-crossing practices, demonstrating how such practices alone cannot remedy inequities experienced by lower-income, Latina/o youth and their communities.
Permeable Boundaries to Access and Build Community Wealth
Schools traditionally do not engage in boundary crossing with their communities. Impermeable school boundaries can have negative consequences for Latina/o youth, school, and community. When schools separate in- and out-of-school lives, many youth of color experience disengagement from learning and school. For schools, impermeable boundaries reduce access to shared physical, social, human, and multicultural capital, limiting Latina/o youth development. For community, impermeability means schools often fail to collaborate in efforts to support their youth or community, cutting off a major institution that could promote community progress.
In contrast, we found boundary-crossing practices at MHS entailed a dynamic interchange of school and community capital, bolstering the school’s capacity and, in turn, enhancing community wealth through transformative experiences with students. Our framework combined conceptualizations of boundary crossing from learning and organizational theories. We found resource sharing between schools and communities opened intersectional spaces, where participants shared physical, social, human, and multicultural capital, prompting learning across school/community boundaries. Table 1 displays how such boundary crossing promoted opportunities that served not only individuals, but also the school and community. Table 1 (first row) shows that through relations with various CBOs, MHS marshaled all forms of capital—physical, social, human, and multicultural—to provide students with access to health and academic-support services that sustained the intellectual, physical, and socio-emotional development of students, enhancing their capacity to engage in academic learning. Further, MHS drew on community funds of knowledge to enhance curricular opportunities. Table 1 (row 2) shows that in return, MHS contributed to building community wealth when its “underserved” students exceeded societal “norms” by succeeding academically and becoming health professionals who would serve the community. MHS also added directly to “wealth” of the community when students engaged in activities, such as the Peaceful City Campaign, that enhanced the well-being of the community and its residents.
Boundary-Crossing Practices, Capital Shared, and Associated Opportunities.
Note. CBO = community-based organization.
Several features of MHS’s boundary-crossing practices merit special attention. First, these practices evolved from foundational elements of logic, mission, and collaborative ethos. Across these elements is a fundamental asset-orientation toward community. Second, boundary crossing was a ubiquitous, daily phenomenon; its density and frequency contrasts with that of modal schools with stand-alone boundary-crossing endeavors (e.g., internship programs, service learning requirements, a class featuring culturally relevant curriculum rooted in community). Boundary crossing (coupled with the foundational elements) supported participants to internalize an asset-oriented outlook on youth and urban community. For students, boundary crossing heightened their understanding of community wealth, empowering them by developing their physical, human, social, and multicultural capital. With new skills, knowledge, and confidence, MHS students could maintain hopefulness and seemed inclined toward civic engagement/activism that could build community wealth. This is noteworthy since many Latina/o youth faced with overwhelming odds succumb to hopelessness and allow the status quo to persist. MHS youth viewed themselves as agents responsible for pushing toward a more just society.
Third, boundary crossing lessened separation of school and community. Our findings suggest that the dynamic flow among elements of our model—logic, mission, and collaborative ethos; boundary-crossing practices; capital exchange; and benefits to community wealth—resembles a Mobius loop where insider and outsider distinctions dissolve. Hence, MHS is unlike many schools currently serving Latina/o youth that have closed gates, walled-in learning, and high borders between school and community. Like the supple twisting Mobius loop (Figure 1), MHS conjoined school and community thereby generating shared capital—which contributed to the transformation of the school and city, while also promoting social justice more broadly.
Permeable boundaries in support of community, student, and school development.
Ultimately, the MHS case contributes to theory building by advancing a model that illuminates how reciprocal and mutually beneficial relations contribute to building school and community wealth. An important corollary of this permeable boundary framework is how it extends literature on school-community relations that has typically been school-centered, emphasizing how boundary-crossing, whether initiated by schools or communities, benefits schools (Honig et al., 2001; Warren & Mapp, 2011). Research has ignored ways communities can benefit from school-community boundary crossing. By underscoring the importance of community wealth as not only a resource to tap but an outcome of school-community partnership, we forge new ground.
Complexities of Crossing Boundaries
Lest our model suggest that permeable boundaries can easily be achieved, we emphasize that boundary crossing is no easy task given historical divides between schools and community, power differentials, and larger contexts of urban, lower-income, culturally/linguistically non-dominant youth, communities, and schools. MHS and its community faced complexities in establishing and maintaining permeable boundaries. As noted earlier, the founding of MHS involved demanding battles and challenging collaborations among parents, CBOs, reformers, funders, policy makers, and educators. Sustaining internal organizational ties, maintaining partnerships between school and community in the face of having to move sites, and the district’s retreat from small schools and funding crises created further problematics. While MHS sought to alter traditional status hierarchies that privileged school knowledge over community knowledge, sometimes differences emerged, revealing tensions in school-community cultures and power relations. A further challenge was revealed when student internship hierarchies in the community reinforced academic hierarchies within school. Also, in seeking to lower boundaries between school and community, the school struggled to sustain hope in the face of continued violence. The economic and physical insecurity of urban life often tempted graduates to leave, thus threatening an erosion of community wealth.
Implications
Despite limitations of drawing implications from one critical case, our study offers insights for researchers and practitioners. Beyond deficit-focused research, our study models ways to examine sites that stretch boundaries conceptually and literally to serve Latina/o students, schools, and communities. Identifying community schools with some success (defined by traditional academic measures or broader conceptions of community well-being) and examining key success factors contributes to a growing knowledge base on schools organized for Latina/o student success. That knowledge base can be further deepened by programs of research examining success factors of multiple schools and communities in varied regions and with contrasting cases of schools founded upon community logics and more traditional schools adapting to a community-based approach. More research is also needed to understand associations between permeable boundaries and outcomes for students, schools, and community. Focused attention on community wealth and well-being, specifically benefits that accrue to a community when a school is closely engaged in reciprocity, would help. To do such work, researchers must also cross boundaries, immersing themselves in communities, drawing data from school, community, and intersectional spaces. This research would also be longitudinal to track community transformation and how/if graduates return and give back to community. Further, researchers would be wise to examine the flow of physical capital across permeable boundaries, tracing how synergistic collaborations between schools and communities yield additional funding and examining how/if these funds impact student learning and community wealth.
For educational leaders, teachers, and community leaders and members, our findings highlight the need to minimize boundaries between school and community. The MHS case suggests how boundary-crossing practices became systematized and structured through norms and practices within and beyond the school, rather than happening randomly. For those considering ways to foster boundary crossing, our study suggests the multidirectional nature of this effort: academic work that harnesses community resources including families and community members; tapping CBOs to support youth engagement within schools; and engagement with local professionals to support physical and psychological development of students and families. With regard to fostering youth engagement in community, our study suggests values of internships, but also activities that promote youth activism as it relates to academic learning. Such opportunities help to construct students as learners and empowered community members.
Furthermore, MHS provides a case study that may be useful for educators to investigate alternative logic models for school reform. Current policy has heightened awareness of the market competition model (charter schools), while a community-based organizational logic model may be an alternative pathway for school reform. A CBO logic model derives from different origins and yields different results that may expand beyond individual to community development. Finally, educators and community members interested in boundary-crossing practices must anticipate complexities that arise in school-community collaborations, taking time to attend to: relationship building, capacity building, conflict management, district politics, community crises, and ongoing maintenance of permeable boundaries.
Despite the promise of our findings, schools and communities alone cannot support Latina/o student success and school and community development, as they ultimately are situated in broader societal and institutional contexts. Much of the activism that MHS students, school, and community members undertook on issues such as college access, immigration reform, and peace building resulted from failures in other institutions. Political and economic structures responsible for producing racially and socio-economically stratified schools were not resolved by CBOs’ partnership with school reformers, parents, and educators. Inequities in school funding persist, linked to larger institutional failures (poverty, housing segregation, immigration issues, college financing). Widening inequality in the United States demands that the pursuit of permeable boundaries proceed with due attention to ensuring that those in positions of power beyond school and local community are enlisted into combating societal inequities. While our study highlights expanding the walls of school to include community, such efforts are situated in a broader society that too frequently creates and maintains barriers to supporting development of Latina/o youth and their communities.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are deeply indebted to MHS staff and the community partners who shared their expertise and opened their practice to us. We also thank our research team: Luciana de Oliveira, Paulina Moreno, Serena Padilla, Jose Rosario, and Adriana Escarega for their assistance and insights. Finally, we are grateful to Ana María Villegas and Patricia Gándara for their helpful feedback on our research.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research study reported in this article was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation [Grant #10935] and the Flora Family Foundation [Grant # 2010-1830]. The authors are grateful for this generous support.