Learning Power and Building Community: Parent-Initiated Participatory Action Research as a Tool for Organizing Community

Is the thrust of this committee to go out and inform and educate people about the benefits of small schools? Or is it to mobilize and organize the community and the parents' hopes, dreams, and demands concerning their children's education and utilizing this demand as an impetus for change?--Mother involved in Parents of Children of African Descent. PARENTS AND COMMUNITY PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN THE EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCES of their children and a powerful role in organizing" the "hopes, dreams, and demands of their community. All too often, and specifically within education research, working-class parents and parents of color are seen as a hindrance to academic achievement and are rarely regarded as active participants in decision-making processes (Valencia, 1997). Yet, these same parents are radically changing the dynamics of parental involvement in urban districts across the country. Between the years 2000 and 2004, I participated in and researched a vibrant parent and community movement to address racial inequality at the local high school in Berkeley, California. Parents and community members from Berkeley's African American and Latino communities armed themselves with research, set about organizing their communities, and ultimately became active participants in an all city dialogue on equity and schooling that still continued six years later. I began this article with a quote from a community meeting focused on involving communities of color in a small school reform process at Berkeley High School. A mother stood up and eloquently asked the other members to think about what it means to organize community and how to go about doing it effectively. The dynamic discussion that ensued highlighted the very different ways in which parents and community members defined community, mobilizing processes, and how to achieve the outcomes they hoped for. Many felt that they could benefit from an outside "organizer" who could help to educate and mobilize the community. Others felt that as community members they were responsible for engaging their respective communities and learning from one another, with the hopes of understanding and subsequently developing a concrete plan of action. The above interaction exemplifies two very different approaches to community organizing. One model, based on the methods developed by Saul Alinsky, begins with "community organizing" and usually focuses on leaders or organizers and plays out in the public sphere as organizing for power (Stall and Stoecker, 1998). In the other model, "organizing community" places the onus of knowledge and knowledge production in the hands of community members, rather than in those of outside "organizers." Organizing community then centers on "community building, collectivism, caring, mutual respect, and self-transformation" (Ibid.: 733). In the literature, this is also often referred to as women-centered organizing, which focuses on bridging a gap between needs and resources, mobilizing community to create a demand (for equity, in this case), and engaging in personal and institutional transformation (Collins, 2008; Pardo, 1998). In the pages that follow, I document a grassroots mobilization of parents and community members, who in essence combined both methods of community organizing: building power and community. Oakes and Rogers (2006) lay out a framework for documenting and understanding radical approaches to urban school reform. In this framework, the authors show how ordinary, everyday youth and adults can influence educational policy and schooling through a process they call "learning power." There are three key components to learning power: learning about power, power of learning, and learning to be powerful. Learning about power involves communities in the study of economic, political, and social systems that produce suffering and the inequitable distribution of power and resources (San Antonio, 2006). Power of learning is the process by which communities utilize the methods of Participatory Action Research (PAR) (as laid out in the introduction of this issue and discussed more later) to identify issues, understand causes, and use that new knowledge to effect change. …