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The ethic of community

Gail C. Furman
Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA
Keywords Ethics, Community, Leadership, Social justice Abstract This article proposes the concept of an ethic of community to complement and extend other ethical frames used in education (e.g. the ethics of justice, critique, and care). Proceeding from the traditional denition of ethics as the study of moral duty and obligation, ethic of community is dened as the moral responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators pursue the moral purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work in schools. The ethic of community thus centers the communal over the individual as the primary locus of moral agency in schools. The usefulness of the ethic of community in regard to achieving the moral purposes of schooling is illustrated with the example of social justice. The author concludes that the ethic of community is a vehicle that can synthesize much of the current work on leadership practices related to social justice and other moral purposes of educational leadership.

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In this article, I propose the idea of an ethic of community to complement and extend other ethical frames used in education (e.g. the ethics of justice, critique, and care). Proceeding from the traditional denition of ethics as the study of moral duty and obligation, I dene ethic of community as the moral responsibility to engage in communal processes as educators pursue the moral purposes of their work and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work in schools. Thus, an ethic of community centers the communal over the individual as the primary locus of moral agency in schools. In what follows, I rst present some background on moral leadership and ethics in education; I then argue that the ethic of community is a needed complement to the other ethical frames typically used in education and show how it is related to achieving the moral purposes of schooling. In other words, I will argue that ethic of community is a vehicle that can synthesize much of the current work on leadership practices related to social justice and other moral purposes of educational leadership. Background The argument that educational leadership is fundamentally a moral endeavor has been developed by many scholars in recent years. Goldring and Greeneld (2002, pp. 2-3), for example, in their recent work on the roles, expectations, and dilemmas of leadership, state that the moral dimensions of educational leadership and administration constitute one of the special conditions that make administering schools different from such work in other contexts. Similarly, Sergiovanni (1996, p. 57) argues that schools are moral communities requiring the development of a distinct leadership based in moral authority. Using more playful language, Hodgkinson (1995, p. 7) states that educators are secular priests working in an arena of ethical excitement.

Journal of Educational Administration Vol. 42 No. 2, 2004 pp. 215-235 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 0957-8234 DOI 10.1108/09578230410525612

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While the focus on the moral in education is not new Dewey (1922), for example, wrote about education as a fundamentally moral practice what is new is the increasing interest and rapid expansion of this literature in recent years. There are probably many reasons for this, including the emergence of the critical humanist perspective in the 1980s (e.g. Foster, 1986), challenges to the dominant functionalist research traditions in the eld (Greeneld, 1979, 1999), as well as the widely-recognized new realities of the social context of schooling (Cunningham and Mitchell, 1990). In my view, this emerging literature on the moral in educational leadership falls into at least three distinct but overlapping strands moral leadership theory, the moral purposes of leadership, and ethical leadership practice. First, scholars have developed a body of work aimed at the explicit development of moral leadership theory. As Leithwood and Duke (1998, p. 36) note, moral leadership has been one of the fastest growing areas of leadership study. Scholars who write in this area argue that values are a central part of all leadership practice and that the proper foci of leadership studies should be the values and ethics held by school leaders themselves. Sergiovannis (1992, p. 16) argument for a new kind of leadership based in moral authority is illustrative:
By giving more credence to sense experience and intuition, and by accepting sacred authority and emotion as fully legitimate ways of knowing , the value systems undergirding management theory and leadership practice will grow large enough to account for a new kind of leadership one based on moral authority. This kind of leadership can transform schools into communities and inspire the kind of commitment, devotion, and service that will make our schools unequaled among societys institutions.

In addition to advocacy and theoretical work, some research studies have explored moral leadership in action in the practice of school administrators (e.g. Dillard, 1995; Enomoto, 1997; Greeneld, 1991; Kasten and Ashbaugh, 1991; Kelly and Bredeson, 1991; Keyes et al., 1999; Marshall et al., 1996; Reitzug and Reeves, 1992). Across these studies, common ndings are that administrators are very much aware of the moral aspects of their work and that they do practice moral leadership in relying on their core values and their commitments to particular ends-in-view in their work in schools. The second strand in the literature is the increasing attention to these ends-in-view or moral purposes of leadership, that is, the valued outcomes that should be the goal of leadership endeavors in twenty-rst century schools, such as social justice, racial equity, and learning for all children (Beck and Murphy, 1994; Furman, 2003; Hodgkinson, 1991). In this strand, the focus is not so much on the values held by leaders themselves, although this is certainly relevant, but on the goals of their work, in other words, what leadership is for. Where traditional leadership studies have tended to take a relatively value-neutral approach to studying what leadership is, how it is done, and by whom (Furman, 2003), much contemporary scholarship is focusing on the why of leadership its moral purposes and how they can be achieved in schools.

Murphy (1999) corroborates this shift in the literature by identifying three new paradigms that might serve as the center for educational leadership studies in the twenty-rst century school improvement, democratic community, and social justice and noting that each of these represents a possible valued end for schooling. Relatedly, in describing the work of African American school leaders, Dantley (2003, p. 196) offers the term purposive leadership to capture these leaders sense of commitment to the moral purpose of constructing a platform of hope for marginalized students and communities. The third development in the literature related to schooling as a moral endeavor is the emergence of ethics as a distinct area of study during the 1980s and 1990s. As Beck and Murphy (1997, p. viii) state, educational scholars are showing an unprecedented amount of interest in explicit consideration of ethical issues, and many are contributing to the development of this strand of research (e.g. Beck, 1994; Beck and Murphy, 1994; Begley, 1999; Furman and Gruenewald, in press; Hodgkinson, 1991; Katz et al., 1999; Noddings, 1984; Shapiro and Stefkovich, 2001; Strike et al., 1998; Willower and Licata, 1997). By the mid-1990s, ethics was rmly-established as part of the knowledge base for educational leaders, evidenced by: . its inclusion as one of seven major domains of knowledge in the document base project of the University Council for Educational Administration (Hoy, 1994); . the proliferation of ethics courses in administrator preparation programs at universities around the country (Beck and Murphy, 1997); and . the inclusion of ethics as one of the six domains in the widely-adopted ISLLC standards for administrator preparation (Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium, 1996). Given the rapid growth of ethics as an area of study, it is important to identify, analyze, and critique the dominant concepts and models that are inuencing the eld. Beck and Murphys (1994, 1997) monographs have made an important contribution by analyzing the ways that ethics is approached both in the educational leadership literature and in leadership preparation programs. In brief summary, they found two primary ways of thinking about ethics in the eld. The rst is to approach ethics as principles that can guide ethical reasoning and decision-making (e.g. the works of Kidder, 1995; Strike et al., 1998). The assumption underlying this approach is that individual educators, in their day-to-day professional practice, are confronted with ethical dilemmas that are difcult to resolve; by applying principles of ethical analysis, the individual can think through such ethical dilemmas and make decisions that are ethically sound. For example, a particular dilemma may be understood as a conict between two competing values, such as justice versus mercy; when the dilemma is understood in this way, then principles for resolution may be applied. These principles for resolution involve comparing the possible

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outcomes of decisions that are based in differing approaches to ethical reasoning, such as ends-based (consequentialist), rule-based (non-consequentialist), or care-based thinking (Beck, 1994; Kidder, 1995). The second way of thinking about ethics in the eld of educational leadership, according to Beck and Murphy (1997, p. 33), is to equate ethics with perspectives that inform perceptions, character, and beliefs. In this view, ethics is less about making decisions using objective principles and more about living morally in specic situations (Beck and Murphy, 1997, p. 33). In other words, ethics is based in the character of the individual his or her internalization of moral values and virtues that guide personal and professional practices, including the resolution of moral dilemmas encountered in daily practice. Noddings (1984) focus on caring in human relationships and Starratts (1994, p. 29) presentation of the foundational qualities of an ethical person are examples of this approach. Although the two approaches to ethics identied by Beck and Murphy principles for decision making and individual character are different in their emphases, it should be noted here that both focus on the individual as an ethical actor; in other words, both imply that individuals are the primary moral agents who have an impact on schooling, a point I will return to shortly. Perhaps the most familiar ethical framework in common use in education is the tri-partite frame developed by Starratt (1994, 2003). Starratt claims that three ethics underlie ethical practice: the ethic of justice, the ethic of critique, and the ethic of care. These ethics complement each other, and each are needed in the project of building an ethical school. The ethic of justice requires that we govern ourselves by observing justice. That is to say, we treat each other according to some standard of justice which is uniformly applied to all our relationships (Starratt, 1994, p. 49). In other words, fairness or equal treatment is the core value underlying an ethic of justice: The basic idea [of justice] is that a society must establish rules that are fair to all and then live by those rules (Noddings, 1999). If the ethic of justice looks toward fairness, the ethic of critique looks toward barriers to fairness. The assumption here is that it is insufcient to work for fairness within existing social and institutional arrangements if the arrangements themselves are unfair. One must also critique the present system, examining the ways that policies, practices, and structures might be unfair, how they might be advantaging one group over another. The ethic of critique is necessary because:
No social arrangement is neutral. Every social arrangement, no matter how it presents itself as natural, necessary or simply the way things are, is articial. It is usually structured to benet some segments of society at the expense of others. The ethical challenge is to make these social arrangements more responsive to the human and social rights of all the citizens (Starratt, 1994, p. 47).

The ethic of critique is important for schools because it forces educators to confront the moral issues involved when schools disproportionately benet some groups in society and fail others (Starratt, 1994, p. 47).

The third frame, the ethic of care, is concerned less with fairness the equitable distribution of resources and application of rules and more with caring for individuals as unique persons. The ethic of care requires absolute regard for the dignity and intrinsic value of each person, and desires to see that persons enjoy a fully human life (Starratt, 2003, p. 145). Further, the ethic of care focuses on the demands of relationships, not from a contractual or legalistic standpoint, but from a standpoint of absolute regard and love (Starratt, 2003, p. 145). The ethic of care balances the ethic of justice; what may be fair for one person may not be fair for another, unique individual in very different circumstances and with very different needs. In presenting the ethic of care, Starratt closely follows the foundational work of Gilligan (1982) and Noddings (1984), which in turn reects the I-and-Thou philosophy of Buber. Across all of these approaches to the ethic of care, a central premise is that relationships are at the center of human life; however, the focus is primarily on one-to-one relationships, that is, on individuals and their responsibility to be caring in their relationships with others. While other analysts approach ethics differently and might disagree with Starratts frame, there is no question that it has been inuential in the eld of educational leadership; many university-based administrator preparation programs have used Starratts 1994 book in ethics courses (Beck and Murphy, 1997), and many researchers and analysts use his work as a theoretical frame (e.g. Enomoto, 1997). Shapiro and Stefkovich (2001, p. 18), however, suggest that Starratts tri-partite frame needs to be expanded by adding a fourth ethical dimension the ethic of the profession arguing that:
[. . .] even taken together, the ethics of justice, critique, and care do not provide an adequate picture of the factors that must be taken into consideration as leaders strive to make ethical decisions within the context of educational settings. What is missing that is, what these paradigms tend to ignore is a consideration of those moral aspects unique to the profession . . . To ll this gap, we add a fourth to the three ethical frameworks . . . a paradigm of professional ethics.

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The moral aspect unique to the profession, they state, is the moral imperative to serve the best interests of the student (Shapiro and Stefkovich, 2001, p. 23). In other words, Shapiro and Stefkovich are arguing that, however valuable, the ethics of justice, critique, and care do not adequately take in the unique professional responsibilities of educators, which are shaped not only by personal values, but also by professional ethical codes. The ethic of the profession places students at the center of the ethical decision-making process (Shapiro and Stefkovich, 2001, p. 23) and is a necessary complement to the other ethics. Shapiro and Stefkovich thus propose a four-part model that includes the ethics of justice, critique, care, and the profession. Within these several frames for thinking about moral leadership and ethics are glimmers of and gestures toward the communal. Shapiro and Stefkovich (2001, p. 22), for example, recognize that individuals professional ethical codes

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are inuenced by community standards, including both the professional community and the community in which the leader works. They also note that the ethic of critique is linked, in the works of Giroux (1991), Shapiro and Purpel (1993) and others, to social discourse (Giroux, 1991, p. 48) and dialogue. In other words, it is only through social discourse that the voices of the marginalized can be heard and the inequities of the system can be exposed. Sergiovanni (1992, p. 86) includes an entire chapter on collegiality as a professional virtue in his book on moral leadership, suggesting that promoting collegiality (or the communal) is one of the tasks of moral leadership in schools. Similarly, in her treatise on caring in educational administration, Beck (1994) calls for a leadership that emphasizes relationships, encourages collaboration, and promotes a sense of belonging for students and staff. Starratt (1994, p. 50) perhaps goes the farthest in linking ethics to the communal. He reminds us that concepts of justice are not developed in isolation, but are shaped by participation in the life of the community and that moral choices are best made in a communitarian setting. He states:
It can be argued that an ethic of justice, especially when focused on issues of governance in a school setting, can encompass in practice the two understandings of justice, namely, justice understood as individual choice to act justly, and justice understood as the communitys choice to direct or govern its actions justly. In a school setting, both are required (Starratt, 1994, pp. 50-51, emphasis in the original).

In work subsequent to his 1994 book, Starratt (1996, 2003) puts even more emphasis on the communal, positing that the administering of community is one of the primary goals of moral leadership in schools. These gestures toward the communal suggest that these ethical theorists have been inuenced by the growing interest in community in education (to be discussed in the next section) and wish to draw connections between these ethical frames and the communal. Yet these gestures toward the communal are peripheral to the central points in each frame and do not change the fact that most approaches to ethics in educational leadership are based in the assumption of the individual administrator as ethical leader, decision-maker, and moral agent. As Leithwood and Duke (1998, p. 36) state, Much of the writing about moral leadership . . . adopts the perspective of those in formal administrative roles. Thus, these approaches tend to highlight and focus our attention on the cognitive, emotional, moral, and even spiritual experiences that are internal to the individual actor and that serve that individual as a guide for his or her moral leadership practice. With the exception of Starratts (1994, 1996, 2003) suggestions for the collaborative work needed to build an ethical school, little attention is given in the ethics literature to the communal processes that are necessary to achieve the moral purposes of schooling in the twenty-rst century. Thus, these ethical frames do little to pull our thinking beyond the mindset, so entrenched in our Western society, our schools, and our eld of study, of the individual as leader and moral agent.

The ethic of community Along with ethics, community has been increasingly a subject of educational analysis and research in recent years. Advocates of community building in schools claim multiple potential benets, including a reduced sense of alienation for students, improved achievement, enhanced collegiality for educators, and the possibility for practices that are more democratic (Furman, 2002; Louis and Kruse, 1995; Sergiovanni, 1996); a thin but growing research base supports some of these claims (e.g. Beck and Murphy, 1996; Bryk and Driscoll, 1988; Shouse, 1996). In elds other than education, the concept of community is also gaining ground. For example, Wengers (1998) work in business organizations seems to show that communities of practice are the fundamental social units that promote learning, creativity, and constructive action within organizations. While it is not the purpose here to review this community literature in any depth (and most readers will be familiar with the basic assumptions and claims within this work), what is needed here is to show the link between this work on community and the proposal for an ethic of community. Much of the literature on community in schools emphasizes the importance of relationships, collaboration, and communication; however, in its general usage, the term community tends to connote an entity, a thing, a product, or a specic type of social conguration. In other words, when one perceives the term community, one conceives a mental image of a tangible entity. Thus, when Sergiovanni (1994) calls for a new metaphor for schools substituting community for organization one still envisions a community-like organization. Beck (2002) corroborates this tendency to view community as a thing in her analytical review of the literature on community. She found that ontological images of community abounded: community was likened to a family, a circus, a neighborhood, or a jazz group. In other words, community is typically conceived as a thing, an entity to be created in schools, or a specic type of social/organizational arrangement (Beck, 2002, p. 26). In contrast, in my recent analysis of the prospects for creating community in schools (Furman, 2002, p. 285, emphasis in the original), I concluded that:
[. . .] community is processual. The sense of community, of connection with others, is based in relationships, which depend in turn on the ongoing processes of communication, dialogue, and collaboration, and not on a set of discreet indicators such as shared values and shared decision making. Thus, community is not a product or entity that can be measured, but an ongoing set of processes that are facilitated by educators who understand and are committed to these processes.

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In other words, to promote fundamental changes in how schools operate with the goal of enhancing community-like experiences, it is more important to focus on the processes of community than the entity of community, and it is more important to inspire commitment to these processes than commitment to the metaphor or image of community as an end product. The proposal here for an ethic of community devolves from this analysis of community as process. In its simplest terms, an ethic of community means that

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administrators, teachers, school staffs, students, parents, and other community members interested in schools commit to the processes of community. In other words, they feel that they are morally responsible to engage in communal processes as they pursue the moral purposes of schooling and address the ongoing challenges of daily life and work in schools. Thus, an ethic of community centers the communal over the individual as moral agent it shifts the locus of moral agency to the community as a whole. It leads to a practice of moral leadership that is clearly distributed and based rst and foremost in interpersonal and group skills, such as: . listening with respect; . striving for knowing and understanding others; . communicating effectively; . working in teams; . engaging in ongoing dialogue; and . creating forums that allow all voices to be heard. It also means that all persons involved in school communities need to develop these moral leadership skills and practices. The ethic of community complements and expands the frames developed by Starratt (1994) and Shapiro and Stefkovich (2001) in its focus on the communal rather than the individual. Where the other frames highlight the values that might guide ethical practice in schools justice, critique, and care the ethic of community centers this ethical practice in communal processes. Thus, the ethic of community is useful in mitigating one of the perennial problems of traditional research in educational leadership the unrealistic assumption that heroic leaders can provide the vision and expertise to overcome the many challenges facing public schooling in the twenty-rst century and lead schools in transformative directions (Bogotch, 2002; Heifetz, 1994). The expanded ethical frame is illustrated in Figure 1. This denition and argument for an ethic of community generates two immediate questions[1]:

Figure 1. Ethical framework centered in the ethic of community

(1) What are the communal processes to which educators should commit? (2) Why is a leadership practice based in an ethic of community important in todays schools? To address these two questions, in the following sections I will draw from recent literature on democratic community and social justice in schools. Democratic community and communal processes What are the communal processes to which educators should commit if an ethic of community is adopted as a guide to leadership practice? While there is no one answer to this question, recent work on democratic community in schools is very useful in suggesting promising directions. The idea of democratic community has acquired some shared meanings in recent educational literature. Kahne (1996) uses concepts derived directly from Dewey when he contrasts traditional communitarians, who value traditional roles, responsibilities and norms, with democratic communitarians, who consider democracy as a way of life in which community norms and values [are] continually held open to informed critique (Kahne, 1996, p. 27). According to Kahne, in such a democratic community diversity is recognized and respected, and change is expected. From this perspective, democratic community may be dened as a participatory way of life, a process, not a stagnant end (Kahne, 1996, p. 34), in which individuals are committed to the full and free interplay of ideas (Kahne, 1996, p. 34). Similarly, Apple and Beane (1995, p. 6) discuss the foundations for a democratic way of life and how it might be enacted in schools. The central concerns of democratic schools, they state, include the open ow of ideas, regardless of their popularity; the use of critical reection and analysis to evaluate ideas, problems, and policies; concern for the welfare of others and the common good; and concern for the dignity and rights of individuals and minorities (Apple and Beane, 1995, pp. 6-7). From these and other discussions of democratic community in schools (e.g. Crow and Slater, 1996; Furman and Starratt, 2002; Maxcy, 1995; Reitzug and OHair, 2002), some common meanings or principles emerge: . Democratic community is based on a reverence for open inquiry, or the full and free interplay of ideas (Dewey, 1916, p. 83). . Democratic community members feel a responsibility to participate in open inquiry to work for the common good. . In democratic community, the worth and dignity of individuals and the value of their participation are respected. Two observations on this understanding of democratic community as developed in education should be noted here: rst, this concept of democratic community is very concerned with diversity, that is, with how to be both democratic and communal in an increasingly diverse and multicultural society.

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Second, as Furman and Starratt (2002) have noted, this understanding of democratic community is virtually synonymous with the concept of deep democracy as developed by Gutmann (1987), Green (1999) and others. For example, Green (1999, p. 60, emphasis in the original), who writes from the perspective of philosophy, reects the democratic community principles of open inquiry, respect for individuals, and working for the common good in her advocacy for deep democracy in our increasingly diverse society:
The best hope today for preserving what is most insightful and rich in the worlds diverse cultures is deep democracy . . . This involves respecting, communicating receptively, and cooperating with those whose values are different than but not unalterably antagonistic to ones own, even as one celebrates ones own cultural memories and renews the rituals that give ones cultural tradition ongoing life in new times and circumstances.

Using these nearly interchangeable principles of democratic community and deep democracy as a basis, I suggest the following three sets of communal processes as a starting point for leadership practices that embrace an ethic of community in schools: (1) processes for knowing, understanding, and valuing; (2) processes for full participation and inquiry; and (3) processes for working toward the common good. I offer the specic suggestions that follow as a sample of the many possibilities that could be developed in schools. Communal processes for knowing, understanding, and valuing First is a set of processes that aim at knowing, understanding, and valuing others as unique individuals and as members of valued cultural groups. This deeper knowledge and understanding of others, while a prerequisite for developing respect for the worth and dignity of individuals, is often a problem in schools. Indeed, as research by Shields (1999) in Navajo schools has shown, educators may know very little about their students and their home cultures and base many decisions on bias and inaccurate assumptions. Some possibilities for processes aimed at knowing, understanding, and valuing individuals, their home cultures, and the communities in which they live would be deep or intentional listening, getting-to-know-you projects in schools, and place-based education. Deep or intentional listening. Deep or intentional listening involves inviting others to tell their stories of who they are, what their lives are like, and what they hope for, and then fully attending as these stories are told. Deep listening also involves suspending ones own assumptions, judgments and emotional reactions. As Isaacs (1999, p. 98, emphasis in the original) states, Often when we listen to others we may discover that we are listening from disturbance; in other words, we are listening from an emotional memory rather than from the present moment. Deep listening is a skill that needs to be learned. Isaacs (1999)

suggests a process for learning to listen from the perspective of dialogue theory, and Schultz (2003) offers ideas for deeper listening between teachers and students in classrooms. Getting to know you projects. A variety of school-wide and classroom-based activities can be promoted to help educators and students get to know and appreciate each other. These activities t naturally into the regular curriculum, and many familiar teaching activities can simply be adapted to promote knowing, understanding and valuing. The Child Development Projects (1994) publication, At Home in Our Schools, offers many ideas for these adaptations of school-wide and classroom-based projects and activities. For example, a welcoming newcomers project might involve setting up welcoming committees in classrooms to introduce newcomers to the school and designing getting to know you bulletin boards featuring photographs, artwork, and other information about new students and teachers. Many of these school-based activities can be extended beyond the school walls to include people in the community. Multiple creative ideas for projects such as these can be generated by educators and students within their local school context. However, a few of these activities implemented in isolation in specic classrooms will have little impact on knowing, understanding, and valuing others throughout the school community. What is needed is a commitment throughout the school to the need to know, understand, and value others, and to the creative development of projects that address this need. Place-based education. A recent development in curriculum theory, place-based education offers curricular strategies for developing a deeper knowledge of the community, its history, and its cultural and natural environment. In essence, place-based education is an umbrella term for approaches that self-consciously try to connect pedagogy to local place, that is, to engage students in reinhabitation (Gruenewald, 2003) of their local environments. Gruenewald (2003, in press), Sobel (1996) and others are contributing to a growing literature base on place-based education, and the Rural School and Community Trust has published the Place-based Learning Portfolio Workbook (see http://ruraledu.org/rtportfolio/index.htm), which provides a detailed rubric for documenting and assessing place-based pedagogies. Specic methodologies associated with place-based education that can contribute to knowing, understanding, and valuing include cultural journalism and natural history (Furman and Gruenewald, in press). Cultural journalism, or local history, aims to create connections between teachers, students, and the cultural life of their communities by engaging students in interviewing community members, gathering stories about local traditions, producing knowledge about local cultural life, and publishing articles, journals, and books. The primary benet of doing local histories is the process of learning about and caring more deeply for ones home community and the local places beyond the connes of the classroom. Similarly, natural history methods provide

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rsthand experience with the living world outside the classroom, that is, they involve students in studying the natural environment of their local community through regular excursions into the eld (Knapp, 1992; Sobel, 1996). Communal processes for full participation and inquiry A second set of communal processes are those aimed at full participation and open inquiry. Clearly, a prerequisite for participation and inquiry in any school setting is the opportunity for participation, in other words, the creation of spaces with the school structure and schedule for dialogue and deliberation. The range of possible congurations for these spaces is almost limitless, from small focus groups within classrooms to open town meetings involving all members of the community; each school community needs to develop a conguration that is appropriate for and responsive to the local culture and needs. Given the existence of such spaces, however, the methodology of communication and deliberation is critical. How can full and constructive participation and inquiry be promoted and sustained? One promising approach is dialogue, or the art of thinking together (Isaacs, 1999). Sometimes used as a proxy for conversations, the term dialogue actually refers to a specic theoretical approach or paradigm for talking together that holds promise for building understandings and generating creative, synergistic responses to problems, particularly in settings characterized by differences in cultural perspectives and values. Isaacs (1999, p. 9, emphasis in original) denes dialogue as a living experience of inquiry within and between people or a conversation in which people think together in relationship . . . and listen to the possibilities (Isaacs, 1999, p. 19). He states:
Dialogue, as I dene it, is a conversation with a center, not sides. It is a way of taking the energy of our differences and channeling it toward something that has never been created before. It lifts us out of polarization and into a greater common sense, and is thereby a means for accessing the intelligence and coordinated power of groups of people (Isaacs, 1999, p. 19, emphasis in the original).

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Most writers on dialogue agree that there is no recipe or algorithm (Burbulus, 1993, p. ix) for dialogue. Rather, it involves sets of predispositions or understandings that form a container for talking and thinking together, along with some practices that need to be learned listening, respecting, suspending, and voicing (Isaacs, 1999). While a fuller treatment of dialogue is not possible here[2], it is important to include it in a discussion of communal processes since talking together skills are critical to the ethic of community and are so conspicuously neglected in most discussions of school community. Communal processes for working toward the common good A third set of communal processes would be aimed at working toward the common good of the community. Of course, all of the foregoing processes

for knowing, understanding, and valuing, and for full participation and inquiry, serve the interests of working toward the common good. For example, a specic premise of dialogue theory is that conceptions of the common good and ideas for action can be constructed within and emerge from dialogic interactions. However, to complement and extend these other processes, action research is a method that can bridge from the ideas and understandings generated by dialogue to specic projects and actions. The typical understanding of action research in education is rather narrow that it is research conducted by educators, for themselves, in order to solve specic problems of classroom practice (Mills, 2000; Stringer, 2004). Here I use a broader denition: action research is problem-solving research, which is typically conducted in local contexts by those who have a vested interest in solving the problem. Using this denition, school-sponsored action research can be a powerful mechanism for involving students in the study of, and service toward, their own schools and communities. The signicance of action research as a communal process aimed at working toward the common good is its potential to engage educators and students as change agents as they investigate and gather data on their community, its cultures, and its problems, and then plan and implement some sort of action. Action research texts (Mills, 2000; Stringer, 2004) are excellent sources of ideas for the methods of action research, while a more comprehensive discussion of the role of action research in democratic education can be found in Hart (1997). To reiterate, the foregoing suggestions for communal processes are merely a sample of the possibilities for communal leadership practices; however, they hopefully serve as an entry point for thinking about the ethic of community as the basis for leadership practice in schools. The next section turns to the third and nal question, why is it important to commit to these communal processes in schools?

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The ethic of community and social justice To explore the importance of an ethic of community in todays schools, I return to a point made earlier in this article, that the moral purposes of schooling and school leadership are becoming a central focus of the eld. In other words, what is most important to address in the study of leadership in the twenty-rst century is how leadership can help achieve valued outcomes such as social justice, racial equity, and learning for all children in schools. The claim here is that leadership practice must be grounded in an ethic of community in order to achieve these moral purposes. In other words, the ethic of community is a vehicle for leadership practice aimed at these valued ends-in-view. This section looks more closely at this relationship, using the example of social justice as a moral purpose or valued end of schooling.

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Social justice has recently acquired a new intensity and urgency in education for several reasons, including the increasing diversity of school populations (Goldring and Greeneld, 2002), the growing awareness of the achievement and economic gaps between mainstream and minoritized children (Coleman, 1990; Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Valenzuela, 1999), and the increasingly sophisticated analyses of social injustice as played out in schools, including the injustices that may arise from the current policy environment of high-stakes assessment and accountability (Larson and Ovando, 2001; Macedo, 1995; McNeil, 2000; Rapp, 2002). While there is no static, agreed-on denition for social justice, Bogotch (2002) reminds us that constructs such as social justice acquire a shared, though imprecise, meaning during certain periods of time. In education, the current shared meanings about social justice include its critical stance, that is, its critique of current educational arrangements that are rife with inequity . . . and lead to inequitable outcomes for children (Pounder et al., 2002, p. 270); its call for radical change to address these inequities (Bogotch, 2002; Grogan, 2002); and its general goal of improving the education and life chances of poor and minority children (Larson and Murtadha, 2002, p. 150) through changes in schooling. Taken together, these shared meanings of social justice suggest that working for social justice requires a deliberate intervention that challenges fundamental inequities and works toward better educational and economic outcomes for marginalized children. However, the specic nature of this deliberate intervention remains vague. Larson and Murtadha (2002, p. 157), for example, provide a ne review of the background theories and arguments related to social justice, but conclude that there is a vagueness . . . as to what all of this means to researchers and practitioners. However, a recent analysis by Bogotch (2002) provides a helpful distinction between social justice from a community perspective and social justice related to a quasi-heroic discourse based on individualistic notions of leadership (Bogotch, 2002, p. 144). From a community perspective, working for social justice involves an openness to the participation of all community members in constructing visions of social justice that are appropriate and meaningful within the local context; further, this work is continuous and recursive, because when local conditions change, the only recourse is to begin again to reconstruct social justice (Bogotch, 2002, pp. 146-7). In contrast, from the individualistic perspective, working for social justice is based in heroic action. As Bogotch (2002, p. 148) states, Heroic individuals often have a single-mindedness to pursue their own vision tenaciously and apart from others who may not share their particular vision. Such visions, or notions of social justice begin and end as a discrete, yet coherent belief system that separates nonbelievers from true believers. Rather than constructing the meaning of social justice locally and communally, from diverse views, and engaging the community in working toward it, heroic leaders struggle valiantly, often against great odds, to achieve a particular vision of social

justice. Although Bogotch says that both the communal and individualistic approaches are important, he also concludes that all social justice/educational reform efforts must be deliberately and continuously reinvented and critiqued (Bogotch, 2002,p. 154), a process he clearly links with the communal view of social justice. Thus, Bogotchs analysis strongly suggests the importance of a communal perspective when working for social justice in schools. Taking this communal perspective of social justice a step further, Furman and Shields (2003) argue that the concepts of democratic community and social justice are inextricably connected. They state:
Social justice is not possible without deep democracy; neither is deep democracy possible without social justice. Indeed, there is an essential and dynamic interplay both within and between these concepts that provides a sort of check and balance... Insofar as deep democratic processes permit a construction of what social justice means, we cannot attend to issues of power without deep democratic processes. Our concept of social justice, on the other hand, suggests some essential underlying values and offers a construction of moral purpose that provides the compass for the common good (Furman and Shields, 2003, p. 18).

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In other words, meanings of social justice as well as decisions on the deliberate interventions required to work for social justice are constructed by the community through the processes of deep democracy open inquiry and critique with a broad scope of participation across community members, while social justice, in turn, provides the moral compass for the processes of democratic community. Essentially, these arguments for a democratic communal approach to social justice are saying that social justice cannot be realized given the status quo of hierachical relationships in schools, assumptions that moral leadership is the purview of heroic leaders in administrative positions, and the dearth of opportunities for full participation and open inquiry (Furman and Shields, 2003). Communal processes, as captured in the proposal for an ethic of community, are necessary. In other words, an ethic of community, when adopted as a basis for leadership practice, is a vehicle for working toward social justice because it centers in leadership practice the communal processes of democratic community, which are necessary aspects of striving for social justice in schools. When school leaders meaning anyone and everyone who cares about what happens in schools internalize the ethic of community as a guide to practice, they turn away from heroic and often futile notions of moral leadership toward communal notions; they recognize that working toward moral purposes like social justice is a communal responsibility rather than the purview of a transformational leader with vision; they become open to the possibilities of constructing concepts of social justice that are appropriate in the unique contexts in which they work and learn; and they develop the capacity to reconstruct social justice continually through communal work. Thus, an ethic of community centers the communal over the individual as the primary locus of moral leadership and agency in schools.

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Conclusion As I think about the importance of the ethic of community as a guide for leadership practice, I am reminded of analyses that are unfolding in regard to other issues in education. For example, there is a major thrust to identify the links between leadership practice and student learning outcomes; as with the work on social justice and democratic community, this endeavor often has suffered from the assumption that the individual heroic leader can act as a primary agent in improving student learning. [And, of course, the current national and state-level policy environment tends to reify this notion by, for example, holding school principals accountable for increasing achievement test scores in their schools.] New analyses, however, are acknowledging the complexity of the links between leadership and learning; they are creating new scaffolds for thinking about the multi-layered, complex relationships among various dimensions of schooling that have an impact on learning. For example, Spillane and Louis (2002) backward map from student learning through a complex series of links among classroom instruction, classroom community, school-wide professional community, organizational learning, and leadership practices. While their analysis suggests a sort of intervening variable or causal-chain model in regard to the relationship between leadership and learning, at the same time it clearly highlights the importance of the communal in working toward improved student learning. They state, for example, that without the development of social trust, time to meet and talk, strong teacher voice in decisions, and reduced school size and complexity, professional community a critical component for improved student learning will not be possible. I see this analysis in regard to ethic of community in a similar way. If we backward map from the moral purpose of creating social justice in schools, as presented here, we discover that democratic communal processes are at the heart of working toward this valued end. And we see that leadership practice means participating in, promoting, and supporting these communal processes. The ethic of community captures the centrality of this need for communal processes in a way that the ethics of justice, critique, care (Starratt, 1994) and the profession (Shapiro and Stefkovich, 2001) do not. Thus, the ethic of community is a missing link in thinking about the relationships among ethics, leadership practice, and the moral purposes of schooling. Figure 2 illustrates these relationships.

Figure 2. Links between ethics, leadership practice, and social justice in schools

In short, I believe that the commitment to the ethic of community is the foundation for moral leadership practice in twenty-rst century schools.
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