Renewed Aspirations for Schools as Community Hubs

AbstractThis book explores the expanded roles of schools, investigating how they may offer more to their communities than formal education. It also discusses what schools can gain from their communities through various forms of partnership and collaboration. We explore this ‘more than a school’ idea through past examples, in current practice, and as a model for schools into the future. Uniquely, the book investigates these issues from a spatial perspective, adopting the view that school and urban infrastructure, including buildings and landscaped outdoor areas (i.e., space), matters in the context of school-community relations. Indeed, we suggest that it mediates these relations, even though such influence is infrequently mentioned in the existing literature. Aligning our research with the spatial turn in the social sciences, we argue that research into school-community connections has tended to view such relations as fundamentally social, omitting adequate consideration of the role that space plays in enabling and/or constraining connections between school administrators, students, teachers, parents, carers, and members of the wider community. Adopting a spatial approach, a range of new perspectives are offered with respect to fostering stronger school-community connections through engaging thoughtfully with the built environment. The recurring themes of partnering, planning, designing, and enabling schools as community hubs are used to structure the 20 chapters that follow the initial scene-settings chapters.