18 RESEARCH IN TEACHER EDUCATION Vol.3, No.1. April 2013. pp. 18–21. Building communities for the future Neil Herrington University of East London Abstract W hile partnerships, in England, between schools and their communities are encouraged, ‘authentic’ engagement in these partnerships is constrained by a number of factors. This article explores some of these factors and puts forward some suggestions as to how a community-orientated approach, operating through Place-Based Education, could impact positively on the educational environment and wider issues of regeneration. Keywords: Community; Regeneration; Place-Based Education; Curriculum; Engagement; Localism. Introduction Previous UK governments and iterations of departments responsible for education have explored the linkage between schools, communities and regeneration (DCSF 2007; DfES 2006). While the UK Government and the acronyms have changed, the imperative for schools to ‘engage with their wider community... is inherent in the direction of public sector reform and localism’ (Thomas 2012, p. 10). This imperative exists within a complex relationship between schools, communities and curricula. This article explores some of these complexities, looking at the way in which place, community and the nature of public space interact with, and indeed shape, the educational environment. School approaches to community engagement The relationship between school and community is complex (Bertotti et al. 2011; Coomber 2009; Lavia & Moore 2009; Thomas 2012). This complexity flows from the dynamic nature of communities as sites of engagement (Coomber 2009; Lavia & Moore 2009) and from the difficulty in defining ‘community’. For a school, the community is likely to include students, their parents and carers, and their teachers. One also needs to consider other school staff, and the school’s wider stakeholders (however these are defined). However, the definition could, or possibly should, include those who might not have a direct link to the school, but who are geographically close to the building. The community is, therefore, not homogeneous, and one cannot assume that an individual’s perceptions and experiences of a community are necessarily shared across the community’s population (Christiansen & O’Brien 2003; Orellana 1999; Pink 2008). This differential experience is important if, as some commentators (Habermas 1991; Lefebvre 1991) believe, public and community space is created through social interaction rather than being introduced as a fully formed entity. There is a need to explore how these differential perceptions play out in the formation of practice. Taking these complexities as a given, there are, broadly speaking, two competing understandings of the relationship between school and community (Cummings et al. 2007). The first is a school-orientated understanding where communities are framed as resources contributing to the school’s own tasks of, for example, raising achievement (Cummings et al. 2007). Seeing this as a task of enabling young people to gain qualifications to leave the community, the school becomes instrumental in the destruction of the community (Cummings et al. 2007). From this perspective, schools are often seen as a source of problems and this has some resonance with ideas that see formal curricula and professional education as undermining a community’s confidence in their own knowledge and experience (Freire 2000; Illich 1996). The contrasting approach is a community-orientated understanding, seeing schools as a resource for the community where students are educated into the community rather than as a means to leave it. The community-orientated understanding (Cummings et al. 2007) is manifest in a number of educational practices which are rooted in the generation of concrete knowledge about the local environment