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 definition of ethics as the study of moral duty and obligation, ethic of community is defined 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.

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual framework for social justice leadership as praxis and to explore the implications of this framework for leadership preparation programs. Conceptual Argument: The conceptual framework for social justice leadership is grounded in a review of literature and organized around three central concepts. First, leadership for social justice is conceived as a praxis, in the Freireian sense, involving both reflection and action. Second, leadership for social justice spans several dimensions, which serve as arenas for this praxis. These dimensions include the personal, interpersonal, communal, systemic, and ecological. Third, each dimension within the framework requires the development of capacities on the part of the leader, capacities for both reflection and action. The author argues that the central purpose of leadership preparation programs is to develop these capacities in aspiring school leaders. Implications: At present, the literature on social justice leadership and most preparation programs address some of the capacities for social justice leadership well (e.g., critical consciousness about social justice issues) but others poorly or not at all (e.g., the actual skills needed for leadership praxis). The praxis framework proposed in this article facilitates a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of the capacities needed by contemporary school leaders working for social justice and therefore how preparation programs might be designed and delivered.

The social justice discourse in education has been critiqued by Bowers and others for its lack of attention to a broad range of related ecological issues. This article analyzes and critiques the current discourse of social justice in the field of educational leadership and offers an expanded concept of socioecological justice in schools. Arguing that pedagogy is a critical vehicle for addressing socioecological justice, the authors develop a model for a critical pedagogy of place and describe specific instructional methodologies associated with the model. The article concludes with suggestions for a critical leadership of place intended to enhance socioecological justice in schools.

This article addresses the paradox of community building in schools characterized by diversity, posing it as the dissonance between modernist notions of community and postmodernism. The article attempts to unravel the paradox through a theoretical alignment of these concepts. A framework for postmodernism as descriptive social theory, nonnative/constructive social theory, and oppositional/deconstructive social theory is used to analyze community; a nested model for community possibilities in postmodern times is presented; and a concept of postmodern community for schools is explored. The implications of postmodern community for schools are discussed.

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This exploratory study gathered information about the use of action research within doctor of education programs in educational leadership and explored faculty understanding of and perspectives on action research. Survey data established that action research is used infrequently to meet dissertation requirements. Contributing factors include lack of clarity regarding the nature of action research (AR) and concerns about methodological legitimacy. Because the development of collaborative leadership skills and the pursuit of social justice objectives are inherent to the action research process, these results call for additional discussion regarding this distinctive methodology and its role in the preparation of educational leaders at the doctoral level.

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In his recent monograph on the quest for a new "center" for educational leadership, Joseph Murphy (1999) identifies "three powerful synthesizing paradigms" (p. 54) embedded in the "shifting landscape" of the field-democratic community, social justice, and school improvement. While suggesting that each offers the potential "to re-culture the profession of school administration" (p. 54), Murphy chooses school improvement as the center, arguing that "it will be the most effective of the three . . . in rebalancing the relationship between the academic and practice wings of the profession" (p. 55). In this chapter we consider a different choice: What would it mean for democratic community to be the center for educational leadership in schools, and how would this choice re-culture the profession? 1 We are interested in this undertaking not only as a natural extension of our respective writings on the relationships among community, democracy, ethics, and leadership in schools, but also as a response to the growing concern that current directions in public school policy, including initiatives associated with "school improvement," actually threaten democracy in schools and society (Berliner, 2001;Elshtain, 1995). We will say more about this concern in a later section of this chapter.Murphy's (1999) selection of democratic community as one of the "synthesizing paradigms" of the field reflects the increasing use of this term in educational writing in recent years. However, the concept is not new, with much of the current work finding its grounding in Dewey's ideas promulgated more than 80 years ago. Kahne's (1996) rendition of democratic community is a good example, as he uses concepts derived directly from Dewey when he contrasts "traditional communitarians," who value traditional roles, responsibilities and norms, with "democratic communitarians," who follow Dewey and consider 105