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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