It Takes a Whole School: A Synthesis

The whole-school approach offers a structure and language to exchange and celebrate diverse educational perspectives, priorities, and practices. Our goal in assembling this collection is not to offer a blueprint, a narrowing solution to problems of schooling in contemporary times, but to share promising and inspiring cases, to provoke dialogue and open conversations, but also to question, resist, struggle, and break with restricting traditions and orders. Of course, all schools are unique, contextually rich, complex, dynamic, and ever-evolving. They are educational communities, education homes assembled through scholarly expertise, professional practices, institutional structures, and lots of dedication, love, and care. Professional growth, Maxine Greene writes, requires a “quest for a better state of things for those we teach and the world we share” (Greene, 1995, p. 1). This quest brings together the innovative practices outlined in this collection. Here, we showcase diverse professional communities reflexively engaged in working together, teaching and learning together, in particular contexts and times. We offer this book as an invitation to think differently about schools and schooling. Above all else, this invitation is deeply educational. In this closing chapter, we highlight tensions, common threads, and noticeable absences that might inform the future development of the WSA in our pursuit of a world that is more sustainable than the one currently in prospect.