School-parent-community engagement is known to be critically important for educational outcomes. When school personnel, parents, and members of local communities engage with one another there are significant dividends - social capital, trust, and mutual understanding among them. When those dividends multiply, children and young people tend to engage - both more and more often - in their school communities, families, and wider social milieux. In the process, education and learning extend across generations. Evidence suggests that engagement also either flourishes of is attenuated as a result of the settings in which interactions occur. Yet, in the scholarly and policy literature, engagement is often written or reportedly spoken about as though it was an aspatial phenomenon. The aim of this chapter is to explore this tendency to elide the spatialities of engagement by reference to a two-year research project based in 12 public schools in Tasmania, Australia. Our foundational premise is that engagement is always already spatialized. The question we consider in particular is what evidence is there that school personnel, parents, and community members have or do not have explicit or implicit understandings of the spatialities of engagement?

Item Type:	Research Book Chapter
Keywords:	methodology; silence; schools; parents; communities; engagement; social change; learning environments;
Research Division:	Education
Research Group:	Other Education
Research Field:	Education not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society
UTAS Author:	Stratford, E (Professor Elaine Stratford)
UTAS Author:	Katersky Barnes, R (Dr Robin Katersky Barnes)
UTAS Author:	Burns, G (Ms Gemma Burns)
UTAS Author:	Fischer, S (Mrs Sarah Fischer)
ID Code:	135669
Year Published:	2020
Deposited By:	College Office - CALE
Deposited On:	2019-11-07
Last Modified:	2020-03-03
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