Community is an important ingredient of successful schools, yet it is a more complex topic than is portrayed in current discourse. In this engaging volume, Patricia Calderwood explores multiple layers of educational communities and the conditions that inspire their resilience and growth. Confronting the inherent fragility of community, she also provides hopeful discussion about the ways communities can become responsive, and subsequently resilient, to vulnerabilities. Using the backdrop of different schools, Calderwood depicts community as a process rather than a commodity and illustrates how notions of community evolve locally and distinctly. Calderwood addresses issues of identity, leadership, voice, and normative forces in the lives of ordinary people as she engages readers in this important and timely analysis. -- Publisher description.