The objective of this paper is to analyse the potential impact of the participation of parents and the community in secondary education through teacher leadership. The account draws on data which is largely teachers’ voices. The concepts underpinning the research are based on the experience of the HertsCam network that supports teachers as agents of change together with the INCLUD-ED project, which identified successful educational actions that contribute to school improvement and social cohesion. The idea of ‘non-positional teacher leadership’ (Frost, 2014) and the different types of community participation in schools (Flecha, 2012), are at the core of this work. The communicative methodology (Gómez, Puigvert & Flecha, 2011) is used in the research addressed in this paper, which implies egalitarian dialogue between researchers and the interpretations, reflections and theories of the people directly involved in the realities being studied. In this sense, a process of building knowledge together occurs, allowing emerging new understandings beyond what is known in the academia. Some of the initial findings of in-depth interviews and communicative observations conducted in diverse secondary schools are presented. As a result, an approach to teacher leadership that enables the creation of spaces of dialogue for teachers to interact with the community is discussed.

Flecha, A. (2012). Family Education Improve Student's Academic Performance: Contributions from European Research. Multidisciplinary Journal of Educational Research, 3(2), 301-321. Frost, D. (ed.) (2014) Transforming education through teacher leadership. Cambridge: Leadership for Learning. Gómez, A., Puigvert, L., Flecha, R. (2011). Critical Communicative Methodology: Informing Real Social Transformation Through Research. Qualitative Inquiry, 17 (3), 235–245