Diversity is a crucial aspect of schools (Werning et al., 2008) as student populations worldwide exhibit a wide range of characteristics, including race, gender, culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, family background, and socio-economic status (Rowan et al., 2021). Supporting and acknowledging diversity in schools  promotes social justice, which is closely linked to principles such as equality, fair opportunities, and inclusion (Blackmore, 2006). In turn, social justice helps create equitable and democratic school settings (Jean-Marie, 2008), addressing the educational challenges faced by disadvantaged groups (DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014). Social justice and community engaged school leadership are closely linked to promoting  diversity  to support students' social, cognitive and emotional development (DeMatthews, 2018). As  parental and community engagement has an important place in ensuring social justice in schools, one of the frameworks for addressing diversity is community engaged school leadership for social justice is by DeMatthews (2018), which  consists of five elements as “personal experiences and commitment”, “situational awareness”, ‘advocacy’, “critical reflection and praxis”, and “technical expertise and standards-based leadership practice”. Personal experiences and commitment stresses that personal and professional experiences determine the way principals make sense of their world view, position in society, and dominant power relations. Situational awareness is an accurate understanding of the school context and recognition of external factors that may be beyond the principal's control. Advocacy, which refers to communicating with a wide range of stakeholders, builds broad-based support and networks. Critical reflection and practice implies that school administrators examine their own attitudes and skills, with an emphasis on  the importance of policy change, technology, budget, curriculum changes, and awareness of assessment and evaluation processes. Technical expertise and standards-based practices include  local policies and laws, school budgeting, curriculum, instruction, assessment, classroom management and student discipline practices, teacher and staff evaluation processes, providing principals with knowledge and skills that teachers, students, parents and community groups may lack.

Turkiye, like many other nations in Europe and the world, is a country with diverse student populations with unique needs. Turkish education system, on the other hand, is centralized which is characterized by highly bureaucratic and standardized implementations. This inevitably leads to implications on schools and school leaders in supporting diversity and inclusion through social justice and community engaged school leadership praxis. This is a problematic area which requires fine-grained research on the implementations, roles and understandings of school leaders .

In this regard, we aim to examine the roles of school principals  related with  community engaged school practices and school leadership in supporting or `managing`  diversity in an urban school in Turkiye through DeMatthew`s (2018)  community engaged leadership for social justice framework. 

The guiding research questions in addressing the aim are:

1.How do the school leaders and teachers perceive diversity in the school?

2. How do the school leaders and teachers employ community-engaged school practices to address  diversity in the school?

3. What are the roles of school administrators in this school in relation to community engaged leadership for social justice to address diversity ?

4. What are the expectations of the school community in this regard?

A qualitive single-case study(Yin, 2011) was utilized to comprehend the roles and practices to of three school administrators, ten teachers, ten parents and ten community members in relation to diversity. For this case study, a secondary school in Ankara was selected purposefully for two reasons. Firstly, the social fabric of the neighborhood where the school is located has changed significantly due to the migration patterns. Secondly, the socio-economic profile of the neighborhood where the school is located is quite low, and the number of seperated parents and migrant families in the neighborhood is quite high. Therefore, the school is thought to be a significant example of diverse student populations in terms of social, economic, cultural and individual aspects . the school has a variety of pressing challenges in addressing the needs of the students. There are 38 teachers, 3 school administrators and 739 students in the school. Despite being a secondary level, the school has 2 kindergarten classes. Data collection tools for the case study included qualitative semi-structured interview forms with the school principals and teachers; focus groups interviews with parents and community members and document analysis of the school website, pictures, videos, report related to the school were analyzed. Content analysis of the collected data was grounded in the dimensions of framework (DeMatthews, 2018). Validity and reliability were ensured through separate analysis of the findings .We triangulated our analysis of data from all sources through member checks and agreed on the common themes. This allowed us to interpret our findings from multiple perspectives and reinforced the analytical structure of the different stages of analysis (Marshall and Rossman, 2011). First, the collected data were sorted inductively according to the framework, then an iterative process was employed to thematically code the data, allowing the identification of themes and sub-themes. Next, patterns were identified across the framework’s dimensions to complete the picture of the studied phenomenon (Marshall and Rossman, 2011).

The findings of the study show that there is ambiguity and challenges about how school principals understand and demonstrate community engaged practices and they approach diversity with caution and a form of empathy. However, there exists political and cultural implications in community engagement notion and practices of the educators . Findings will be discussed during the session in ways that how it differs from European approaches and to what extent De Matthew`s Framework could be utilized in specific school contexts as of the case in this study. This study does not attempt to generalize but the case could yield further applications for European and other contexts.

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