Chapter 11: From Mistrust to Collaboration: Using Transformational Social Therapy to Support Participation in School–Community Educational Reform in aFrench Banlieue

This chapter examines a process, Transformational Social Therapy (TST), which is designed to foster collaborative action to address problems in organizations and communities where fractured relationships and mistrust create blocks to collaboration.¹ The case details collaborative planning in a school-community network, the Maville-TST School Success Project, which took place between April 2005 and October 2006 in one of the banlieues² on the outskirts of Paris, France. Maville (a fictitious name) is an economically depressed town that is home to a large multi-ethnic population, both French-born and immigrant, with roots in North and West Africa and other European and non-European countries. The area is considered volatile and, in fact, riots that were widely reported internationally exploded there and in other banlieues in October 2005, while this project was taking place (Coleman, 2006). At the time project activities began, tensions in the community were high and many of the local schools—among the lowest performing in France—were in disarray and closed off from each other and the neighborhood. Mandates from a recently revived national education reform policy that called for school-community collaborative planning provided an opportunity and some resources, and the principal of the lead school in the network, Collège Picasso (a fictitious name) invited the Charles Rojzman Institute, the hub for TST activities, to facilitate the planning process.