When educators attempt to make “community” a part of classroom learning: The dangers of (mis)appropriating students' communities into schools

• Based on the literature, we specify four defining characteristics of community.
• We explore educators' usage of the term community and the associated implications.
• We examine how PD artifacts, tools, and norms co-construct localized meanings.
• We disambiguate four alternative analyses that are often conflated with community.

In this article, we explore the ambiguous associations of the term “community” within one professional development (PD) program that engaged teachers in using mobile technologies to learn about data. We argue that multiple meanings of “community” are embedded in competing ideological discourses that reproduce and/or contest relationships of power that shape the educational experiences of students of color. We examine how the norms, representational artifacts, and tools in the PD we studied co-constructed various meanings of “community.” Lastly, we explore the implications of our findings for PD facilitators by disambiguating other analyses that are often conflated with “community.”