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Holistic View of Education Values Mental Health

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Holistic View of Education Values Mental Health

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2018 proposed change

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Social justice leadership involves educational leaders distributing responsibilities with teachers and constituents and promoting connections with families and communities to adopt inclusive, transformative, and action-based practices that address the holistic needs of diverse students to improve their educational experiences and lives.

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Social Justice Leadership Adopts a Holistic View of Students

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Social Justice Leadership Adopts a Holistic View of Students

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A primary conviction of mine is that social justice education must be holistic. If educational practices are inclusive, they are attentive and responsive to multiple facets of students' needs. Rather than privileging cognitive development and content acquisition and upholding white, privileged civic values, socially just educational leaders must consider diverse cultures, languages, learning styles, genders, races, sexual orientations, disabilities, and individuals' social emotional health. According to Dantley and Tilman (2010), this is done by educational leaders being well versed in critical theory where they consistently "interrogat[e] the uses as well as the abuses of power in social, economic, and political structures" (Dantley & Tilman, 2010, p.20). This includes educational systems that "regularly generate and reproduce power inequities" (Dantley & Tilman, 2010, p.20). An appropriate way to facilitate an anti-oppressive, holistic approach to education is to provide ample professional development opportunities for educators and staff and to emphasize the intersectionality of social issues without ignoring the specific social barriers and experiences of historically marginalized populations.

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Social Justice Leadership Honors Diverse Voices

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Social Justice Leadership Honors Diverse Voices

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I believe that socially just educational leaders absolutely must honor diverse voices at all levels within the school systems they lead. This begins with appropriate representation across teachers, staff, and leadership teams. When there is an incongruity between those who are in charge and student identities within a building or district, there is an underlying concern about leaders being able to comprehend students' lived experiences. This can lead to significant breakdowns in trust that impede rapport building, which is essential to building a healthy school culture. Furthermore, a failure to understand students' experiences and cultures can prove challenging for leaders to appropriately provide supports to benefit students academically and emotionally. In order to address issues of representation, hiring teams must prioritize recruiting, hiring, and retaining quality administrators, teachers, and staff that reflect the student populations that they serve.

Beyond being mindful of representation in leadership teams, socially just educational leaders should be highly aware of students' feelings about current conditions within the school and work alongside them to address their concerns. According to Shields (2010), quality, social justice educational leaders "...must engage in dialogue, examine current practice, and create pedagogical conversations and communities that critically build on, and do not devalue, students’ lived experiences" (Shields, 2010, p.571). This is accomplished by dedicating time and resources to connect teachers and administrators with a diverse group of students, especially those whose voices are not privileged, to determine, understand, and respond to student needs and concerns to benefit school culture and experiences of marginalized populations. In my school, our administration has recruited a small group of students and about twenty students to represent the whole student body to collaborate to identify areas to improve our school culture and brainstorm specific ways to address these concerns. This Student Action Committee honors students' voices and reflects this aspect of my philosophy of a leadership team that is in tune with social justice.

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James MacGregor Burns on Distributed Leadership

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James MacGregor Burns on Distributed Leadership

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Many teachers do not feel consistently valued by upper level administration and others in managerial roles, so the concept of distributed leadership is central to my conception of leadership for social justice. In his interview with Jepson Professor Al Goethals about leadership studies, MacGregor Burns (2010) emphasizes the importance of leaders to share responsibilities of creating change with their constituents, as well as honoring their role in these successes. He wonders "...to what extent do we exaggerate the role of the leaders that we hear so much about and minimize the role of leadership at the grassroots level." This question strikes a chord with me because he clearly articulates a significant problem, which is the lack of trust and strong relationships between figurehead leaders and their "followers." To my thinking, socially just leadership is distributed among all stakeholders, certainly including a diverse group of teachers, and is fundamentally rooted in shared responsibilities and credit for educational practices and successes.

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Cooper, C.W. (2010). Educational leaders as cultural workers: Engaging families and school communities through transformative leadership. In S.D. Horsford (Ed.), New Perspective in Educational Leadership: Exploring Social, Political, and Community Contexts and Meaning (pp. 173-195). New York, NY: Peter Lang.  (chapter 9 in required text)

CSUMB Service Learning Institute. (2018, November 30). Service Learning Student Leadership Course Based. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpwkOlqVs9g

Dantley, M, E. & Tilman, L, C. (2010). Social justice and moral transformative leadership. In C. Marshall & M. Oliva (Eds.), Leadership for Social Justice: Making Revolution in Education (2nd ed.) (pp. 19-34). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon.

KQED Education. (2017, September 27). Stepping Up: The Social Justice Activist. Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcbAr3QCPs0&disable_polymer=true

Richmond, U. O. (2010, June 14). James MacGregor Burns on Leadership. Retrieved March 27, 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bugXWk820B8

ROUNDTABLE: Equity & social justice in education. (n.d.). Retrieved March 31, 2019, from https://www.teachingquality.org/blog/roundtable-equity-in-education/

Scanlan, M. & Theoharis, G. (2015)Intersectionality in educational leadership. In G.

Theoharis & M. Scanlan (Eds.), Leadership for increasingly diverse Schools (pp.1-10). New York, NY: Routledge. (Chp. 1.in required text)

Shields, C.M. (2010).
Transformative leadership: Working for equity in diverse contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, 46, 558-589.

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This interview demonstrates students' incredible insights they can offer to educational leaders. Effective and socially just leaders must tap into these assets to benefit the groups that they are charged with leading.

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Stepping Up: The Social Justice Activist

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Social Justice Leaders Connect and Collaborate with the Communities They Serve

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Social Justice Leaders Connect and Collaborate with the Communities They Serve

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Another crucial component of social justice educational leadership involves addressing gaps between the schools and the communities that students belong to. Unfortunately, "a collaborative approach to engaging families that seeks to build community, bridge cultural differences between families and schools, foster dialogue, and share power is rare" (Cooper, 2015, p.173). Many schools today fail to adequately support students because current practices are not inclusive and ignore the strengths and values of minoritized families and communities. Cooper (2015) suggests that "discontinuities between schools and families contribute to marginalization of many families and lessen the effectiveness of educational leaders" (Cooper, 2015, p.174). This is especially true for students from low socio-economic backgrounds and African American and Latinx families. A way to address these gaps involves developing thoughtful and sincere ways to honor the assets of students' families and communities and invite them into the schools to use those strengths to benefit students' educational experiences.

The responsibility in establishing these connections and promoting parent engagement lies with those in power: educational leaders. Rather than seeking parent and community engagement in symbolic ways where families are encouraged to interact with teachers, administrators, and the school in general for a few hours a few times a year, schools should facilitate ongoing measures that welcome families and communities and designate a "seat at the table" for them as primary stakeholders in students' education. Furthermore, there must be active attempts to understand and attend to the biases that exist within the school system to "[counter] deficit thinking, [develop] collaborative decision making structures, and [seek] to resolve equity-oriented conflicts and cultural tensions" (Cooper, 2015, 186). Progress will not be made unless educational leadership accepts that many current practices that "include" parents and communities are shallow and lacking equitable involvement from stakeholders outside of the schools.

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Social Justice Education is Action Driven

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Social Justice Education is Action Driven

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In order for educational leaders to be effective, their practices must be action driven. Scanlan and Theoharis (2015) contend that understanding the characteristics of social justice leaders is not sufficient to establishing a socially just and culturally responsive school; "leadership practices--what leaders do--matter most" (Scanlan & Theoharis, 2015, p.4). Dantley and Tilman develop this notion. Through a critical theory framework, they posit, that educational "...leadership must be critically educative; it can not only look at the conditions in which we live, but it also must decide how to change them" (Dantley and Tillman, 2010, p.20). With this in mind, partnerships with students, families, and community leaders must be used to do something, and communities of practice can help facilitate real change. Scanlan and Theoharis (2015) reinforce the need for social justice education to be social, diverse, and shared between all stakeholders. I support this stance; educational leaders must be aware of their need to create and maintain communities of practice that honor administrators, teachers, staff, students, families, and communities in order to be effective and socially just.

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The following video is evidence of a school that has developed communities of practice that honor student voice. Furthermore, the student being interviewed has clearly found a space to hone her own leadership skills to improve the overall climate and experiences for other students in her educational institution.

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Service Learning Student Leadership Course Based