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As a teacher, I have experienced the need and importance of community members and parents within schools and education. However, often times community involvement is centered around systems that are not serving them and with language that does not reflect the culture in which they are situated.

While I am still identifying the most effective route in which communities play a role within education, I am committed to involving them in authentic ways with a transformative leadership approach.

I am committed to listening and observing in order to learn what is needed from my role of a teacher for the community at hand.

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Social justice leadership is investigative. It is to question the norms and structures that exist and examine their impact on all those within a community. If there are bias and marginalizing forces, a leader is to asses the origin of those forces within the norms and structures and rebuild with the newfound understanding. Rebuilding, however, must not dismiss or further marginalize groups within the community, but include and empower them.

“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people, they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.”
--- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Leaders of social justice work should remain true to the duty of empowerment to combat inequality. Empowerment can and should look like the disbursement of power, the lessening of privileging and othering within the community, and should not exclude the groups which the leaders belong.

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“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
― Paulo Freire, We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change

As educators we are social leaders. We must be "critically reflective, courageous, innovative, and bold" (Scanlan 4). We must constantly assess, interpret, and provide accordingly to contexts and intersects of diversity and culture within our students and school communities.

Kumashiro's anti-opressive framework is useful when striving to understand education's role within social justice:

"...refer to those groups that are traditionally marginalized in society as those other than the norm..."

educate the other (focus on improving the experiences of students who are othered)

education about the other (focus on what all students --privileged and marginalized-know and should know about the other)

education that is critical of privileging and othering (focus on examining not only how some groups and identities are bothered but also how some groups are favored)

education that changes students and society (focus on how oppression begins in discourses that frame how people think, feel, and interact)
(Dantley 21).

While this can be interpreted and implemented in various ways, we, as educators, must first humanize all and second "denounce separatist politics that reify social, cultural, and political division among people" (Cooper 185).

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

Dantley, M, E. & Tillman, 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.

Scanlan, M. & Theoharis, G. (2015)Intersectionality in educational leadsdzhip. In G. Theoharis & M. Scanlan (Eds.), Leadership for increasingly diverse Schools (pp.1-10). New York, NY: Routledge.