Ethics and social justice have nothing to do with educational administration

You know that what you do [social justice] is fringe to educational administration.

Thus in 1990, I began my 30 year journey as an academic, focused increasingly, on transformative leadership and inequitable social contexts. I determined to persist, despite knowing my colleagues at the time were not particularly supportive. Soon many scholars, practitioners, and critics were writing about social justice—a term that began to be used by both “right” and left” to support diametrically opposed opinions.

Hence, I sought a different route, one I believed would be more robust and less subject to cooptation. My quest led me to the works of Freire (1970) who argued the need for political struggle to transform inequitable, concrete material conditions and of Burns who posited that leadership requires a revolution that involves a complete and pervasive transformation of the conditions that leave “billions of the world’s people in the direst want” (2003, p. 2). Ultimately I settled on the concept of transformative leadership as one that applies as well to feminine studies (Gumbonzvanda (2012), to Africa (Preece, 2003) to Europe (vanOord, 2013), as to North America, as a leadership theory that improves education as well as many other institutions.  

The purpose of this paper is to examine this quest: What is transformative leadership? How did I get there? Does it have international potential? Where are my blinders? And, how could I have had more impact?

To do so, I will examine how my colleagues’ insights affected me, the work I did and the lessons learned when I conducted research and professional development on the Navajo reservation in SE Utah, my studies of the principals of successful and highly diverse schools in four countries (Canada, the United States, Norway, and New Zealand),and I will examine critically, the impact of these studies on the scholarly community as well as on my students. Throughout, I will demonstrate how authors who wrote about transformative leadership have increasingly influenced me and my work. Foster, for example, an early scholar asserted that educational leadership should be “critically educative,” that it should not “only look at the conditions in which we live” but decide how to change them (p. 185).

My studies of Navajo students taught me that although their material family conditions may influence their approach to school, it is truly the pervasive presence of deficit thinking and teachers lack of belief in students and their families that negatively affect their possibilities of success. This was capsulated in the teacher, who when asked how to improve students success, responded, “better parents.” In Norway, I was challenged about using a normative and affirmative theory. However, in New Zealand, I saw teachers challenging one another, gently admonishing, “You seem to be in deficit thinking now.” Examining teachers’ approaches to students whose backgrounds are not white, Christian, or middle class, showed the need to help teachers understand the persistence of racism, rather than attributing it to individual “bad behavior.” Learning from other principals and their teachers revealed the importance of listening to educators voices, perhaps through “free writing,” of ongoing conversation and dialogue, and of a school-wide approach to equity and social justice.

These and other lessons as well as readings of scholars such as Delpit, Giroux, Weiner, and many others, led me to the articulation of transformative leadership as a theory with two overriding principles (or hypotheses) and eight interconnected tenets. This overview will help educators to better understand the content of transformative leadership theory and its applicability to various international contexts in both education and other social institutions.

When one searches words like odyssey, journey, retrospective, the path ultimately leads, whether one explicitly acknowledges it or not, to some aspect of autoethnographic writing. Autoethnography, Bernay (2019) explained, drawing on the seminal work of Ellis (“requires the analysis of personal experience in order to reveal values, beliefs and interpretations […] in order to understand cultural experience” (p. 161). Reed-Danahay goes further, labelling her work as a combination of “critical autoethnography” in which one’s position is critiqued and analyzed in order to determine one’s positionality and whose interests are being served. It engages in a dialogue which “provokes questions about the nature of ethnographic knowledge by troubling the persistent dichotomies of insider versus outsider, distance versus familiarity, objective observer versus participant, and individual versus culture. (2017, p. 145). Fournillier and Edwards state that “through its commitment to critical self-reflexivity, autoethnography offers a powerful medium to interrogate power, resist oppression, and (re)define self” (2020, p. 461). Often used by subaltern scholars, autoethnography also provides a means for mainstream scholars to examine and challenge the redefinition of self. Some scholars jump right into their academic journey, and describe its various stages (Hoy, 2012). Some, like Bernay (2019) and Yazan (2019) identify a conceptual lens through which to examine their work. Others (Glanz, 2000) tell their own story through the experiences of another. Still others draw on authoethnography to critique their own work (Jasman, 2010) through a kind of auto-meta-analysis. In this paper, I combine these approaches as I focus on my own experiences in several selected contexts, and critique some of my own studies, as well as how my developing beliefs and values relate to my own cultural experience. I am a mother, a senior citizen, a white, cisgender, divorced woman who has spent over 51 years in education, teaching every level from kindergarten to post doctoral studies. I am privileged, with both parents and my maternal grandmother having graduated from university. I have never known hunger, nor have I experienced systemic prejudice. Yet, during that time, I have evolved from an uncritical teacher of French to a much more critical scholar of transformative leadership theory. This paper represents, in small part, my journey and suggests that even someone like me may become known as a critical leadership scholar.

I have learned, as have others, the importance of challenging beliefs, mental models, or meaning structures (Anello et al. 2014; Johnson, 2008). I have come to believe in the benefits of unifying one’s personal and professional life, despite the considerable literature on creating boundaries (Chen et al., 2009). I have learned the importance of naming personal privilege and how I have benefited (Whiting et al. 2015), the need to reject deficit thinking (Valencia, 212), and the importance of acknowledging intersectionality (Crenshaw, 2017). And I have discovered the criticality of dialogue, which in Bakhtin’s understanding is “not just talk” but an ongoing openness to others. These and other lessons have enabled me to acknowledge my failures as I tell my own stories, to reflect on what I might do differently if I were at the beginning of my research program. I wonder often, had I not simply written, but engaged in more prolonged activism, whether I might have had a greater impact. I do constantly revise and recreate my syllabi and course assignments which have enabled me to openly talk about privilege, racism, systemic inequities and the need for transformation from day one in my classes and in all my writing. In turn, my students and those who read my works regularly tell me that I have changed their lives. How is this possible, I consistently ask myself. And my answer, must also be one others learn. I try to be authentic, relational, and critical and in so doing, invite the same from others who want to engage in the difficult work of transformative leadership.

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