The Role of Student Responsiveness and Voice in Educational Leadership: Exploring Racial Opportunity Cost and Recognition for Students of Color

• In Event: Culturally Responsive School Leadership: Empirical Research and Theoretical Advances

Abstract

The consideration of student responsiveness and voice in educational leadership are emergent areas of research (Mansfield, Welton, & Halx, 2012; Robinson, 2011). Concurrently, educational researchers have increasingly turned to culturally responsive leadership as an approach to achieve equitable and excellent schools for all students (Johnson, 2006; 2007; Santamaría & Santamaría, 2012). The purpose of this conceptual paper is to articulate a space for privileging student responsiveness and voice within the context of culturally responsive leadership approaches, drawing from the authors’ previous work in this area. Specifically, we argue that despite being overlooked in much educational leadership research, students P-20 are a critical component of a school community (Venzant Chambers & Huggins, in press). As such, student voices have much to offer in terms of understanding and fostering culturally responsive school contexts.
Expanding this line of thinking, we merge the concepts of opportunity recognition (Seifert & Patalano, 2001; Stiemke & Santamaría, 2012) and racial opportunity cost (Venzant Chambers, Huggins, Locke, & Fowler, in press; Venzant Chambers & Huggins, in press; Venzant Chambers, 2012) in order to understand students’ role in creating opportunities for success given the restraints or barriers present in the larger school culture. Opportunity recognition occurs in the presence of predictive encoding, or the ability for individuals to place pending goals into their memories as associations with particular environmental features letting them know when timing is optimal to pursue advancement (Seifert & Patalano, 2000). Similarly, previous work on racial opportunity cost articulates the costs incurred by high-achieving students of color as they seek to achieve academic success in the racialized, white-normed contexts of their school community (Venzant Chambers et al, in press). Opportunity recognition highlights students’ agency in navigating opportunities for advancement in school, while racial opportunity cost provides a framework for understanding the larger school culture constraints within which these students operate. Understanding these conceptual frameworks may better position educational leaders to appreciate the students’ perspectives and act in ways that are more culturally responsive.

Authors

• Lorri Michelle Johnson Santamaria, The University of Auckland

• Terah Talei Venzant Chambers, Michigan State University