Creating a Culture of Confidence: Reconceptualizing Urban Educational Leadership

• In Event: Roundtable Session 19
  In Roundtable Session: Teacher Education in Dialogue With Paulo Freire

Abstract

The paper considers what fearless leadership involves, the manner in which it comes to be particularly needed in urban schools, and how fearless leadership can transform urban schools into oases of learning, being, and freedom. We theoretically engage some of the practical experiences of the authors to conceptualize fearless leadership as an alternative approach to the constellation of realities faced by urban educators and students. As a method we critically dialogue through a pedagogy of confidence, to re-think the dissemination of standardized knowledge by working with different ways of understanding contemporary questions of freedom in the context of urban education. We ask: what does it mean to re-imagine urban educational leadership as something other than the conventional hierarchical leader/follower relationship?

Authors

• Yvette Jackson, National Urban Alliance

• Veronica McDermott, National Urban Alliance

• Mairi McDermott, University of Toronto - OISE

• Marlon Simmons, University of Calgary