Leadership to Dismantle White Supremacy: The Lived Experiences of a First-Year Latino Dean

• In Event: 32.020 - Scholars of Color Leading in Professional Colleges/Schools of Education: Challenges, Opportunities, and New Perspectives on Socially Responsible Leadership

Abstract

During my 15 years of service as a faculty member in two schools of education in two states, I was charged with preparing K-12 pre- and in-service teachers for work in the fields of urban bilingual education and ESL. During these years of service, I rose through the academic ranks from assistant professor to professor and eventually earned a position as an endowed chair. Although, over these years, I had the potential to impact the professional growth of hundreds of educators through my teaching, research, and service with/for community-based agencies and public schools, I still felt a void in my professional career. I began to wonder about the extent to which my contributions were really making a difference in the lives of urban teachers, their students, and communities. After all, the material conditions of urban learners and their communities had not and continue not to experience substantial positive change. Moreover, my feelings of inadequacy were exacerbated by structurally racist machinations like inadequate and very White urban pre-service teacher selection, legislatively mandated funding disparities for urban schools, standardized testing as racist tools of exclusion, and a general sense of lack of urgency pertaining to the dismantling of White supremacy and its myriad other manifestations in places we call schools. To make matters worse, I was the token Latino teacher educator in the places I labored.

The aforementioned feelings I have described placed me at a professional crossroads, and I was constantly thinking about ways I could make a more significant impact in community with other community/teacher/teacher educator activists. Quite simply, I was at my wit’s end. Then it happened. As I was sitting at my desk in my large endowed chair office reviewing my impressive cache of emails, one message caught my eye. This message was from a search firm sharing that I had been nominated by a colleague to apply for a school of urban education dean position at a university with an explicit anti-racist mission. This was it—this was my exit strategy and escape valve from the desperation and trauma I felt from being surrounded by many conformist and racist White colleagues who I felt operated exclusively out of self-interest in order to free themselves from their own feelings of White fragility and guilt, as they worked to save urban learners and their communities. Have my exit strategy and calling for servant leadership as a new dean of color alleviated my pain or has it only exacerbated it? Or, both, perhaps?

The purpose of my portion of this proposed symposium panel presentation is to respond to the aforementioned questions, as I share my experiences as a new dean of color in an urban school of education. I will discuss the intersections of my experiential high and low points of servant leadership, opportunities, and challenges as a dean of color and their implications for social justice work in teacher education.

Author

• Rene F. Antrop-Gonzalez, Metropolitan State University