Crossing Borders to Change the Game

• In Event: 18.053 - Challenging the Status Quo: Invoking Social Justice Leadership in Ed.D. Programs

Abstract

Purpose:
Seeking to challenge the sacred spaces within academia that have been established by those with the greatest historical power, this paper highlights three purposefully transgressive moves made in the leadership of a doctoral cohort. The goal of these transgressive moves was to add to the range of possibilities in expression and exploration that new waves of doctoral students may seek or find more resonant than existing structures.

Theoretical framework:
Drawing heavily from critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998) and decolonizing epistemologies (Smith, 1999), this paper invokes what Gutiérrez (2009) describes as simultaneously “playing the game” while also “changing the game.” Rather than solely seeking to focus on guiding our doctoral candidates with ways to “play the game” of academia through efforts at engendering conformity, this work, instead, describes a press for ways to provide this on-ramp of access to the existing power structures, while at the same time seeking to change academia, to more equitably provide spaces for a range in ways of knowing, growing, expressing, framing and presenting research.


Methods & Data Sources:
Built upon two years with my ten doctoral students and co-teaching colleague, I provide a descriptive account of how we “changed the game” as we examined our individual and collective access to and manifestations of privilege, our own beliefs and biases, and our own deeply-held constructions about all that is good, beautiful, and bright. I invited my doctoral students to consider with me how these ideas may shape our interactions with our students, the families of our students, and the community at large, and how as educators, we may unintentionally perpetuate hegemonic and poisonous practices. Throughout this process, I worked to reflexively examine my own complicity in the reification of these oppressive and silencing structures in ways that I continue to uncover each day.

Findings:
This descriptive work highlights three distinct ways in which I have worked to “change the game” of the doctorate for the students in my cohort. First, I have included a stated and foregrounded focus on self-care, with an emphasis on health and well-being, with healthful balance as the centerpiece. Second, I describe the “anti-canon” of readings we explored, drawing heavily from the works of scholars of color and voices from the margins, and I speak to the challenges layered into this decision. Finally, I describe the critical reflexivity with which I worked to transparently share the multi-layered complexities of engaging in this work of conforming (playing the game) while transgressing borders (changing the game).

Significance:
This work is not intended to be accusatory; rather, it is invitational, as I personally grapple with my entanglement in these issues across multiple planes. This work is significant in that it seeks to focus on the ways in which we, as educators, may be invited to examine our own constructions of boundaries and borders (Anzaldua, 1987) while resisting the status quo of neoliberal universities (Darder, 2016).

Author

• Anita Bright, Portland State University