Equity Through Community: Equity-Oriented Leadership and Understandings in Conservative and Rural School Districts

• In Event: 25.048 - Social Justice Tensions in the Principalship and Other School Leadership Roles

Abstract

Drawing from a longitudinal study of equity leadership formation, this paper analyzes how five school and district leaders make sense of equity issues while working in politically and socially conservative rural districts. The leaders in our study identified themselves as “equity-oriented” and committed to serving “all students;” however, our findings reveal that they often avoided explicit discussions of race, class, or LGBTQ issues, focusing discussion on broader concepts of “community” and “all students.” For many, “community” became a way of discussing “equity” while not pushing too strongly on their districts’ sociopolitical boundaries. In this paper, we analyze two principal ways leaders utilized the term “community”: “community as equity” and “community as relationships.”
Descriptors: rural schools, equity, social justice leadership

Authors

• Katherine Rodela, Washington State University

• Emily Pressman, University of California - Los Angeles