Identifying Equity-Oriented Transformative Leaders

• In Event: 43.051 - Democratizing Education Through Transformative Leadership to Meet the Needs of Minoritized Students

Abstract

A major research challenge is identifying leaders who come from a specific value framework because one cannot simply ask, “Is social justice important to you?” or “Are you racist?” Yet it is important to know whether educational leaders have challenged pervasive deficit thinking and adopted appropriate inclusive beliefs and approaches to enable them to successfully address the educational needs of diverse student populations.
Purpose. This paper describes the development and validation of a survey instrument that assesses both the implicit beliefs and actions of educational leaders to determine the extent to which they operate from an equity-oriented, transformative framework.
Theoretical perspectives. Quantz et al (1991) asserted that “American schools are in a period of confusion” (p. 96) and concluded that “only the concept of transformative leadership appears to provide an appropriate direction” (p. 96). Twenty years later, business leader Caldwell et al. (2012) argued that “the ongoing cynicism about leaders and organizations calls for a new standard of ethical leadership that we have labeled ‘‘transformative leadership’’ (p. 175). Leadership guru, Burns (2003) called for transforming leadership whose greatest task "must be to respond to the billions of the world's people in the direst want" (p. 2). Until recently, the research conducted in response to these calls has been largely confined to single-case studies of self-reported social justice or transformative leaders.

Methods. In 2013, van Oord commented: “scholars such as Shields (2010, 2012) have in recent years successfully endeavoured to define and theorize transformative leadership” (p. 421). Using Shields’ eight tenets of transformative leadership, the author developed a two part survey to assess leaders’ transformative beliefs, dispositions, and actions. The first half consists of 16 pairs of statements, each perceived by some leaders to be highly desirable. An example is: “A good leader acknowledges societal implicit bias and takes individual backgrounds into consideration when making decisions” and “A good leader operates from a “color-blind” perspective and does not consider ethnicity in decision-making.” The second half of the survey consists of 16 statements with a four-point likert-scale response to assess the frequency with which leaders executed certain actions, e.g., “I discourage teachers from addressing potentially controversial issues […] in their classrooms.”

Data sources. The survey was piloted with small groups of educational leaders in four countries and subsequently modified based on their responses and comments. It was then more widely distributed to approximately 200 educational leadership students in university classes in two countries and subjected to confirmatory factor-analysis for validation purposes.

Results. Our results demonstrated the validity of the survey with students falling along a continuum of beliefs and actions related to socially-just, equitable, and transformative beliefs and practices.

Scholarly significance. This survey enables researchers to go beyond self report of a social-justice foci and to identify leaders for further study who actually exhibit socially-just and transformative beliefs and practices. Hence, it will enable researchers from various fields to advance the use of rigorous, transformative methodologies to determine how to successfully and positively impact the educational experiences and outcomes of minoritized students.

Author

• Carolyn M. Shields, Wayne State University