Bending Systems Leadership Toward Educational Justice: Co-Design With Families and Communities as Leadership Practice

• In Event: 63.018 - Examining Efforts to Achieve More Inclusive and Equitable Engagement in District Decision Making

Abstract

Efforts to center educational leadership on equity recognize that the students, families and communities most marginalized in our systems hold critical knowledge and expertise for improving schools and realizing educational justice (Cooper, 2009; Fine, 2010; Galloway & Author, 2015; Khalifa, 2012). However, district leaders - and the programs that prepare them - often position families and communities outside of key decision making spaces and reify conventional power asymmetries between schools and communities (Auerbach, 2012). Moreover, the field offers a dearth of models and practices for fostering equitable collaborations between systems-based educational leaders and minoritized families. Drawing from Participatory Design Research (PDR), this paper introduces codesign as a leadership practice focused on partnering and decision making towards redesigning educational systems for educational justice.

Codesign emerges from PDR, an iterative design-based research approach that attends to power, relationships, and histories of oppression/resilience in the process of partnering with young people, families, and communities to identify problems of practice and innovate solutions (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016). In contrast with focus groups or listening sessions that “capture” parent voice or feedback, codesign engages families/communities as key decision makers and designers of their own solutions and works to disrupt normative roles and power in the design process. We bridge this research method with a conceptual framework of equitable leadership practice to examine how systems-focused leaders learn to move beyond moral commitments to enact equity in their everyday actions through codesign practices that address power asymmetries in roles, routines, and interactions between systems and families (Author & Galloway, 2014).

In this paper we examine the practice of current systems leaders as they learned to conduct codesign over the course of a year as part of their practitioner doctoral program. We foreground case studies of leaders in 2 different systems - an assistant superintendent in a suburban district and a principal supervisor in an urban district (both co-authors of this paper) - to understand:
• How do systems-based leaders learn to enact codesign in their everyday leadership practice?
• What are the core tensions and learning trajectories that emerge through engaging in codesign?

In our findings, we elaborate how leaders sought to collaborate with families of color to guide district strategy (in the suburban district) and hire new principals (in the urban district). We highlight key tensions in their efforts and the leadership shifts that emerged from engaging those tensions. For example, leaders had to negotiate their own roles and power as both systems actors and individuals with their own lived experiences of privilege and oppression. Through their co-design processes, these leaders constructed new ways of navigating powered relational dynamics in their leadership and holding space for students, families, and educators to equitably participate in consequential decision-making. By examining the lived tensions and multiple learning trajectories of leaders’ emergent co-design practices, this study offers ways forward for enacting equitable collaborations between formal systems, families and communities.

Authors

• Ann M. Ishimaru, University of Washington

• Aditi Rajendran, University of Washington - Seattle