Black Male Principals and the Challenges of Social Justice Leadership in a Post-Truth Era

• In Event: 75.041 - MTCC Roundtable Session 33
  In Roundtable Session: 75.041-4 - Intersectionalities of Lived Experience: Social Context as Evidence to Democratize Educational Research

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to consider the ways Black male principals promote social justice in their work. How do these leaders understand and navigate their school environment, and what are ways they seek to improve the quality and outcome of the experience for Black and Brown children? The leadership literature inadequately considers the voice and lived experience of Black school leaders, and therefore delimits avenues of potential solutions. New narratives may proclaim other ways to describe and diagnose the problem, less focused on deficit notions of ability, more critical of systems that sort and label yet do not cure.
The theoretical framework is centered in a critical race informed notion of coloniality. Under this framework, race is ever present and invisible, and the dominant narrative for knowing is White and neo-liberal (Parker & Villalpando, 2007). Under a framework of coloniality, "in the United States, the structure of settler colonialism has undergirded ideologies of White supremacy, in which white skin and White ways of knowing and being are constructed as both superior and normal" (Tuck & Guishard, 2014, p. 12). Leadership praxis under my framework gives voice to Black school leaders, offers narratives that counter deficit thinking, and imagines new ways of defining school success, and declares these to be acts of decolonization (Pathak, 2010).
This paper is an auto-ethnographic account of key leadership moments as principal of a middle school engaged in school improvement work. I juxtapose and intersperse my own experiences with school leadership against the collective narrative of other Black male school leaders engaged in similar efforts. I position myself as a Black man committed to social justice. Auto-ethnographic study is a method of inquiry that explores the researcher's personal experience and connects this story to broader cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings (Chang, 2008). Counter-storytelling as a methodology, “aims to cast doubt on the validity of accepted premises or myths, especially ones held by the majority” (Cook & Dixson, 2012). In using this method, I develop the counterstories from the literature, from the interviews of the other leaders, and from my own professional and personal experience (Solórzano and Yosso 2002).
This research is relevant and timely in that it confronts squarely this year’s AERA themes: school reform that silences the voices of the oppressed serves the interests of oppression; research has had limited impact on education policy because it assumes deficit narratives best explain what is wrong in our schools, i.e., there is something wrong with the (Black, Brown and poor) children, not the system imposed upon them; and the need for hegemony to have an official truth requires their discount of any narrative from the Other. The focus of what we study and how we study, drives what we will seek as remedy.

Author

• Jamel Adkins-Sharif, Blackstone Innovation School