Becoming Comfortable With the Uncomfortable: Cultivating Critical Practitioner Scholars in Educational Leadership

• In Event: 81.022 - Dismantling Our Delusions: Mindful Reflexivity as Liberation

Abstract

Objectives
Dominant models of Educational Leadership tend to focus on “color-blind,” apolitically-framed, managerial, instructional, transactional, and/or situational (Parker & Villalpando, 2007; Santamaria, 2013) practices and policies. This paper, however, investigates the counternarratives produced by first generation graduate students of Color within an Educational Leadership for Social Justice (ELSJ) doctoral program and preliminary administrative credential program at a public university as a way to visibilize the inherent oppression obscured by those dominant models. This research specifically seeks to understand the ways that students in these programs learned and applied mindful and reflexive practices towards their own Critical Sense Making (Reyes, 2018) in becoming critical, courageous, mindful, and self-reflective scholar practitioners.

Theoretical Framework
This scholarship builds upon discourses that examine how knowledge and research in education have been approached in colonial (Patel, 2016; Smith, 1999; Tuck, 2009; Wilson, 2008) and dehumanizing (Irizarry & Brown, 2013; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2013) ways, but also in ways that tell desire-based (Tuck, 2009) counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) that humanize ((Irizarry & Brown, 2013; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2013; Laura, 2016) both the researcher and researched. Within that process, this research examined the way that Critical Praxis (Freire, 1970) became operationalized as students held their new learnings in tension with their prior conceptions of self, educational leadership, and research.

Methods
This research followed this line of inquiry. What non-dominant approaches and bodies of research could ground the process of becoming a critical, courageous, self-reflective, and purposeful scholar practitioner? What are high leverage analytical, technical, self-reflective, mindful tools and practices that can continue to propel students to live into becoming the educational leader they want to and need to become? Using methods of critical participant observation, narrative inquiry, and critical race methodology, the research examined data in the form of student-created products, student interviews, and field notes produced by the researcher.

Findings
Five key praxis-centered practices emerged from this research: 1) Become Comfortable with being Uncomfortable, 2) Question the Unquestionable, 3) Visibilize the Invisible, 4) Problematize not Pathologize, and 5) Reframe the Narrative. The first practice sought to create the non-judgmental and mindful conditions to engage in uncomfortable conversations and reflexivity protocols. The second practice aimed to question dominant perspectives that have been made to seem normal and natural. The third practice sought to identify and examine architectures and technologies of systemic oppression. The fourth practice worked to shift perspectives, behaviors, and language that saw certain people and communities as problems rather than as being in systemically-mediated situations that require problematizing as analysis. The fifth involved cultivating the ethic to apply the first four practices within performance tasks produced by students.

Scholarly Significance
This research extends the scholarship on graduate programs of Educational Leadership with aspirations of social justice and educational equity. In particular, this scholarship provides insights on how decolonial approaches to apprenticing first generation administrative credential and doctoral students of Color into the academy can influence Educational Leadership as a field as well as an academic discipline.

Author

• G. T. Reyes, California State University - East Bay