From Transactional to the Transformative: Scholar PRAXISioners Being Emancipatory Leaders

• In Event: Pedagogies of Re: Toward a Decolonial, Emancipatory Framework of Educational Leadership

Abstract

This current historical moment has provoked the world to rethink how we DO things. Educational leaders in particular have been looking for immediate answers in reforms, trainings, and resources. How much, however, have we been also rethinking how we must BE while we DO things? How much have we questioned why and how we have done things in the first place? Educational Leaders as citizen-scholars are more than what one is DOING. It is also in how one is BEING. After all, we are human beings and not human doings. This research, then, interrogates the colonial roots of BEING and DOING within an Educational Leadership for Social Justice (ELSJ) Ed.D. program at a public university while also investigating the decolonial ways that first year doctoral students are cultivated as scholar PRAXISioners.

Being and doing within the field of educational leadership is obscured by the ways that whiteness and capitalism, both of which are rooted in coloniality (Quijano, 2007), affects how Ed.D. students from historically colonized groups experience assaults of dismemberment from their wholeness (Rendón, 2009). Western perspectives legitimate certain bodies of knowledge, marginalize others, and help to fragment the “learning spirit” (Battiste, 2013). The dominance of empiricism influences scholar-practitioners to work in transactional ways while centering upon “objective” approaches that aim to “prove” without deeply understanding the complexity of the research context. The transformative scholar-practitioner, however, grapples with these assaults by asking, how does my research improve lives?

The practitioner, who is believed to be atheoretical and immethodical, must be reframed as the scholar-PRAXISioner, whose work is praxis-directed (Freire, 1972). As decoloniality occurs simultaneously alongside coloniality (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), PRAXISioners are embedded in and with communities towards reaching self actualization while dismantling systems of oppression. This research, then applies a pedagogy of and towards decoloniality (Reyes, 2019) as the theoretical framework to enter and move through research in ways that were indigenizing (Khalifa et. al., 2018), desire-based (Tuck, 2009), humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014), and healing (Menakem, 2017).

Grounded in critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) and decolonizing research paradigms (Patel, 2016; Smith, 1999, Wilson, 2008), this research investigated the questions, what is the sacred nature of the values, principles, precious knowledge, and processes that center decolonial pedagogies in the redesign of the ELSJ Ed.D. program? What testimonios illuminate how students engaged with and experienced their decolonial, doctorate journey? Portraiture (Lightfoot-Lawrence & Davis, 1991) and testimonio (Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, & Flores Carmona, 2012) were utilized to center the sociocultural and political experiences of students of Color, while also including the voice of the narrator-researcher. Data included instructional artifacts, institutional documents, student work, informal conversations, and reflexive memos.

A pedagogy of problematizing, visibilizing, reframing, and reimagining emerged from this research and extends the scholarship on graduate programs of educational leadership with aspirations of equity. This scholarship provides insights on how decolonial approaches to apprenticing doctoral students of Color can influence a more expansive view of how educational leaders for social justice can BE as well as what they can DO.

Author

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