"Normal Is Antiblackness": Examining One Detroit Principal's Learning Journey to Just Leadership

• In Event: Meeting the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 4 of Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education: What Does Research Say?

Abstract

Objective
This case study examines the experiences and introspection of Ms. Strong, a veteran leader who navigated her school through the coronavirus pandemic. Strong's exposure to critical theories (Theoharis, 2009; Shields, 2010; Khalifa, 2018; Shields & Hesbol, 2020) and conceptualizations of deficit thinking (Skrla, & Scheurich, 2004; Valencia, 2010) compelled her reimagination of school. This paper addresses the need for culturally responsive leadership to intentionally identify anti-Black policies and practices affecting school communities (Dumas, 2014). The authors chronicle her journey of critical self-reflection to establish equity and justice, delineating her efforts to create a new post-pandemic school with student advocates.

Methods
Auto-ethnographic qualitative methodological tools (Hamilton et al., 2008) allow ongoing explorations of design, praxis, and the ways research can change leadership practice. This study forged a practice-to-research pathway (Tseng et al., 2017) with critical theories that preclude ahistorical, decontextualized understandings of schools and student outcomes. Within teacher education literature, reflexive and shared journaling are pedagogical and methodological tools (Blake, 2005). We examined data documenting thoughts and actions over the virtual school year through content analysis (Bengtsson, 2016; Fraenkel et al., 2012), collected through individual writing prompts, survey data, responses to readings, and online threaded discussions. Shared journaling prompts facilitated reflection to discern changes in thoughts over time-related to critical theory. We employed narrative inquiry (Craig, 2011; Farmer, 2004) and a phenomenological lens to analyze Strong's reflexive journaling data (Connolly, 2007).

Results
We discuss two themes (a) transformative leadership theory can be employed to examine transformative actions (Shields, 2017), counter anti-Black racism in school, and develop new liberatory epistemologies (Caldera, 2020); (b) culturally responsive leadership may interrogate Black educators' internalized racism and the spaces they negotiate between oppressed and oppressors (Khalifa, 2018; Morris, 2016).

Significance
DPSCD partnered with a local University to build transformative leadership capacity. Throughout that program, Strong’s principalship was challenged, dismantled, and disrupted; COVID19 further tried her leadership. Alarming death totals and health disparities (Dooley, Bandealy, & Tschudy, 2020) made her question every institution, particularly schools, especially Detroit’s schools. During this crisis, while most struggle with online learning engagement, she struggled to identify who among her 474 students were food insecure or lacking shelter. 25% of Detroit residents lost their jobs due to conditions created by COVID19. The leadership development program helped her examine her leadership. She discovered internalized anti-Blackness, her construction and maintenance of dehumanizing policies and practices, and a collective rush to return to “normal” oppressive systems that were comfortable even if detrimental to the students and families she served.

Educators have moral obligations to facilitate communal, critical activism for systemic, transformative change. Before her exposure to culturally responsive leadership and transformative leadership theories, Strong was unaware of ways her biases influenced her leadership decisions and impeded justice, access, equity, and belongingness. She was ignorant of internalized racism and how she participated in anti-Blackness (Grant, Woodson, & Dumas, 2020; Love, 2019). The pressure of the pandemic coupled with her new learnings helped Strong identify how her policies and practices preserved and perpetuated white supremacy.

Author

• Rema E. Reynolds Vassar, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author