Critical Consciousness Development and Improvement Science for Social Justice Leaders

• In Event: Integrating Improvement Science Into Leadership Programs: Opportunities, Challenges, and Adaptations

Abstract

Leadership preparation programs are increasingly challenged to prepare educational leaders that are equipped to lead for equity and social justice. Despite shifts in racial and ethnic demographics showing the majority of public school students in the United States are students of color (NCES, 2022), 78% of public school principals are white (Taie & Goldring, 2019). While leadership preparation must target the diversification of educational leaders, attention to how leaders are prepared to redress educational inequalities in racialized contexts is also necessary.

Recent leadership reform efforts, like Improvement Leadership Education and Development (iLEAD) and the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED), have worked closely with institutes of higher education in support of the adoption of improvement science (IS, Bryk et al., 2015) as a strategy to equip leaders with the knowledge and skills necessary to confront systemic inequality and lead the transformation of systems (Biag et al., 2021). The take up of IS in leadership preparation, devoid of critical consciousness development, is insufficient to prepare social justice leaders (Safir & Dugan, 2021). Critical consciousness is a significant element in the preparation of leaders as it facilitates the critical self-reflection needed to recognize the ways in which existing educational systems uphold systemic inequality (Theoharis & Haddix, 2011). A challenge in leadership preparation resides in the design of tasks that can facilitate internal reflective work required of leadership candidates. Increasingly, statewide assessment efforts leveraging performance-based tasks to measure leadership development have emerged (Orr et al., 2017), although questions about the validity of such assessments to evaluate social justice leadership growth remain (Leonard, 2018).

We highlight one task that shows promise in gauging critical consciousness development in social justice leadership preparation: the creation and iteration of a driver diagram. The driver diagram is a prominent, visual tool in IS for representing a working theory of change for a problem of practice. The generation of a driver diagram is a complex task that requires leadership. It reflects the author(s) current understanding of the system that gives rise to the problem as well as a plausible way to mitigate and redress the problem. We draw on Furman’s (2012) praxis-dimensions-capacities framework to guide our analysis of a series of leadership preparation driver diagrams collected over the course of two years. Preliminary analyses of candidates’ driver diagrams reveal that candidates leaned heavily on research literature in constructing their theory of action and less on their professional knowledge. While there was limited evidence in the representations that candidates integrated their own understanding of the contexts in which they work, we found the majority of candidates’ driver diagrams were rooted in aims that centered issues of equity and social justice. In our analysis of candidates’ driver diagrams, attention to what was and was not represented (Mazzei, 2007; Zarate, 2020) provided evidence of progressions through critical consciousness development. We will present examples of students' driver diagrams in our full submission. Our findings could be used to illustrate a mode of formative assessment to monitor candidates’ social justice leadership development towards praxis.

Authors

• Maritza Lozano, California State University - Fullerton
  Presenting Author

• Carlos Sandoval, WestEd
  Non-Presenting Author