More Than an Intellectual Exercise: Intersections of Social Justice Leadership, Art, and Identity

• In Event: Stories of Arts, Embodiment, and Praxis in Pre-K–20 Leader Preparation

Abstract

Immediately upon enrolling in a Master’s/credential program in educational leadership, students are thrust into seven intense weeks of summer instruction, which challenge these emerging leaders to interrogate their personal identities and understanding of oppression, and practice having hard conversations in service of equity. Students often describe this experience as drinking from a firehose. The sheer volume of readings, coupled with new ways of thinking about positionality, call into question long-standing values, beliefs and perspectives, and necessitate more than a traditional essay for students to synthesize. This paper documents early outcomes from one leadership preparation program’s pilot attempt to promote reflection and synthesis: the Exploring Intersections project.

Context:
In an effort to honor diverse learning styles and offer multiple modalities for engaging in and articulating learning, the Exploring Intersections project offers pre-service leaders an innovative way to show what they know. This semester-long project stretched beyond the walls of the university classroom and required students to immerse themselves in their local communities, become photo-ethnographers, capturing street art that exemplified their emerging social justice leader identities. Students were then invited to create a website which combined curated graphic images, excerpts from their own writing, and quotes from course-related texts. The resulting creative, artistic display was then presented to their classmates for real time feedback and analysis.

Research Questions:
What are the intersections of social justice leadership preparation, arts education, and creativity?
How do leadership preparation students experience alternative pedagogical approaches?

Theoretical Framework:
This research is situated within the frameworks of social justice leadership (Dantley and Tillman, 2010) and leadership preparation. Highlighting the fact that most leader prep programs tend to focus on management skills, Drago-Severson et al. (2011) advocate that “programs need to teach about relational learning, collaborative leadership, and reflective practice” (p. 84). As a result, research in social justice leadership preparation over the last decade has pointed toward the need to combine critical perspectives with praxis and personal transformation, rather than conceptualizing leadership as an exclusively intellectual endeavor.
Leader preparation programs centered on justice guide students to deepen their understanding of complex social identities, in order to sharpen their equity stance. While exposure to the foundational theories of social justice leadership can serve as a strong introduction to liberatory thinking, providing a modality that encourages critical reflection, processing and innovative demonstrations of learning allows students to move beyond theory and into practice..

Methodology:
During the first semester of their leadership preparation program, a cohort of 14 pre-service leaderships completed the Exploring Intersections project. A survey designed to measure the personal impact of that project was administered with responses analyzed and coded to discover recurrent themes. Phase 2 of this research will include semi-structured interviews with selected participants to further understand the impact of this pedagogical practice. Student work products will be analyzed for evidence of emerging leadership identities.

Significance:
This study invites scholars and program directors a window into the actual impacts of one embodied practice used as a pedagogical tool in hopes of catalyzing innovation in leader preparation.

Author

• Soraya Sablo Sutton, University of California - Berkeley
  Presenting Author