A Pathway Forward for Educational Leadership Methodologies to Serve Racial/Radical Justice

• In Event: Interrogating Research in Educational Leadership: Co-Constructing Methodologies for Equity

Abstract

Drawing on the work of the Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva (2008), the authors examine how racial considerations have affected the way educational research has been theorized and conducted; how the issues it seeks to examine are framed, and how data is analyzed and presented. An “ideology of knowledge production,” as anchored within Eurocentric, white dominant academic contexts, has largely reaffirmed male-dominated, Westernized positional authority in educational leadership as field of practice and in particular as a field of study (Cranston & Whitford, 2018; Cranston & Jean-Paul, 2021). As an outcome, the dominant research methodologies used in educational leadership continue to marginalize Indigenous and racialized research paradigms and methodologies. The result is that in far too many instances Indigenous and racialized ontologies and epistemologies are deemed “as acceptable,” yet have only been considered as acceptable by the gatekeepers who permit them to exist on the peripheries of mainstream educational leadership research and scholarship (Cranston & Whitford, 2018; Cranston & Jean-Paul, 2021; Kovach, 2010; Ladson-Billings; 2021; Smith, 2012). It has become increasingly clear to Indigenous and racialized scholars of educational leadership that our work has largely been focused on decolonizing ourselves to actively resist and push back against the dominance of colonial research paradigms and methodologies (Battiste, 1998). The paper hopes to offer to non-Indigenous and non-racialized scholar-researchers a meaningful examination of the unchallenged and all-too-often under-analyzed narratives of the scholarship and research educational leadership. In addition, the authors will explore how these have been anchored in a particular Eurocentric, white supremacist dominant voice. By extending the conceptual framing for decolonizing educational leadership for racial and radical justice developed firstly by Cranston and Whitford (2018) and extended by Cranston and Jean-Paul (2021), the authors examine the ways through which coloniality manifests itself in contexts of knowledge and meaning-making in the research and scholarship of educational leadership. The hope is that the analysis will bring into greater focus the need for scholar-researchers of educational leadership to acknowledge how most methodological paradigms have served to reify a hierarchy of colonial settler-slave-Indigenous relationships in terms of the dominance of some forms of knowledge, scholarship, and research methodologies over others. The goal of this analysis is to surface a bold, timely, and more hopeful vision that allows those committed to racial and radical justice a means to conceive of how research in higher education might break free of its colonial genealogies and their widespread complicities in maintaining the subjugation of Indigenous and racialized ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies.

Authors

• Jerome A. Cranston, University of Saskatchewan
  Presenting Author

• Rina Whitford, University of Manitoba
  Presenting Author