The Power of Purposeful Partnerships: Building Capacity for Decolonizing the Scholarship of Educational Leadership in Predominately White Spaces

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

Abstract

As Tuck and Yang (2012) so pointedly noted, “decolonization is not a metaphor” (p. 1). Applied to the scholarship of educational leadership, the work of decolonizing cannot simply reside in mission statements or paper responses to calls to action. Rather, decolonizing requires intentional and active engagement – in other words, ‘doing’ the work. Arguably much of this work rests on the shoulders of White scholars whose research have long been privileged across much of the academy, with educational leadership being no exception (Cranston & Whitford, 2018; Lopez, 2020). And yet “there is a long and bumbled history’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p.3) of ‘good intentioned’ White folk who have attempted to alleviate the impacts of colonization. In this manner, White scholars who wish to engage in decolonizing spaces of scholarship must be careful to attend to such work in ways that do no further subjugate or marginalize the communities they seek to serve. Embedded in critical race theory (Ladson-Billings, 1998), this paper explores two projects that engage the notion of two-eye seeing (Bartlett, Marshall, & Marshall, 2012) to actualize how diverse research partnerships can engage in decolonizing approaches to broaden how educational leadership and research on leadership in schools is conceptualized. The first project is a partnership between the Canadian Association for the Study of Educational Administration and the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. The project aims to create an online repository of research summaries and a co-edited journal issue with graduate students from across Canada that highlights diverse approaches to educational leadership, and which challenge traditional norms around how educational leadership has been defined as both a field of study and a practice within the K-12 school context. The second project is a partnership between a non-Indigenous researcher and a group of Indigenous school-based leaders to share their stories in their own words. Borrowing from Archibald’s approach to Indigenous storywork as methodology, care had to be taken to allow the stories to speak for themselves - to be “free from dominating theories” (Kenny, 2013, p.2)”. Consequently, there were no predetermined themes to guide the writing. Rather, in consultation with a group of elders, a series of land-based gatherings was utilized to ground stories of leadership in the realities of the ongoing tensions between the colonial underpinnings around what it means to be an educational leader and the traditional stories and Indigenous teachings that guide their approach to leadership in education (Archibald, 2008). The paper highlights richness that can be found in co-constructed partnerships focused on decolonizing the dominant White frame of educational leadership and offers hope for the future of decolonizing research in education in predominantly White spaces.

Authors

• Shannon J. Fayant, University of Regina
  Presenting Author

• Pamela J. Osmond-Johnson, Memorial University
  Presenting Author