How Social Justice School Leadership Is Understood and Performed Across Cultures

• In Event: School Leadership and Equity in Student Learning: Conceptualization, Contexts, and Effectiveness

Abstract

Researchers have suggested that school leaders could play a key role in meeting the needs of all students and indicated that they must develop an increased awareness regarding social justice issues (DeMatthews & Mawhinney, 2014; McKenzie et al., 2006). However, the existing knowledge base and the relevant conceptualization attempts have been dominated by research from the US, with a few notable exceptions (Berkovich, 2014, Arar et al., 2017). Yet, it has become conventional wisdom in the field of leadership over the years that context matters (Hallinger, 2018). We, therefore, propose that the research on social justice leadership not only needs more exploration in different contexts, but also calls for genuine discussion on the roles of various national, local, and school-level contextual factors more explicitly.

The study adopts a multiple case study methodology to investigate school principals’ understandings, practices, and challenges of social justice leadership across three distinct national contexts, Israel, Turkey, and Texas, USA. The goals of the case selection were, first, identifying both the information-rich and the contextually relevant cases and, second, creating the maximum diversity regarding sociocultural contexts in the data (Merriam & Tisdell, 2015). In each jurisdiction, 12 to 14 leaders working in schools with high levels of socioeconomic and cultural diversity participated in data collection. Thematic analysis has been used in analyzing the collected data (Braun & Clarke, 2006), followed by a cross-case synthesis to consolidate and contrast the key findings across individual cases (Yin, 2014).

Data are categorized under five major themes such as types of inequality, leadership perceptions, leadership practices, supporting factors, and hindering factors across the jurisdictions. The results show that both the institutional and the community factors play a significant role in the formation of social justice leadership perceptions and practices. At the same time, such contextual factors bring challenges as well as opportunities for social justice leadership. The results also evidence that there are important commonalities regarding both the practices and perceptions of social justice leadership. For example, economic disadvantages and family backgrounds are seen as important sources of inequality in most contexts, while socio-emotional leadership is seen as one of the effective ways to deal with the related inequalities.

Author

• Sedat Gümüş, The Education University of Hong Kong