Crisis, Repair, Remedy: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Exploration of School Leadership/Community Through a Humanist Lens

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 12:40 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Fostering Affirming and Inclusive Educational Spaces: Considerations for Centering the Needs and Well-Being of Marginalized Students (Table 1)

Abstract

Crisis dominates schooling discourse, within leadership practice, on workforce attrition and across communities disrupted by the Covid19 pandemic. As a team of four principals and two researchers, we engaged in collaborative autoethnography as method, to consider the ways in which school leaders work to repair harm within school life, and by doing so, providing some remedy to the wider schooling community. Shared dialogue facilitated the interrogation of leadership issues and relationships, while negating researcher/ practitioner dualities. Through a lens of Freirean humanism, our study indicates that school leaders are delineating between authentic and artificial crisis, addressing increasingly emotional labour of repairing fragile relationships, and finding their role stretched across gaps in community leadership in order to remedy lags in policy.

Authors

• Nicola Sum, Monash University

• Reshmi Lahiri-Roy, Federation University Australia

• Wilma Culton, Department of Education Victoria

• Helen Koziaris, Department of Education Victoria

• Edward Strain, Department of Education Victoria

• Lisa Gough, Department of Education Victoria