Anointed: A Portrait of Community-Embedded School Leadership

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Leadership at the Crossroads: Navigating Race, Racism, Power, and Community-Driven Leadership (Table 8)

Abstract

This study centers practitioners that neoliberal logics have particularly injured: veteran “community-embedded” educators. “Community-embedded” describes experienced Black educators from the same low-income urban neighborhoods as their students. Historically-grounded in Black educational heritage and combining Black Storywork and Portraiture, this study partners with a highly successful school leadership team of teachers, administrators, and staff to explore how teammates viewed and enacted leadership and the values and experiences driving their conceptualizations and practices. Teammates characterized school leadership as service-driven, collaborative, community-engaged, and asset-oriented, fueling specific power-sharing and transformative practices. Findings amplify community-embedded educators’ long-held skills, wisdom, knowledge, and praxis; which scholarship often forgets, undermines, or rejects; presenting community-driven remedies for research, policy, and practice.

Author

• Georgina Rivers, Harvard University