Collective Preservation as Political Warfare in Educational Leadership

• In Event: We Didn’t Just Happen: Toward Critical Educational Leadership as Renewal

Abstract

bell hooks (1994) vulnerably reflected that they came into theory needing to make sense of their life. hooks wanted “make the hurt go away” by finding theory as a “location for healing” (p. 59). They clarified that theory is not healing nor liberatory in itself. It must be directed toward those ends. Similarly, Audre Lorde has been known to have proclaimed that caring for herself is self-preservation, which is an act of political warfare.

In essence, both hooks and Lorde draw upon praxis to not only make sense of their sociocultural and political realities–they do so with direction. They aim for healing. They aim for liberation, even amidst the conditions that inflict trauma and sustain woundedness in the first place. As such, this scholarship addresses President Howard’s call to reimagine racially just educational spaces by examining the conditions and work produced within a 1st year Educational Leadership doctoral course entitled, “Community Organizing as Social Justice Research.”

The context of this study explores self-preservation in ways that not only work to examine and reject systems of oppression such as coloniality and racism that inflict and sustain harm, but also engages sacred pedagogies that employ somatics, joy, and student-led community learning. That means that while critique is essential, it is not at the center. While critical analysis informs work and approaches to work, as hooks alludes, theory cannot be at the center. Community is at the center. Along the way, individual and collective healing occurs.

To understand the nuances of this work in humanizing ways, this scholarship applies portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) and critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). As a political project, like any decolonial, critical race approach, portraiture is inherently desire-based (Tuck, 2009) through its rejection of narratives that perpetuate pathology and failure, while centering complex and humanizing stories of goodness. Through critical race methodologies, this work incorporates pedagogies that invite students to produce sacred, anti-racist, and decolonial healing work that departs from traditional assessments. This study, then, draws from the following data sources: student-produced work, phenomenological interviews, and portraitist (i.e., “researcher”) observations and reflections of the voices, relationship, emergent themes, and the aesthetic whole of the context.


Findings from this research involve a collaboratively developed intention of community preservation as being “rooted in a sociohistoric analysis that identifies systems of oppression as impacting minoritized communities in unhealthy & violent ways more severely than dominant communities.” Collaborators also worked to describe community preservation practices as “joyful, loving, healing, grounding, growth-oriented, caretaking, communal, reflective, mindful, & consciousness-raising that help maintain our humanity and health within a society that operates under conditions that create harm, unwellness, dis-ease, inequity, inequality, exploitation, & injustice towards minoritized peoples.”


This research extends the scholarship on social justice and equity-centered Educational Leadership doctoral programs. In particular, this scholarship provides insights on how decolonial approaches to apprenticing first generation doctoral students of Color into the academy in sacred, healing-oriented, and critically conscious ways can influence Educational Leadership as a field as well as an academic discipline.

Author

• G.T. Reyes, California State University - East Bay