Ethnocultural Leadership as Liberatory Praxis: Ancestral Memory & Cultural Continuity in Global Majority Leaders

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Reframing Educational Leadership and Supervision: Integrating Cultural, Organizational, and Instructional Perspectives

Abstract

This proposal builds on Courtney Wilkerson’s ethnocultural leadership framework—rooted in ancestral memory, relational accountability, and communal agency—as a transformative model for educational leadership. It also integrates Carr’s Africana leadership categories, emphasizing collective identity, culture as policy, and relational responsibility. Employing qualitative methods—including oral history interviews, participant observation of rituals and governance, reflective journaling, and document analysis—the study examines how memory and cultural knowing shape pedagogy and assessment. Findings are expected to reveal how cultural memory strengthens community bonds, informs humanizing data practices, and resists colonial educational norms. This work advances AERA’s goal of unforgetting histories and imagining futures by offering a framework for integrating ethnocultural praxis into policy, leadership preparation, and culturally sustaining school systems.

Author

• Courtney Wilkerson, Howard University