The Cilantro Effect: Reimagining Leadership Through Relational Risk and Transparent Care

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Perspectives in Educational Leadership

Abstract

This critical autoethnography explores how culturally grounded, emotionally resonant, and politically transparent leadership is often recoded as unprofessional within institutions that prioritize palatability over relational accountability. Drawing on Critical Funds of Caring, pedagogy of discomfort, and the coloniality of power, I introduce The Cilantro Effect as a conceptual tool to examine how affective norms, around tone, clarity, and expression, shape educational leadership expectations. Using field-based reflection, memory work, and professional feedback, this inquiry reveals how relational, justice-centered leadership is disciplined under dominant norms. Rather than neutralizing discomfort, this paper reframes it as a necessary condition for equity-driven leadership. Findings call for a shift from performative professionalism to transparent care, presence, and political clarity in cultivating more just educational communities.

Author

• Sarah Elisa Stein, San Francisco State University