A Kitchen Table Talk: Reimagining the Process of Doctoring Ourselves

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Building from our Histories and Transforming Future Methodologies and Pedagogies in EdD programs

Abstract

This conceptual paper examines the critical mentorship practices and experiences of faculty and former doctoral students from an EdD program to develop a framework for healing-centered educational leadership. We reflect on how our program culture, pedagogy, and cohort-based structures created conditions for individual and collective transformation. This paper contributes to the growing field of healing-centered leadership by offering a practitioner-informed framework rooted in the lived experiences of educators whose identities are multiply marginalized and/or whose professional commitments threaten interlocking systems of power (Crenshaw, 1991). The collaborators also raise the limitations and tensions of engaging in abolitionist and liberating pedagogies amidst an institutional context that continues to perpetuate harms for both doctoral students and faculty.
Purpose: This conceptual paper examines the critical mentorship practices and experiences of faculty and former doctoral students from an EdD program to develop a framework for healing-centered educational leadership. We reflect on how our program culture, pedagogy, and cohort-based structures created conditions for individual and collective transformation. Our purpose is to share a praxis of leadership development that prioritizes healing, relationality, and community building as integral to fostering leadership resilience, particularly for scholar-practitioners from marginalized communities.
Scholars have documented how educational institutions often reproduce racialized harm and perpetuate disconnection (Dumas, 2014; Patel, 2021; Love, 2019). Leadership programs, in particular, tend to emphasize bureaucratic efficacy over relational justice (González Stokas, 2023). Black feminist pedagogies (hooks, 1994; Brown, 2013), abolitionist teaching (Love, 2019), and decolonial critiques of the academy (Patel, 2021; Lara, 2020), however, invite us to reconceptualize doctoral preparation as a site of healing and resistance. Our work builds on this scholarship while extending it into the domain of EdD programs, which are underexamined in leadership literature.
Conceptual Framework: Our offering braids Black feminist epistemologies (Collins, 2000), abolitionist feminisms (Hernandez et al., 2022), DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013), and participatory visual methodologies (Lara, 2020). We conceptualize “healers of education” as scholar-practitioners who resist dominant paradigms of academic success and reorient leadership around care, restoration, and justice.
Methods & Data: We utilize "visual witnessing as inquiry," which involves drawing as a form of collective data interpretation and affective listening (Brown, 2013). Alongside this, we employed Kitchen Table Talk (McNeill et al., 2021) as method and methodology: we interviewed one another about our experiences in the doctoral program—discussing what shaped our growth, challenged our beliefs, and nurtured our leadership as doctoral graduates and mentors.
Findings: We identify three themes that inform our emerging framework for healing-centered leadership preparation:
Healing as Praxis, Cohort as Community and Visual and Embodied Knowing
Significance: This paper contributes to the growing field of healing-centered leadership by offering a practitioner-informed framework rooted in the lived experiences of educators whose identities are multiply marginalized and/or whose professional commitments threaten interlocking systems of power (Crenshaw, 1991). The collaborators also raise the limitations and tensions of engaging in abolitionist and liberating pedagogies amidst institutional context that continue to perpetuate harms for both doctoral students and faculty.

Authors

• Elizabeth Holliday Morgan, Morgan State University

• LaToya Jackson, Sierra College

• Sheeva Sabati, California State University - Sacramento

• Rachel Stewart, Los Rios Community College

• Vajra M. Watson, University of Redlands

• Ximena Ospina, California State University