Towards Educational Leadership for Justice: Preparing leaders to integrate ethnic studies into their leadership practices

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The Critical Role of Ethnic Studies in Educational Leadership

Abstract

Objectives & Research Questions:
Educational Leadership programs are responsible to cultivate critical reflection and an Ethnic Studies Leadership Praxis (Tagamolila-Noriega, 2024), encompassing ES Pedagogies and Critical Leadership Praxis (Daus-Magbual, 2011). ES teachers are often tasked with advancing ES without support from administrators. ES professional learning for educational leaders is crucial inside preparation programs and beyond. This paper describes programs that center ES and explores:
How can educational leadership programs cultivate and engender social justice and critical leadership praxis by integrating ES pedagogies?
How can ES professional leadership development create conditions to foster leadership for liberatory outcomes?

Theory:
Our leadership programs draw on Yosso et al. (2001) definition of CRT in education. For educational leaders, engaging with ES pedagogies cultivates a deeper understanding of systemic inequities and the skills to implement culturally affirming practices (Williams et al., 2021) and community responsive leadership (Tintiangco-Cubales & Duncan-Andrade, 2021). One cannot develop a system to sustain ES without a leader who understands the needs of the system by deeply understanding and espousing ES pedagogies (Daus-Magbual, 2011; Tintiangco-Cubales & Curammeng, 2018; Tagamolila-Noriega, 2024).

Methods/Sources:
How P-12 leaders are prepared to navigate the socio-political complexities surrounding ES programs amidst the anti-Ethnic Studies climate, is insufficiently documented. Drawing from our experiences as P-12 administrators and scholars developing educational leadership programs, we describe components of two programs, one preparing P-12 leadership candidates for administrative credential and a P-16 EdD leadership program, which center ES pedagogies with the aspiration of engendering leaders who lead for liberatory justice.

Findings:
The paper describes how coursework centers commitment for program participants to understand the systemic racism that pervades our institutions through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) by embedding ES pedagogies. Coursework components include:
Use of CRT and QuantCrit approach to data analysis, fostering anti-racist, data-informed practices (Fong & Irizarry, 2025; Tabron & Thomas, 2023) and policy development.
Fostering authentic collaboration with parents, community leaders for collaborative action and liberatory leadership (Rodriguez et al., 2003; del Carmen Salazar, 2013).
A Liberatory Leadership Framework grounded in Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1974, 1993), to redress systemic inequalities through dialogue and critical and racial consciousness (Kohli et al., 2020).
A leadership praxis predicated upon critical reflection and self-reflection (Vasquez & Altshuler, 2017; Tintiangco-Cubales & Curammeng, 2018; Tagamolila-Noriega, 2024) through coursework centering social justice & critical leadership praxis.
We enumerate how including administrators in ES professional development alongside teachers is essential to equipping them to champion ES on their campuses and reducing the cultural taxation on ES teachers (Padilla, 1994; Torepe & Manning, 2018). Components for this ES critical professional development and examples of existing professional development models are described.

Significance:
This paper offers two important contributions:
It highlights the intersection of Educational Leadership preparation and ES to foster social justice and liberatory leadership, an expanding area of ES research.
A narrow focus on teacher-level professional development has resulted in significant cultural taxation on ES teachers and can be redressed by establishing a comprehensive ES critical professional development for leaders beyond preparatory programs.

Authors

• Yesenia Fernandez, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Kitty M. Fortner, California State University - Dominguez Hills