Educational Leadership in African Diasporic Contexts: Implications and Possibilities in a Digital Age

• In Event: Educational Leadership and Outcomes

Proposal

Educational Leadership in African Diasporic Contexts: Implications and Possibilities in a Digital Age

Relevance: This paper takes a critical look at educational leadership in the African diaspora. The study that informs this paper casts a decolonizing, transnational gaze into the work and wellbeing of Black school leaders in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, and the Caribbean countries of Grenada and Jamaica. Data collection is ongoing. We report preliminary data on the current challenges of leading schools as Black minorities in the Global North and Black majorities in the Global South. We also contextualize our findings in relation to the theme of education in a digital society. We concur with the writers of the conference call that the digital divide – illuminated and exacerbated by and during COVID-19 – could become wider and foster new forms of social disadvantages and/or inequalities without focused efforts and interventions. Our position is that the digital education age could be leveraged to advance social justice for Black communities, but we posit that deliberate steps must be taken to prevent this focus from eclipsing ongoing, important equity, anti-racist, and decolonizing work.

Theory/Context: Dominant understandings of equity issues in the field of educational leadership have roots in Eurocentrism, reflecting White, heterosexual, middle-class, Christian, able-bodied, male understandings of leadership (Armstrong & Mitchell, 2017). In this project, we take inspiration from Pirbhai-Illich et al.’s (2023) seminal work on decolonizing educational relationships to decenter European/Western ways of seeing, doing, and believing school leadership. We interrogate the historical structures, traditions, and norms that elevate whiteness and white supremacy while subjugating Black voice, Black worth, and Black dignity. Our overarching approach is to apply a decolonizing, transnational lens to examine how colonially entrenched racial inequities play out in the work of Black school leaders across the Canadian and Caribbean sites of the study.
Mode of Inquiry: Our research is qualitative and utilizes critical document analysis, one-on-one conversations (semi-structured interviews), and small group discussions (focus groups) with school principals and assistant/vice principals across the five Canadian and two Caribbean sites. We center the concepts racial inequity, work, and wellbeing from a decolonizing, antiracist lens, exploring with participants the colonial understandings, structures, and ways of knowing that inform their thinking and approaches to their work. We are interested in how these understandings, structures, and ways of knowing shape not only the kinds of actions these leaders take and do not take, but how both the structures and norms around these leaders’ work, and these leaders’ responses to these structures and norms, impact school leaders’ actions and wellness. We then analyze each interview using a combination of a priori and open coding approaches (Lichtman, 2010; Miles & Huberman, 1994) to thematically present preliminary results.

Findings: As we explored above, our study explores the work and wellbeing of Black school leaders in five Canadian and Caribbean jurisdictions, against the backdrop of colonization and its enduring legacies and implications. We discuss our findings in relation to the overarching conference theme of education in a digital society, exploring the implications for centering this focus within and against the backdrop of oppression that continues to affect the lives of Black educators, school leaders, students, families, and communities across these African diasporic contexts. Accordingly, we expose for critical gaze the ways education administration, governance, and discourse remain pervasively Eurocentric and Christian across the Canadian and Grenadian contexts. Within this focus, we call attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism, microaggressions, whiteness, exclusion/erasure, performativity, and hypervigilance that overshadow Black Canadian school leaders. In the Caribbean sites, we trouble widespread fiscal lack hampering growth; sexism and patriarchy in principal recruitment, hiring, and promotions; the propensity for success to be tied to Christianity and Christian education; and an ongoing defense of coloniality. While important, envisioning education in a digital society may arguably be secondary to the more acute issues constraining school leaders in these settings. As participants shared, the COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted equity work, exposing gaps in social justice intent, action, and outcome across all sites in the study. School leaders continue to face challenges addressing learning deficits in the wake of this pandemic.

Given these challenges, it is important to critically examine how centering digital education may eclipse urgent equity work in African diasporic contexts; the implications of deepening inequity between Global North and Global South jurisdictions and the challenges posed for digital education and school leadership in these contexts; and possibilities that valorize discussions of education in a digital society while maintaining focus on wider historical contextualities facing Black communities. Overall, we ask and explore: What would/does a shift in emphasis from equity to digital education mean for improving the work and wellbeing of Black school leaders? Or/Instead, how might we engage in discussions of advancing education in the context of the digital age without eclipsing the work of dismantling ongoing colonial inequities in the work and wellbeing of Black school leaders in the African diaspora? Even further, how might we conjoin the topics of education in a digital society and Black school leaders’ work and wellbeing as (inter/co-related) social justice priorities/imperatives?

Contribution: Indeed, the digital divide could widen and foster new forms of social disadvantages and/or inequalities without focused interventions. This paper adds critical knowledge around action needed to prevent this focus from eclipsing ongoing and urgent equity and decolonizing work. The paper also offers important insights into the school leadership contexts for Black school leaders in African diasporic contexts.

References
Armstrong, D., & Mitchell, C. (2017). Shifting identities: Negotiating intersections of race and gender in Canadian administrative contexts. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 45(5), 825–841.

Lichtman, M. (2010). Qualitative research in education: A user’s guide (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook (2nd ed.). SAGE.

Pirbhai-Illich, f., Martin, F., & Pete, S. (2023). Decolonizing educational relationships: Practical approaches for higher and teacher education. Emerald.

Author

• Donna H. Swapp, University of Regina