Visibilizing the Invisible: Cultivating Critical Practitioner Scholars in Educational Leadership

• In Event: 35.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: 35.077-3 - These Are the Breaks: Ruptures in Coloniality in Educational Leadership

Abstract

Objectives
Dominant models of Educational Leadership tend to focus on “color-blind,” apolitically-framed, managerial, instructional, transactional, and/or situational (Parker & Villalpando, 2007; Santamaria, 2013) practices and policies. This paper, however, investigates the counternarratives produced by first generation doctoral students of Color within an Educational Leadership for Social Justice (ELSJ) program at a public university as a way to visibilize the inherent oppression invisibilized by those dominant models. This research seeks to understand the ways that students in their first course of their first year critically made sense (Reyes, 2018) of their process to become critical, courageous, mindful, and self-reflective scholar practitioners in decolonial ways.

Theoretical Framework
This scholarship builds upon discourses that examine how knowledge and research in education have been approached in colonial (Patel, 2016; Smith, 1999; Tuck, 2009; Wilson, 2008) and dehumanizing (Irizarry & Brown, 2013; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2013) ways, but also in ways that tell desire-based (Tuck, 2009) counterstories (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) that humanize ((Irizarry & Brown, 2013; Kinloch & San Pedro, 2013; Laura, 2016) both the researcher and researched. Within that process, this research examined the Critical Sense Making (Reyes, 2018) that students experienced as they held their new learnings in tension with their prior conceptions of self, educational leadership, and research. This research then “theorize(d) in the break” (Paperson, 2017, p. 19) by visibilizing colonial technologies in educational leadership and research in order to reassemble approaches that map decoloniality.

Methods
This research followed this line of inquiry. What non-dominant approaches and bodies of research could ground the process of becoming a critical, courageous, self-reflective, and purposeful scholar practitioner? How do such conditions impact the development of students’ research stances that ground why, how, and what they examine, attempt to understand, and make public? Using methods of critical participant observer, narrative inquiry, and critical race methodology, the research examined data in the form of student-created products, student interviews, and field notes produced by the researcher.

Findings
Five key praxis-centered practices emerged from this research: 1) Become Comfortable with being Uncomfortable, 2) Question the Unquestionable, 3) Visibilize the Invisible, 4) Problematize not Pathologize, and 5) Reframe the Narrative. The first practice sought to create the non-judgmental and mindful conditions to engage in uncomfortable conversations and self-reflections. The second practice aimed to question dominant perspectives that have been made to seem normal and natural. The third practice sought to identify and examine architectures and technologies of systemic oppression. The fourth practice worked to shift perspectives, behaviors, and language that saw certain people and communities as problems rather than as being in systemically-mediated situations that require problematizing as analysis. The fifth involved cultivating the ethic to apply the first four practices within performance tasks produced by students.

Scholarly Significance
This research extends the scholarship on graduate programs of Educational Leadership with aspirations of social justice and educational equity. In particular, this scholarship provides insights on how decolonial approaches to apprenticing first generation doctoral students of Color into the academy can influence Educational Leadership as a field as well as an academic discipline.

Author

• G. T. Reyes, California State University - East Bay