Leading Ourselves out of White Supremacy: Reimagining the Doctorate of Education as an Instrument of Collective Liberation

• In Event: Placing Reciprocity: Centering Relationality in Community-Rooted Education

Abstract

Objectives
What does it look like to lead a classroom, school, or campus community out of white supremacy? How do we lead ourselves out of white supremacy? These are some of the questions that guide our engagements with future educational leaders - EDD doctoral students - who work across K-16 spaces, as well as ourselves.

As scholar-educators and colleagues, we aim to name, identify, and emerge practices that make us more whole and hold us better together. We train and pass this responsibility to other healers of education, recognizing we are in sacred pursuit of justice (Keator & Watson, 2022). Creating anti-racist, affirming, transformative educational spaces in which we -and young people- can “human-be” (Valdez et al., 2018) requires that we re-imagine how we model and embody the praxis of educational leadership.

Theoretical framework​​s
We are connected as co-authors because of our love for learning; we take the pursuit of truth seriously. The truth of racism marks every colonial structure on this planet—including and especially higher education (Tuhiwai-Smith, 2012; Wilder, 2013). Yet learning has always existed beyond the foreclosures of violent institutions, and the collective struggles for liberatory education within these spaces has always been a love-fueled praxis (Kelley, 2016; Patel, 2021). These are lessons from critical genealogies - Black, Women of Color, and Decolonial Feminisms - that emerge from movement spaces and that guide our work.

Methods and Data Sources
Utilizing a reflexive practitioner approach (Cunliffe, 2016; Freire, 1972), we ask, what does it mean to earn a doctorate in education in this moment as systems continue to implode and laws regress? Our doctoral scholars in our 3-year, practitioner centered program are primarily first-generation, students of color, and join our program to extend liberatory possibilities with and for their communities. We uplift the experiences from our andragogical and mentorship approaches to collectively name our praxis of educational leadership, considering the truths that educational leaders must not only be responsive to, but lead us to collectively heal from. Our reflexive analysis focuses on the values, practices, and critical questions that guide our work for growing doctoral scholars acutely attuned to the truths of educational injustice, and equipped with the skills and capacities to cultivate healing.

Substantiated conclusions/warrants for arguments
We develop critical questions that guide our praxis on re-imagining educational leadership as a praxis of collective healing. We consider how a lens of healing allows us to redefine notions of educational leadership, and also consider what this looks like in the following domains of our own programmatic practice: admissions, curriculum content, definitions of scholarship, program culture, student support, and program milestones.

Scholarly significance
The educational debts that are owed to systematically marginalized communities are well-documented “consequential truths” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). They require intentional braiding of skills such as structural analysis, reflexivity, and community mobilization into the training of educational leaders. They require deliberate and critical questioning of our institutional cultures and academic practices. They require unlearning and re-imagination of what learning can be, towards life-affirming futures and healing, today.

Authors

• Sheeva Sabati, California State University - Sacramento
  Presenting Author

• Vajra M. Watson, California State University - Sacramento
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth Holliday Morgan, California State University - Sacramento
  Presenting Author