Transforming Educational Leadership Preparation: Starting with Ourselves
Date
2016-01
Authors
Guerra, Patricia
Pazey, Barbara L.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Nova Southeastern University
Abstract
To lead for social justice, scholars have maintained aspiring leaders should examine their own values and beliefs that dictate, to a great extent, their day-to-day decision-making and responsibilities. To do so requires faculty to examine themselves before they can prepare leaders for social justice. The purpose of this paper is to engage others with similar interests toward creating and/or improving programs designed to prepare leaders for social justice. Serving as a source of data and method of analysis, this duoethnography chronicles the life histories of two faculty members working in different leadership programs to reveal how their understanding of diversity and social justice has been formed over the course of their lives. Sharing stories, they dialogically critiqued and questioned each other, challenging one another to reconceptualize beliefs and meanings about their lived experiences. Duoethnography has the potential to transform faculty's conceptions of diversity and social justice as well as promote empathy, compassion and understanding. When trust is established, faculty can take risks, ask tough questions, reveal vulnerabilities, exchange uncensored comments, and challenge deficit thinking. Duoethnography can be a valuable tool for faculty development. The authors question, however, whether faculty would be willing to employ duoethnography to explore their beliefs about diversity and increase their knowledge of social justice. Due to a perceived lack of trust, power differences, fear of uncovering biases, engaging in conflict, and/or denial of tenure and promotion, they question whether faculty would be willing to engage in this methodology.
Description
Keywords
educational leadership, faculty development, social justice, transformative learning, duoethnography, Counseling, Leadership, Adult Education, and School Psychology
Citation
Guerra, P. L., & Pazey, B. L. (2016). Transforming Educational Leadership Preparation: Starting with Ourselves. The Qualitative Report, 21(10), pp. 1751-1784.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.