Educational leaders confront instances of inequity every day, whether they are aware of it or not. Many find themselves inadequately reacting to such issues due in part to traditional preparation programs that fail to interrogate the existence and impact of systems of oppression. Why is naming and tackling inequity not at the forefront of every conversation about educational leadership? How do our social constructions of identity hierarchies and deficits (mis)shape what leaders think and do? How do leaders advocate for those who need and deserve advocacy? This volume considers these questions and more by offering unique leadership frameworks that integrate critical theories for social change with everyday practice. By bringing together diverse researchers, practitioners, and policymakers who are often pushed to the margins, this volume will help today’s leaders see with new eyes and gain the critical tools, language, and concepts for equity leadership. The text is organized into four sections: Transforming Self, Transforming Educators, Transforming Organizations, and Transforming Systems. Book Features: Interrupts prevailing practices and advocates for a more inclusive, intersectional vision of leaders and the field of educational leadership.Specific and useful frames, concepts, and practices that leaders can adapt to their own context.Authors that reflect diverse perspectives with wide-ranging identities who intentionally push back against the White male-dominated discourse. A practitioner-friendly format that includes glossaries of terms and resources. Insights that reflect the worldwide pandemic crises of 2020.

"In this edited volume, contributors draw on the work of Andrade and Morrell (2008) in articulating critical leadership praxis, as well as critical race theory and critical education leadership scholarship, in order to "offer new and generative theories of change; they make explicit power dynamics, social inequities, and taken-for-granted forms of stratification in educational organizations with the primary purpose of offering specific and useful frames, concepts, and practices to educational leaders that they can adopt in their own work. The goal is for educational leaders to develop their sense of agency and and their knowledge and professional competencies for taking an equity and inquiry stance in their work of transforming the organizations and people around them." The work is intended to provide a counter narrative to a broad literature in educational leadership that "reinscribe white middle-class male leadership styles, values, and priorities as an assumed and normative backdrop, both in terms of the frames used and the values and epistemologies promoted." The work is organized into four sections: Transforming Self; Transforming Educators; Transforming Organizations; and Transforming Systems. Contributors include practicing leaders, doctoral students with leadership experience, and leadership faculty and researchers"--

This book explores a social change and transformational approach to leadership. As educational leaders are increasingly serving a changing demographic of students and also address persistent challenges and heightened tension around race and equity, it is becoming necessary for educators to approach leadership in new and radical ways. Designed for aspiring and current leaders, this book highlights stories of courageous educational leaders with intersectional identities who interrogate and reflect on how their intersectionality shaped their leadership. In turn, these stories help readers explore how lived experiences and deeply held values can shape and inform their own leadership. Chapters conclude with a reader’s guide, prompting reflection upon the nuances of each leader’s journey, and thus, facilitating the discourse of marginalized experiences in educational leadership. This new approach to professional learning helps today’s aspiring principals, aspiring superintendents, and practicing administrators learn how intersectional leadership can help them navigate multiple marginalized spaces and codify new notions of power and success. This volume generates a collection of compelling counter narratives that the field needs to hear.

This book explores an exciting new critical leadership model arising from critical theory and critical pedagogy traditions, and provides examples of applied critical leadership, ultimately expanding ways to think about current leadership models.

Sharing the new and evolving approaches to higher education leadership that foster liberatory systemic change. Higher Education Leadership offers a groundbreaking exploration of leadership in higher education. Rozana Carducci, Jordan Harper, and Adrianna Kezar challenge traditional paradigms and ideologies that hinder progress—advocating instead for liberatory systemic change. The authors highlight new and evolving interdisciplinary leadership approaches for resisting and dismantling oppressive systems, including neoliberalism and white supremacy, within and beyond higher education organizations. This comprehensive textbook synthesizes decades of leadership scholarship and dissects the limitations of hierarchical and individual-centered models prevalent in higher education. Through critical analysis, the authors unveil process-centered, shared-power, and equity-oriented approaches that prioritize liberation. By translating classic and revolutionary theories, they empower current and aspiring higher education leaders to reimagine their roles to create more meaningful impact. The authors bring theory to life by exploring the specific context of higher education and providing practical applications. Their survey also identifies gaps in knowledge and methodologies and provides ideas for future leadership research. They invite readers to view leadership as both a problem to be interrogated and dismantled as well as a pathway to a more liberatory future. By recognizing these dual possibilities of leadership, the authors open the door to powerful insights while also offering a cautionary tale. With enriching case studies, vignettes, and discussion questions, Higher Education Leadership serves as an essential resource for graduate classrooms and professionals seeking to critique existing leadership practices and forge new pathways that foster equity and systemic transformation. This thought-provoking textbook offers a new vision for higher education scholars and leaders committed to fostering inclusive, anti-racist, and equitable universities.

In these times of rapid change, including a global pandemic, educational leaders need tools and frameworks that can adapt to evolving shifts in real time. What might happen if a leadership framework could make sense of this complexity in ways that are humane, ethical, culturally responsive, and multifaceted? This book examines how a flux leadership mindset and corresponding tools promote the conditions for educational change that uplift stakeholders and generate contextualized data during emergency situations. The educational leaders at the heart of this book employed a flux leadership tool through a process called “rapid-cycle inquiry,” which allows for collaborative inquiries to take place in real time to answer tough questions and surface stories that are often silenced in times of sudden change. Featuring narratives of what happened to schools during COVID-19, Flux Leadership introduces a generative framework for agile, responsive, anti-racist, trauma-informed, healing-centered leadership for times of crisis and beyond. Book Features: Provides a framework and set of real-time strategies for leaders to engage in critical leadership practice and crisis leadership with attention to equity.Addresses vital school and district-based leadership issues in various contexts, including reflexivity, identity, positionality, racial literacy, brave space leadership, equity-focused professional development, and critical collaboration.Covers a range of vantage points and intersectional social identities in succinct, accessible, and pragmatic ways.Creates a new approach for leaders to get at context and drive homegrown metrics that speak back to and challenge top-down metrics in schools and districts.

As a critical reflection on education and educational leadership today, this book makes use of the ideas of some of the major thinkers of our time—Adorno, Arendt, Biesta, Brown, Apple, Hall, Marx, Nietzsche, Rancière, Said, Williams, and others—in an examination of the emancipatory potential of education. Author Duncan Waite explores the political, social, systemic, epistemological, and cultural barriers and roadblocks that inhibit liberatory education, discussing the concepts of corruption and abuse of power; systems and structures that hobble us; ideologies such as neoliberalism, capitalism, and corporatism; identity and consciousness; and conceptions of learning, growth, and development. Ultimately the author unpacks how these issues relate to liberation, emancipation, and social justice for students, teachers, and educational leaders, as well as the role leadership can play in realizing the emancipatory promise of education.