Justice-Centered Leadership Practice

Understanding the practice of justice-centered leadership is my key area of scholarship and is crucial to my work in the other two streams of work.

Literature-Grounded Conceptual Tool

The figure below shows a conceptual tool I have used that grounds my examinations of justice-centered leadership practice in the literature. This tool serves as a mechanism for examining justice-centered leadership simultaneously across its constituent approaches, highlighting potentially consequential areas for investigation. While this tool has served as a foundation for investigating justice-centered practice, its use in my research has ultimately culminated in a more expansive, deeper, empirically-grounded practice framework presented below.

Justice-Centered Leadership Practice: Practice-Grounded Framework

Using data collected via interviews with 24 leaders—all of whom exemplify a justice orientation—working across seven school districts, I have built a practice-grounded framework of justice-centered leadership practice, below. While some of the practices identified on the framework reflect those found across the literature in the image above, interviews revealed additional practices and add specificity related to the strategies leaders used to engage in those practices.

If we as a field want school leaders to promote justice within their schools and communities, we must understand what this sort of leadership practice looks like and how real leaders engage in these practices within their daily work. This framework synthesizes empirical data on the real day-to-day work of real leaders seeking justice for students and communities; it creates a meaningful picture of what justice-centered leadership can look like. It identifies practices oriented around multiple issues of justice across multiple leadership approaches, yielding a plethora of potential practices in which practitioners might engage. Further, this research delineates these practices within one clearly-organized framework, making it a particularly valuable tool for time-strapped professionals. In sum, this framework is likely to connect to a wide variety of current and aspiring school leaders, as well as those who prepare them, providing a comprehensive, accessible, and actionable starting place for justice-centered leadership practice that can be tailored to practitioners’ specific contexts and needs.

Directions for Future Research

Looking forward, I have several research projects in queue that will advance the field’s knowledge.

Justice-centered leadership practice is a localized phenomenon, meaning that leaders’ practices are shaped by localized concerns that may change over time (Berkovich, 2014). Therefore, first and foremost, I want to continue to examine justice-centered leadership across many more contexts. I am especially interested in examining rural school contexts. Not only are rural districts—and the challenges students and educators face—vastly different from urban districts, but they are also incredibly varied (a rural district in South Texas is likely vastly different from one in Western Massachusetts, where I’m from). The field has advanced significant knowledge around justice-centered leadership in a variety of urban contexts but has largely ignored rural communities.

Outside of learning more about the practice of justice-centered leaders, I am interested to learn more about how programs may best prepare aspirants to work in hostile policy environments while staying grounded in justice principles. With knowledge of what justice-centered leadership looks like across many contexts, preparation programs can design backward to consider how to prepare leaders capable of engaging in that work.