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. 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.
Current Projects
Investigating Suburban School Leaders’ Practices towards Eliminating Opportunity Gaps within Advanced Academic Programs
Advanced academic programs (AAPs) are designed to provide students with rigorous educational opportunities that prepare them for college and beyond. However, access to these programs is often uneven, with students of color typically significantly underrepresented. This project, which I am working on with a colleague, seeks to examine how school principals, as critical agents of change, navigate and challenge these opportunity gaps to promote racial equity within AAPs. Through interviews, focus groups, and document analysis, we aim to uncover the strategies and practices school leaders use to ensure more equitable access to advanced courses. Our goal is to highlight successful approaches and offer insights that can inform both policy design and school leadership preparation, ultimately supporting broader efforts to desegregate advanced academic programs and ensure that students from all backgrounds have equal opportunities to succeed.
Systematic Review of Social Justice Leadership Literature
Despite the extensive focus on social justice leadership over the past two decades, scholars have yet to reach a consensus on what this leadership entails, creating ambiguity for both researchers and practitioners. Along with two colleagues, I am conducting a systematic review of 177 peer-reviewed articles to explore the various aspects of social justice leadership. We are advancing two articles from this work. The first seeks to develop a robust and comprehensive definition of that addresses multiple forms of oppression and considers both student-centered and systemic approaches to justice. The second seeks to develop a typology of key justice-centered practices evidenced across the literature. Findings from the review are meant to support practitioners, researchers, and leadership programs by providing clear frameworks for understanding and enacting social justice leadership in education.
Justice-Centered Leadership Framework
The goal of this study is to gain a broad understanding of the types of practices justice-centered leadership entails. 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, overviewed in the JEA article listed on my CV. Future articles will deeply examine individual facets of the framework. The data I collected to inform this framework will also shed light on barriers leaders face and their strategies to overcome these, their justice dispositions, and more.