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. 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

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 over 100 peer-reviewed articles to explore the various aspects of social justice leadership. I am currently leading work from this review to develop a comprehensive framework 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 Journal of Educational Administration 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.