Reflection
My definition of a leader of Social Justice prior to attending this program was simply treating everyone with kindness and love- it was all conceptual, nothing practical, and with such vague knowledge of it, I only equated it with the daily interactions with colleagues and students.
With the powerful readings from our course work over the span of 10 months, I now see school leadership in the lens of Social Justice as leading with a commitment to challenging cultural, social and economic inequities arising form hegemonic policies and practices that marginalize. During the past months, I have begun to look at my practices in the classroom, as in my other duties in the school, with greater care and analysis, making sure that these are inclusive and equitable.
I entered PLI knowing the importance of establishing connections with families that I work with and working as a team to design interventions to assist students achieve greater learning. As a Special Education teacher, I know the value of establishing a strong home-school connection. During my journey in the PLI Program, I decided to spread my wings and engage in the unfamiliar, so, upon discovering the inequitable gap that our African American students are experiencing, I decided to co-facilitate the Black Students Matter Committee. I found my skills on the area of parent outreach valuable to my work with the Committee, as our school's Parent Representative and I made phone calls and/or home visits to check-in, say hello, and eventually invite them to our parent dialogues. My knowledge and skills also expanded in several ways.
First, through dialogues, I was given the opportunity to know more about my colleagues, and later identify common commitments to work towards addressing inequitable practices in our school. I was able to build the social capital and formed a Community of Practice that addressed an institutional factor that contributed to feelings of being othered by our African American students. Second, I was able to dig deep into data to discover unseen or unacknowledged institutional practices that contributed to othering. As a Team, we were able to plan and implement strategies that finally bring to the open uncomfortable dialogues about race and biases. Using data to disrupt systems was truly powerful. Last, but not least, I experienced the value of working with a Team whose different positionalities in life played a significant role in moving from investigating a problem to planning and implementing strategies that worked towards the common goal of preventing marginalization of students.
The Challenges and Successes in this Journey
One challenge in this experience was obtaining the trust of some some families that I reached out to. Being a non-Black, they perceived me as not the right person to initiate such cause, and not someone who can claim to understand their plight. This challenge was likewise visible as I reached out to the staff to initiate the PD on Critical Race Theory- to be confronted with issues of race and biases is truly uncomfortable.
For the successes, I felt the power of establishing a culture of care. With our outreach came comfort and openness by some families in sharing their stories. Walls of distrust are shattered with simple yet sincere actions, and are replaced by faith that what we offer are safe spaces for families to express their thoughts, ideas, even heartaches. I also discovered the beauty of alliance. School leaders, teachers and parents, though few, created a community where voices were heard.
Next Steps
Seeing how certain groups are made invisible by certain practices and structures in schools, I would like to further investigate the curriculum and possibly supplement this with more Culturally Relevant and Linguistic components that would acknowledge their uniqueness, but also tackle concepts of "togetherness" and "unity" despite differences. It sounds ambitious but I would love to introduce the Socio-Cultural theory lens in designing curriculum. This means supplementing our existing one with other elements that validate and strengthen students' identities. Respectful of individual differences, it must be vehicles for learners to discover their world through social interaction, where they could be allowed to design their own learning, problem solve, create and innovate through relationship-building- a curriculum not only informs, it also transforms, as it develops new perspectives and new understandings about oneself and others.
I would like to continue strengthening my skills in implementing strategies that will promote the school's vision of equitable learning. This involves data sharing for the purpose of improvement of implementation or dismantling systems that may not be beneficial to the specific population that we work with. This also goes hand in hand with my realization that more than developing reading literacy, I, as an aspiring Social Justice leader, must not only teach students how to read, we must teach them to know their rights in a democracy, gain functional literacy that could help them recognize practices that disadvantage them or others, and find their voices to lift each other.
To provide students what they need, I also need to be able to allocate resources equitable. Vital to any school organization is the day to day operational concerns with hiring, budgeting, and supervision just to name a few. I feel that I need to learn more about this and experience this side of leadership.