In this special blog series, Understanding Leadership for Racial Justice, the Staley School of Leadership Studies invites conversation and action on understanding leadership for racial justice. In this piece, the Staley School’s Dr. Kerry Priest and graduate teaching assistant and doctoral student, Mac Benavides, introduce us to the theory of culturally relevant leadership learning (CRLL).
This is blog entry number two in this series. For more blog posts on this topic, click or tap the category Understanding Leadership for Racial Injustice on the category list on the right.
A common mission across higher education institutions, including K-State, is to prepare students to be global citizens who are ready to engage their careers and communities in order to make progress on the world’s toughest challenges. Yet:
There is a difference between wanting to generally promote change in the world and acknowledging how difficult it can be to address deeply rooted social issues.
(Chunoo, Beatty, and Gruver, 2019, p. 88)
As leadership educators, researchers, and practitioners, we (authors) are interested in practices that advance leadership learning and development for social change and social justice. In this article, we focus more specifically on the challenge of racial injustice. We will reflect on our own learning and engagement with culturally relevant leadership learning and anti-racism tools. In doing so, we hope to create the conditions for those who study, teach, or practice leadership to also engage in the activity of leadership for racial justice.
Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning (CRLL)
Leadership learning and development happens in many forms: formal academic courses, student organizations, work experiences, professional development, community leadership experiences, and mentoring or coaching. Culturally relevant leadership learning (CRLL; Bertrand Jones et al. 2016) is a framework that can help those of us who design and deliver leadership education, training, or development programs to be more racially just.
The framework itself provides a lens for understanding the complexities of social inequity. Reflection on the dimensions can guide courageous action to address inequities in and through our learning environments and teaching practices.
To engage in CRLL, educators must:
- Attend to the learning experiences of marginalized populations and their experiences of oppression
- Critically reflect on how failing to address dominant norms and inequity perpetuates oppression, and
- Acknowledge how the power of language and institutional culture/climate influences learners’ identity, capacity, and efficacy to exercise leadership.
How can we do this?
Faculty Self-Study
At the Staley School of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University, we strive to be a learning community – we are all teachers and we are all learners in pursuit of our mission to develop leaders for a diverse and changing world. As a predominantly white unit at a predominantly white institution, it is especially important that we commit to ongoing examination of our work, and refocus our attention on the racialized dynamics within our school, the university, and the field of leadership studies at large.
In spring 2020, we introduced a self-study of CRLL with these guiding questions: How do identity, efficacy, and capacity interact with dimensions of campus climate? And, how do we as members of the Staley School create a climate of inclusion, belonging, and well-being through our curriculum and programs?
The self-study template outlined and described dimensions of CRLL, considerations for action, and personal reflection on areas of application and/or development. Three domains are shared below as examples for self reflection and action (adapted from Bertrand Jones et al., 2016 and Osteen et al., 2016). We invite you to view and utilize the full copy of the self-study guide.
| Domain | Description or Key Questions | Considerations for Action |
| Historical Legacy of Inclusion/Exclusion | Who has traditionally participated in leadership learning opportunities on campus?
Does this reflect those students who receive leadership “awards” or other recognition for their work? |
It is simply not enough to acknowledge that these patterns of exclusion or inclusion exist(ed); leadership educators must then develop intentional ways to respond to such history.
Recognize and redesign historically white learning environments that constitute white space. Identify and assign diverse voices of theory and practice in curricular and co-curricular programs. |
| Psychological Dimension | What are learners’ individual views of group relations, perceptions of discrimination or conflict, attitudes about difference, and institutional responses to diversity?
This dimension also includes students’ cognitive and personal growth. Do we unintentionally create “conflict” experiences for marginalized students? |
Assess the learning environment for marginalized students and create opportunities that foster acceptance of differing opinions and experiences while encouraging trust.
Consider: How are we centering white and other dominant perspectives in our teaching and programming? Conversely, how are we surfacing and validating historically marginalized ways of knowing and understanding the world? How are we asking students of color to carry the uncompensated/unrecognized burden of their white peers’ learning? In other words, in what ways are we centering the learning and growth of white students at the expense of students of color? In what ways are we allowing white students to negotiate the humanity of people of color by exploiting and tokenizing the few in the room? |
| Organizational/ Structural Dimension | The “important structures and processes that guide day-to-day ‘business’ of the institution” represented by course curricula, budget allocations to support diverse learning opportunities, admissions practices, hiring practices of diverse faculty and staff, tenure and promotion procedures, and rewards structures. | Consider the number and types of registered student organizations represented, and offices or programs that provide opportunities to diverse students.
Critically examine the composition of students selected for leadership positions, as teaching assistants, and on program committees. Analyze course reading lists for diverse authors and ideas that represent the breadth of thinking about leadership in a variety of social contexts. Use critical pedagogy to develop critical consciousness and challenge dominant ways of knowing, being, and doing. |
The timeliness of this self-study reflection was evident, as a dramatic pivot to online learning in March 2020 shone a light on inequities in our institutional systems, as well cultural differences within our classrooms. The events of the summer (including the murders of George Floyd and Breona Taylor, #blackatstate, BLM protests, contentious political campaigns, and increasing cases of COVID-19 among others) renewed our attention around systemic racism and the disproportionate impact of police brutality on Black communities and other communities of color.
As we overlay these local and global challenges with CRLL, we recognized the need for collective sense-making – around our beliefs, values, and teaching and programmatic practices. As we came back together (virtually and in person) in the fall, we continued to ask ourselves: what kind of leadership is required to make progress on racial justice, and what is our role as leadership educators? Our role – and the work that is required to fulfill that role – must be informed by theory but must not remain theoretical.
Anti-Racism
Pairing the CRLL framework with social justice and anti-racism models provides tools of inquiry through which we can critically examine our current work and intentionally design AND commit to a more inclusive path forward. Anti-racism is an excellent tool for disrupting and deconstructing normative ways of being, knowing, and doing. It is a lens through which we can operationalize CRLL to work towards racial justice. By situating anti-racism at the heart of our practice as educators and leaders, we play an active role in changing and reconstructing structures and processes to be more equitable.
Racism is not simply saying a discriminatory word or making an inappropriate joke. Nor is it merely a conscious bias against people with darker skin. Racism is rooted in racist policy, “any measure that produces or sustains inequity between racial groups” that is embedded in all parts of our society (Kendi, 2019). Centuries of racial hierarchy and racist structures have built political, educational, and cultural systems that are inherently in favor of white people and actively disadvantage people of color. Leadership for racial justice over the past century has emphasized human and civil rights, without changing racist policies. This results in the integration of communities of color into systems that were not and are not built for them. These systems are not broken. They work exactly how they were designed to operate.
If we are unwilling to recognize and name the ways that people of color are systemically disadvantaged – in our own classrooms, institutions, organizations, and communities – we will never achieve racial justice. The call for racial justice requires that we recognize that we currently operate in a world of racial injustice. We need leadership that can disrupt this reality in order to reconstruct ideas, policies, and practices that support a more equitable and racially just world.
How can we do this?
Storytelling as Anti-racism Work
This is ongoing work. It’s difficult work and we don’t know exactly how to achieve what we hope for. But as Brene Brown says, a goal in this work is to “get it right, not be right.” We (authors) co-developed a storytelling workshop with our team grounded in CRLL and antiracism. The goals of the workshop were to challenge ourselves to (1) uncover patterns in the stories we tell about our school and about ourselves, (2) to seek to understand those patterns in new ways, and (3) to identify next wise actions for transformation and possibility.
Drawing from Bell’s (2010) model of storytelling for social justice, we focused our facilitation around three primary story types: stock stories, concealed stories, and transformative stories. We also used Kendi’s (2019) work on antiracism to situate our workshop as an interrogation of the structural and organizational manifestations of racism in our school, the university, and the field of leadership studies at large. The antiracism model requires that we acknowledge that racism exists, unpack how whiteness is normalized, critically examine our processes and structures, and actively move from colorblindness to antiracism.
We ended this session with the question, “Now What?” Our team considered and committed to next steps as individuals, teaching and program teams, and and for our school as a system. This may be the most difficult question of all, prompting a movement from talking about the issue to taking action that leads to change. We did not leave with solutions, the issues did not resolve. However, the challenge – and our purpose – was more clear.
We invite all who study, teach, and practice leadership to engage in their own on-going process of inquiry, action, and reflection, utilizing the tools of CRLL and anti-racism.
References
Bell, L. (2010). Storytelling for social justice: Connecting narrative and arts in anti-racist teaching. Routledge.
Bertrand Jones, T., Guthrie, K. L., and Osteen, L. (2016). Critical domains of culturally relevant leadership learning: A call to transform leadership programs. New Directions for Student Leadership, 2016(152), 9-21. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.20205
Chunoo, V. S., Beatty, C. C., and Gruver, M. D. (2019). Leadership educator as social justice educator. New Directions for Student Leadership, 2019(164), 87-103. https://doi.org/10.1002/yd.20360
Kendi, I. X. (2019). How to be an anti-racist. One World.
Osteen, L., Guthrie, K. L. and Bertrand Jones, T. (2016), Leading to transgress: Critical Considerations for transforming leadership learning. New Directions for Student Leadership, 152, 95-106. http://doi:10.1002/yd.20212
Additional Resources
Beatty, C., and Manning-Ouelette, A. (2018). The role of liberatory pedagogy in socially just leadership education . In K. L. Guthrie and V. C. Chunoo (Eds)., Changing the narrative: Socially just leadership education (pp. 229-245). IAP.
Bruce (J.) and McKee, K. (Eds.) (2020). Transformative leadership in action: Allyship, advocacy & activism. ILA Building Leadership Brides Series. Emerald Group Publishing.
Cross, T. L., Pewewardy, C. and Smith, A.T. (2019). Restorative education, reconciliation, and healing: Indigenous perspectives on decolonizing leadership education. New Directions for Student Leadership, 163, 101-115. doi:10.1002/yd.20350
Dugan, J. P. (2017). Leadership theory: Cultivating critical perspectives. Jossey-Bass.
Freire, P. (1968/1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. Herder.
Hooks, B. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge.
Ospina, S. M., and Foldy, E. G. (n.d.). Race and leadership: Implication for leaders of color and leadership development programs addressing issues of diversity. Research Center for Leadership in Action, NYU Wagner. Retrieved from: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/leadership/RaceLeadershipReview12.10.pdf
