Prophetic Criticism in Educational Leadership: Navigating Its Cultural Terrain

Abstract

This chapter represents an overview of prophetic criticism in educational leadership. The author discusses its basic tenants; its aims and goals between reading and interpreting texts with moral clarity and social and structural analysis; and its epistemological break with technical rationality as the guiding prism for the meaning of educational leadership. In addition, the author explains a political agenda in prophetic criticism that enables more authentic representations and practices in educational leadership for scholars of color doing social justice work in the field.

Historically, the field of educational leadership was absent of the voices, narratives, values, and intellectual vision of Black folk. Prophetic critics reject all metanarratives, particularly one dimensional European discourses that either debased the intellectual contributions of communities of color as lowbrow culture; or silenced their contributions in the very exclusion of their perspectives to the field altogether. Therefore, prophetic criticism is about finding one’s unique voice and cultural practices to critique, disrupt, and transform status quo leadership practices in educational leadership.

The author’s articulation of prophetic criticism evokes the dynamic interplay between cultural and social criticism in relation to social justice values in educational leadership. In a bricolage context, this chapter centers popular culture and other public pedagogies as texts by which interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to mining leadership values, narratives, and artistic practices can take shape with diverse communities. It is inside these texts where cultural studies approaches to critical social theory/critical race theory can open up opportunities to study, discover, explore, and evaluate how educational leadership can be understood and acted upon in and through different cultural contexts.

The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature of prophetic criticism enables one to demystify and critique contradictory knowledge production, narratives, rhetoric, and institutional practices that hinder, advance, and reproduce material relations of inequity for communities of color. However, prophetic critics may draw upon counter-narrative cultural practices that operate in subcultural communities of resistance to induce social change in schools and the larger society. It is not just that one can move across and between different critical discourses to enact prophetic criticism. One can work across and between these discourses, applied to different fields/disciplines outside education. However, one can also reconnect these alternative forms of knowledge production to rework and redefine ideologies, values, and meanings associated with social justice in educational leadership.

This chapter will first provide the reader with a brief overview of tensions and struggles, regarding instrumental, technical efficiency approaches to educational leadership. These approaches have negated other diverse forms of knowledge production in educational leadership. The author then reviews/outlines key tenets that shape Cornel West’s notion of prophetic criticism within what West calls the cultural politics of difference. Third, the author draws upon his continual, conceptual development of what prophetic criticism means for educational leaders, working across and between different cultural and social settings in urban contexts. Finally, the conclusion re-emphasizes key ideas that inform a prophetic approach to educational leadership.