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Leading as a Socially Just Practice

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Educational Leadership through a Practice Lens

Part of the book series: Educational Leadership Theory ((ELT))

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Abstract

In Chap. 5, I examined how trends towards school improvement, redolent of the performance pressure placed on schooling systems from increasingly anxious governments, played out in a case study of practices of major district reform undertaken by a regional Catholic education district and its ‘flagship’ secondary school. This chapter takes a different, albeit related turn. Employing a practice architectures lens, it analyses the implications for socially just practices of educating and leading as a regional government school grappled to integrate students of refugee background into its monocultural student demographic. The chapter foregrounds a major moral issue for educating in our super-diverse times. It examines how educational practices were orchestrated in site-specific ways that did not ‘other’ refugee background students as deficit or construct them as the eternally grateful recipients of a host nation’s largesse.

This chapter was originally published as Wilkinson (2017). Leading for social justice: Examining educational leading through a practice lens. In K. Mahon, S. Francisco, & S. Kemmis (Eds.) Exploring practices through the lens of practice architectures (pp. 165–182). Springer International.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    All names are pseudonyms and identifying details have been anonymised.

  2. 2.

    See Chap. 2 for a detailed discussion of this concept.

  3. 3.

    There are some exceptions to this lacuna. See, for example, Arar (2020). School leadership for refugees’ education: Social justice leadership for immigrant, migrants and refugees. Routledge. Arar et al. (2019). Refugees in their own land: The challenge of managing a school in a Palestinian refugee camp in the divided city of Jerusalem. In K. Arar, J. S. Brooks, and I. Bogotch (Eds.), Education, immigration and migration: Policy, leadership and praxis for a changing world (pp. 191–212). Emerald Publishing Limited. Bogotch & Kervin (2019). Leadership and policy dilemmas: Syrian newcomers as future citizens of Ontario, Canada. In K. Arar, J. S. Brooks, and I. Bogotch (Eds.), Education, immigration and migration: Policy, leadership and praxis for a changing world (pp. 33–52). Emerald Publishing Limited. Faubert & Tucker (2019). Leading K-12 refugee integration: A GENTLE approach from Ontario, Canada. In K. Arar, J. S. Brooks, and I. Bogotch (Eds.), Education, immigration and migration: Policy, leadership and praxis for a changing world (pp. 53–72). Emerald Publishing Limited. Norberg (2019). Business as usual or a state of emergency? School leadership during an unprecedented increase in asylum-seekers. In K. Arar, J. S. Brooks, and I. Bogotch (Eds.), Education, immigration and migration: Policy, leadership and praxis for a changing world (pp. 267–284). Emerald Publishing Limited. Wilkinson, J., & Kaukko, M. (2021). How to support students of refugee background in your school. In J. Brooks, & A. Heffernan (Eds.), The school  leadership survival guide: What to do when things go wrong, how to learn from mistakes, and why you should prepare for the worst. Information Age Publishing. Wilkinson & Kaukko (2020). Educational leading as pedagogical love: The case for refugee education. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 23(1), 61–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2019.1629492. Wilkinson & Kaukko (2019). Leading for praxis and refugee education: Orchestrating ecologies of socially just practices. In K. Arar, J. S. Brooks, & I. Bogotch (Eds.). Education, immigration and migration: Policy, Leadership and Praxis for a changing world (pp. 109–130). Emerald Publishing. See also a special issue of International Journal of Leadership in Education, 23(1) devoted to refugee education and leadership.

  4. 4.

    I would like to acknowledge and thank my co-researcher for this study, Dr. Kip Langat.

  5. 5.

    See, for example, Major et al., (2013). Sudanese young people of refugee background in rural and regional Australia: Social capital and education success. Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, 23(3), 95–105. Santoro & Wilkinson (2015). Sudanese young people building capital in rural Australia: The role of mothers and community. Ethnography and Education, 11(1), 107–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2015.1073114. Wilkinson (2018). ‘We’re going to call our kids “African Aussies”’: Leading for diversity in regional Australia. In J. Wilkinson & L. Bristol (Eds.), Examining leadership as a culturally-constructed practice: New directions and possibilities (pp. 54–74). Routledge. Wilkinson & Langat (2012). Exploring educators’ practices for African students from refugee backgrounds in an Australian regional high school. The Australasian Review of African Studies, 33(2), 158–177. Retrieved from http://afsaap.org.au/assets/ARAS_Vol_XXXIII_2_Wilkinson_Langat1.pdf. Wilkinson et al. (2017), Sudanese refugee youth and educational success: The role of church and youth group in supporting cultural and academic adjustment and schooling achievement. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 60, 210–219. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2017.04.003.

  6. 6.

    Unlike Catholic education districts and schools, in Australia all government schools are funded and regulated by various state governments. They are steered by state government education policies and are ultimately accountable to these jurisdictions.

  7. 7.

    ‘School Support Officer [Ethnic]’ was the formal title employed by the Department of Education and Training at the time this study was conducted. Hence, I have elected to use this title.

  8. 8.

    Australian federal government funding of non-government schools has been rising at a faster rate than for government schools. This is despite the fact that state systems educate the majority of students, and in particular, those from varied equity backgrounds, thus placing increasing demands for resourcing on those systems (Cobbold, 2020). Nationally the Australian federal government funds Catholic systemic schools (20% students) and independent schools (14.5% of students). State governments are responsible for public schools that comprise the remaining 67% of students and cater for 85% of all students who experience some form of disadvantage (Cobbold, 2020). The percentage of federal government funding for private schools also “increased from 33 to 45% for independent schools and from 72 to 75% for catholic schools between 1994 and 2010” (Chesters, 2018, as cited in Larsen et al., 2020, p. 4). However, analysis of National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN] tests reveal no differences between government and non-government funded students’ outcomes between Years Three and Nine (Larsen et al., 2020). This dispels a key argument of neoliberalism that increased competition provided by private schools would “drive improvement in education quality” (Larsen et al., 2020, p. 2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    Jane Wilkinson

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Correspondence to Jane Wilkinson .

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Wilkinson, J. (2021). Leading as a Socially Just Practice. In: Educational Leadership through a Practice Lens . Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7629-1_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7629-1_6

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