Chapter 1: Teacher Leadership and Activism: A Conceptual Critical Re-Imagining

It takes leadership and courage to engage in activism. Leadership though a contested term everyone agrees is relevant in almost all aspects of life. Institutions and countries need leaders to guide them and when things go wrong or are not going well, many point to the lack of leadership. Few proponents appear to agree on what leadership is, yet many insist that it is inherently good and urgently needed (Liu, 2020). Leadership over the years has been described and theorized in many ways, with varying approaches. Leadership has been promoted by scholars and practitioners and elevated in status (Silva, Gimbert, & Nolan, 2000). Different forms of Leadership have evolved over the years and have led to a plethora of leadership theories. Some of these leadership theories have been popular in education. For example, distributed leadership (Gronn, 2000; Harris, 2009), instructional leadership (Blase & Blase, 2004; Hallinger, 2003), and more recently social justice leadership (Jean-Marie, Brooks, & Normore, 2009; Theoharis, 2007), culturally responsive leadership (Beacham, 2011; Lopez, 2016), and decolonizing leadership (Battiste, 2013; Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2013; Lopez, 2019, 2021; Lopez & Barnett 2020). Liu (2020) argues that leadership in society is constructed. In other words, people characterize leadership, negotiate and enact how and what they call leadership. Liu suggests further that the “social constructionist view of leadership is compelling because despite the preceding eight decades of research, we do not appear to be any closer to clarifying what leadership is” (p. 8). This definitional “vacuity” of leadership as Liu calls it means that it allows those with power to decide which interpretation of leadership matters most.