Chapter 10: Social Justice in Middle Passage: The Voyage From Frustrations to Hopes

Within this book, we are being pointed in the right direction. That is, we are learning how to listen and make sense of the administrative voices in and around public schools. But as with most complex educational discussions, the term journey is an apt metaphor, for it allows us to track progress in our own learning. The first task is to understand and create meanings from the focus group voices of principals and superintendents. We know from research that leaders create meanings for their followers and they do so primarily through the use of words (Bogotch & Roy, 1997; Gronn, 1983). For many years, well-known leadership educators such as Roland Barth, Gordon Donaldson, Richard Ackerman, Pat MaslinOstrowski, and others, some of whom have been affiliated with principal centers around the world, have argued that listening is an important leadership skill. To be sure, listening itself is not an easy skill to master. Even when we think we understand the words, phrases, acronyms, contexts, and cultures through which principals and superintendents speak, we all too quickly have experienced how contexts change with demographics, the assignment of letter grades to schools, Adequate Yearly Progress outcome measures, and the personality differences that come each and every time an administrator is replaced. So we begin here by listening carefully and actively.