Chapter 17: Boundary-Spanning Practices that Support Anti-Racist Educational Leadership

Anti-racist change in schools entails fostering meaningful relationships with diverse school stakeholders and community members. Educational leaders, which include principals, assistant/associate principals, and teacher leaders, are catalysts for organizational change and have the power and responsibility to enact boundary-spanning practices that contribute to emancipatory progress. However, support for educational leaders to navigate and challenge the overlapping racial and organizational boundaries that reinforce White supremacy is lacking. Drawing on a systematic review of literature on anti-racist educational leadership and community partnerships, we identified 44 publications that described boundary-spanning roles and practices of K–12 educational leaders. We found that boundary-spanning practices were common amongst educational leaders and community partners, but boundary-spanning was underutilized as a conceptual frame. In our chapter, we elaborate on the ways in which scholars describe boundary-spanning in equity-oriented educational leadership, theoretically, empirically, and pragmatically. Drawing from the themes of our analysis, we conceptualize five anti-racist boundary-spanning practices of educational leaders: promoting (un)learning of deficit-based views, challenging White privilege and color-evasiveness, fostering intentional dialogue, cultivating organizational power-sharing, and mobilizing coalitions for systemic change. We conclude with a brief discussion of boundary-spanning practices within our own work.