Centering the Margins: Critical Pedagogical Practices in an Educational Leadership Doctoral Classroom

Critical theories position knowledge and experience as partial and contextual, argue that ideologies both construct and restrict power; and utilize structural analyses to understand power and privilege. Within the critical theory tradition, critical race theory specifically analyzes society through the lens of anti-Black racism (Bell, 1992). I draw on a specific concept within critical race theory, intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) as my pedagogical framework. I do so not to minimize the importance of other concepts within critical race theory, nor to minimize the importance of other concepts in critical theory more broadly, such as standpoint epistemology (sitpoint epistemology per Garland-Thomson, 2002). In fact, some of these concepts show up in my pedagogical choices. However, my focus on Black women is intended to decenter the implicit normalizations of race as Whiteness, gender as maleness, and education as White femaleness.

Crenshaw (1989) roots intersectionality in the legal framework which prevents Black women from being considered as distinct from Black men or White women, even though their experience of discrimination is not captured by anti-Black or antiwoman discrimination. Further, Crenshaw argues that the multiply marginalized are rendered invisible within existing frameworks. Crenshaw builds on a tradition of Black feminists, including bell hooks, Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, and the Combahee River Collective who wrote, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (as cited in Taylor, 2017, pp. 22–23). These words do not mean that a focus on Black women is exclusive of other multiply marginalized identities, nor to position Black women’s oppression in comparative relationship to other groups’ oppressions. Instead, the statement highlights the primacy of the intersecting racism and sexist systems which supported the growth of our modern society and how together, they form a complete enough system of oppression that dismantling them in tandem create the conditions for freedom for all. Following in the tradition of Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, hooks, Truth, and Cooper, I chose to center the experiences and voices of Black women in the course, starting with the conceptualization of the course and carried through text selection, artifact design, the privileging of relationships and dialogue, and my own positionality as a White woman and as a White female faculty member.

My deliberate centering of Black women was intended for the benefit of both Black female students and non-Black/non-female students. Black women are historically marginalized, rendered invisible, and have their contributions erased and plagiarized (Baskaran, 2021; hooks, 1994; Smith et al., 2021). Black women enter the doctoral classroom with the experience of having themselves been marginalized, rendered invisible, and having their contributions erased and plagiarized, while also being unlikely to have seen Black women adequately represented in their experiences in previous classrooms (Haynes et al., 2016; hooks, 1994). Finally, “African American/Black women’s leader experience and ‘herstories’ are absent from the educational leadership perspective” (Alston, 2012, p. 127), so the centering of Black women is critical within this discipline. The deliberate centering of Black women in the doctoral classroom can create a sense of belonging, confidence, and a worldview that resonates with Black female students (Dee & Penner, 2017).

Centering marginalized voices is important for learners with minoritized identities and also for students with dominant group identities. Students with dominant group identities develop and exercise their sociological imagination (Mills, 1959) when they engage in coursework that centers minoritized voices, which leads to a greater sense of social responsibility and promotes the ability to consider multiple perspectives (Ghidina, 2019; Huisman, 2010). Salim, an AfricanAmericangrad- uate student, poignantly describes the way their classmates failed to consider Black women’s perspectives in society, writing, “My White classmates did not seemingly reconsider what it means to be Black and a woman in our society” (Lison & Salim, 2002, p. 247). Salim argues for the importance of centering Black women for the learning of students with dominant group identities, theorizing that “Maybe if we had read Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought, some reconsideration would have occurred” (p. 247). My primary motivation in centering Black women’s voices and experiences in my pedagogy is to benefit Black women, and this choice also benefits non-Black/nonwomen students in their development as justice-oriented educational leaders.

There is considerable literature on the importance of creating a “safe space” for discussing and learning about topics related to race, exclusion, or other constructs in critical pedagogy (Cleaver Simmons & Fellabaum, 2016; Young & Laible, 2000). Safe spaces are generally described as those in which students agree to deescalate conflicts, to assume good intent in their classmates, and to agree to disagree rather than belaboring a point of conflict. The intent behind such safe spaces is to ensure that no individual student feels so challenged emotionally that they retreat (emotionally, physically, or mentally) from the course content.

Safe spaces appear to be based in the concepts of fairness and equality. However, a classroom environment in which all feel equally free to participate and in which all perspectives are held to have equal weight discounts the histories and outcomes of some perspectives. Few would debate the existence of social class, and yet conversations about race tend to take the form of debates about the existence of racism or of documented relationships between inequitable outcomes and race. Valuing all contributions equally creates safety for misinformation and false debate; it creates unsafety for the people most negatively impacted by that misinformation and false debate.

Similarly, a deeper look at the concept of safe spaces reveals power imbalances and a centering of the dominant group and their epistemological stances. As Leonardo & Porter (2010) argue, “the term ‘safety’ acts as a misnomer because it often means that White individuals can be made to feel safe” (p. 147) while for students of color “either they must observe the safety of Whites and be denied a space that promotes people of color’s growth and development or insist on a space of integrity and put themselves further at risk” (p. 140, see also Applebaum, 2009). This tendency is exacerbated by White teachers’ continued discomfort participating in or facilitating conversations about race (Liou & Bernstein, 2018; Picower, 2021). To choose so-called neutrality or silence is an active choice to continue centering the dominant group and dominant epistemologies. As Kendi (2019) states, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” (p. 19). Following this logic, to remedy the past and present systemic erasure of Black women in classrooms requires the systematic present and future privileging of Black women in classrooms.

To facilitate a meaningful conversation about race and gender, those most marginalized must feel the “safest” (Currier, 2021, p. 349). My centering of Black women is most importantly intended to promote the safety for Black women in my classroom, even as I recognize that few spaces are actually safe for Black women. I intend for my non-Black/non-female students to have “their status (or the status quo) questioned” which can result in those students feeling “unsafe” (Currier, 2021, p. 349). I intend for such experiences to serve as a “disorienting dilemma … when students experience discomfort in the area of a prior assumption” (Mezirow, 2000, as cited in Cleaver Simmons & Fellabaum, 2016, p. 122). My centering of Black women is also intended to engage my non-Black/nonfemale students in productive struggle (Leonardo & Porter, 2010) or a pedagogy of discomfort (Liston & Salim, 2002) around race, gender, and the intersection of the two constructs.

I had occasion to be in conversation with a well-respected, well-established international scholar in the field of educational leadership. Upon hearing some of the work that the learners with whom I get to work were doing, they remarked with surprise that this work was occurring at a regional comprehensive university without a history of doctoral education. I have reflected on this moment repeatedly, and each time I am struck with a mix of emotions, including pride and confusion. Regardless of my own personal responses, I began to realize that this story needed to be told more broadly, in part to disrupt the rankings in our own minds around which institutional types do what. Guided by the concept of critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021) and inspired by the collaborative autoethnographic dissertation that germinated in this course (Wright et al., 2020), I began to construct this piece. I relied primarily on formal documentation, including emails I sent and receivedjour- naling and course-planning documents I created, course session transcripts, my and students’ course writings, and the dissertation referenced above. In addition, I asked questions of the students involved in the course to help clarify details. Finally, I shared this piece with the students, asking for their feedback and reframing. In short, while this is an individually authored autoethnography, it is also a collectively-informed autoethnography.

This course was formed as an elective course in a decade-old EdD in educational leadership program located at a regional comprehensive university in the United States of America. Initially, student cohorts were predominantly or entirely White and more than 50% male. In more recent years, two thirds of the admitted students have been women, 60% of whom were White and 40% were Black; approximately 70% of the male students have been White while 30% were Black or Middle Eastern. Our students ranged in age from their early 30s through their early 60s. The gender and racial diversity of the students is juxtaposed against the faculty, who reflected the broad trends of educational leadership faculty (Hackmann & McCarthy, 2011): entirely White, male, and senior (through age, experience, and/or a combination of both) educational leaders.

I am a White, tenured, female professor, and at the time of this course, I was in my late 30s. I began my career as a well-meaning White woman teaching in a predominantly African American school district and identify as someone working toward justice. My gender, explicit commitment to justice, and relative youth position me as an outsider from the rest of the program faculty and closer to our students. My intent is to describe my process and decisions without prescribing a particular set of strategies for others to utilize (Dentith & Peterlin, 2011; hooks, 1994; Thompson & Gitlin, 1995). I heed the word of Dr. Cynthia Dillard (2012), who writes, “while I am continually asked by teachers to prescribe a model or a precise Ubuntu pedagogy, here too, I will resist: There is no simple nor … singular model for being, developing, or creating community” (p. 102). Similarly, I lift up this account of centering the intersection of Black women in a doctoral classroom while naming that other specific practices grounded in the same or similar intersections might look vastly different than those I chose and describe here. Conversely, any specific practice can be misused to sustain the status quo. As singer/song- writer Ani DiFranco (1993) writes, “every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.”

Early in the first semester of her program, Neisha, a Black woman, asked me to meet with her individually. She was considering elective courses and after reviewing our courses, did not find courses of interest to her. At the time, our EdD curriculum had a required course focused on multicultural leadership, but no other courses explicitly centered questions of power and identity. Neisha explained her desire for our program to offer courses that affirmed her identity as a Black woman. Together, she and I mapped out some potential concepts centered on the experiences of Black women leaders.

Shortly after that conversation, Meg, a White woman who was also in her first semester of coursework, also met with me. In a strikingly similar conversation, she asked why there was no course in our program centering the experiences of women. I shared my recent conversation with Neisha and that I was developing an elective course focused explicitly on Black women leaders. Meg was enthusiastic about the idea. Based on the initial interest of Neisha and Meg, I began to complete the steps required to offer the course which included approval from the program director and dean as well as the creation of a syllabus. As the approvals worked their way through the system, I began to read widely and to conceptualize what this course would contain.

In my past work in our doctoral program, I have learned the importance of using articles as supplements to texts. We use an executive model where students meet only a few times over the semester. Past doctoral students have highlighted the usefulness of a textbook or textbooks to provide a sense of continuity across class meetings and to unify concepts. My search for course texts, then, began with a search for books that could be used as the spines of the course.

I was unable to locate a traditional text focused on feminist leadership that incorporated the following elements that were important to me for this course. First, there is a tension between navigating existing (patriarchal) structures and critically viewing those structures to dismantle them. I wanted to ensure that a structural critique was deeply embedded in the course. Second, our program defines educational leadership quite broadly; we have P–12 and higher education leaders in the program, and we also have learning and development leaders working in industry, nonprofits, human resources consultation, and health care. While many texts contextualize feminist leadership within a specific industry, I wanted to select texts that focused on feminist leadership itself rather than its application within a specific industry.

Further, I wanted a text that featured a raceconscious feminism. I would not select a text that had a section or chapter on race. A resource that uses race as an additive component communicates that unless race is explicitly centered, the experiences of White people are universally applicable. Choosing a raceadditive approach definitionally sidelines Black students, requiring them to exercise their sociological imaginations (Mills, 1959) to place themselves and their experiences onto a framework that does not consider them. In tandem, it reinforces to White students that their experiences are normalized, further rendering Whiteness invisible. I decided that as both a political and pedagogical choice (Applebaum, 2009; Currier, 2021; hooks, 1994), I would explicitly center Black women’s experiences in the course and if anyone had to exercise sociological imagination, it would those of us who were non-Black and/or nonfemale.

Choosing course texts is always an act of choosing which voices will be privileged and which will be silenced (Applebaum, 2009; Dillard, 2012). I chose five books and students were asked to read three of the five; in combination, the texts centered a race-conscious feminism, critiqued patriarchal structures, were applicable across industries, and privileged Black women’s voices. Together, these texts explore feminist leadership from the margins (Ellsworth, 1989; hooks, 2015). The single text that explicitly includes White women does so in the context of allyship with Black women. I included this so that a White student reading it might be helped in “unpack[ing] [their] uncomfortabilities [sic] with race and identity across our racial/ethnic differences” (Dillard, 2012, p. 89).

I asked students to choose their final course book of three options; in doing so, I asked students to enter into curriculum development (Brookfield, 2015; Sweet, 1998). I assumed that all the texts would be selected by at least one student, intending that our conversations would be necessarily cross-text and we would co-construct an emergent shared knowledge (Currier, 2021). Because all five identified course books were written from a first-person perspective, I hoped students would feel invited to make connections to their own lived experiences as well as prior disciplinary knowledge (Martinez-Freeman, 2015).

I echo the faculty described by Roland (2020) as I also seek to expand, I seek to expand the definition of what counts as scholarship in terms of both format and content. Autoethnography, creative writing, podcasts, and other forms can all appropriately communicate scholarly information, often with a broader audience than forms such as a 5-chapter written dissertations or an article in a peer-reviewedjournal. Among the books I selected, several make their scholarly contributions using a conversational, informal, and autoethnographic forms. My intent was that engaging with the texts would broaden students’ understandings of scholarship (Hall & Burns, 2009).

After selecting readings, I turned to creating a syllabus. To continue to center Black women as I did with the readings, I knew I needed to structure the course around “the type of dialogue long extant in the Afrocentric call-and-response tradition whereby power dynamics are fluid, everyone has a voice, but everyone must listen and respond to other voices in order to be allowed to remain in the community” (Collins, 1990, p. 237). To begin that dialogue, I knew I needed to ask students to engage with the texts in a narrative format. In addition, I knew that because the student group was likely to be diverse in terms of industry, age, race, gender, and even progress through the program, I needed to create an opportunity for students to demonstrate mastery of the course objectives as appropriate to each individual student to each individual student, reinforcing the appropriateness of designing course assignments and activities around dialogue.

Our class was scheduled to meet four times for four hours each with the expectation of significant work between class sessions. I knew that each of the texts I had selected contained multitudes of possibilities for reflection, deconstruction, and discussion, so I wanted to be sure to plan carefully² for our class sessions to ensure that the directions our conversations took were fruitful and did not recenter Whiteness or patriarchal systems. While I wanted students to respond affectively to what they read and experienced in the course, I also wanted them to have the opportunity to process initial responses to the readings prior to coming to class so that our in-class discussions might deal with the deeper ideas encountered in the readings (Zarate & Mendoza, 2020). To achieve this outcome, I asked students to submit a seminar preparation (an open-ended response which simply asked students to select one major idea from each article or chapter in an assigned reading, explore the idea, and end with a series of questions they hoped to consider in class) 3 days in advance of our class. In the days between submission and each class session, I read and responded to each of their seminar preparations, as well as shared my own seminar preparation with the entire class.

In the syllabus, I emphasized ways of being, such as, thoughtful preparation before course meetings, active engagement throughout the entirety of each course meeting, the posing of thoughtful questions, and offering suggestions and feedback. I wanted to establish that this course would proceed from the assumption that we would co-construct knowledge together and to emphasize the responsibility that each member of the class brought to our collective learning (Croft et al., 2009; hooks, 1994).

The final assignment in the syllabus was the culminating project, a project in which I hoped each individual student could follow up on a previous construct that had captured their attention, conceptualize and implement actions built on the course content, or otherwise define their own approach to synthesizing course content. I was deliberately open-ended and vague in my description of this assignment, which I quote below from the syllabus:

In previous courses, I had experimented with somewhat open-ended assignments intended to allow the learner the creativity to demonstrate mastery in their own way, including asking students to choose from a menu of assessment options including the option to develop their own assignment. However, this culminating project this was the first time I had been so entirely open-ended. Beyond providing the student learning outcomes and this description, I gave no direction on the assignment. When students asked for clarification, I turned their questions back to them. For example, a student asking “Are you looking for a research paper?” was answered “You might choose to write a research paper. You might also choose to create something else.” When someone asked, “Could we complete this project collaboratively?”, I answered “You might choose to complete this project collaboratively. You might also choose to complete this project individually.” I stressed to the students that I could not possibly imagine the many directions and forms their culminating projects might take and that I refused to limit them with the parameters of my own imagination. Many students struggled to trust that I didn’t have a prior assumption about the form or content their assignments would take or that I didn’t have a rubric or grading checklist in mind that I simply hadn’t shared with them. Instead, Iwas attempting to communicate the importance of “self-reflectivity to understand how well learning goals are being met” (Currier, 2021, p. 350; see also Zarate & Mendoza, 2020) and was fighting years of apprenticeship into an educational context that values compliance.

Analyzing syllabi reveals the choices instructional and curriculum designers made to include and exclude topics within a discipline (Gorski, 2009) as well as a faculty member’s “teaching goals and experiences with social justice” (Roland, 2020, p. 283). I intended that the syllabus would help students recognize the centering of Black women in our coursework as well as my intent to minimize power imbalances between myself and the other learners in the room, though I knew that I would always carry institutional power with me (Currier, 2021; Ellsworth, 1989; hooks, 1994; Thompson & Gitlin, 1995). I deliberately elevated student autonomy into the “syllab[us], recommended texts, and assignments, even when some students resist[ed] this effort” (Brookfield, 2015, p. 19).

In particular, the seminar preparations provided opportunities for students to “challenge their own assumptions, clarify and strengthen their own values, and work on aligning their own behaviors and practice with these beliefs, attitudes, and philosophies” (Brown, 2004, p. 81). In their confidential seminar preparations, students wrote through their frustration and challenge with the readings in a way they might not have in public conversation (see also Zarate & Mendoza, 2020). The use of open-ended reflections authored by each student allowed me, as the facilitator of the course, “to better understand from where students are coming and how [I] can meet their needs” (Young & Laible, 2000, p. 396). Finally, I hoped to indicate to students the importance of their individual contributions to the entire learning community (Croft, Juergensen, Pogue, & Willis, 2018; Martinez-Freeman, 2015) by asking them to pose the questions we might consider together in discussion.

A group of 11 learners (counting myself) gathered for the course. We publicly self-identified as women (10) and one man (all 11 as cisgender); three as Black and eight as White; one as Jewish, some as Christian, some without public religious identity, and some as atheist or agnostic; three as queer; one as disabled; and all were raised to speak English as a first language

Nine students came from across three different cohorts of the doctoral program; the tenth was a master’s student from another college. Many students did not previously know one another; this underscored the urgency I felt in establishing and growing a sense of community in the first class session. As I read their seminar preparations, I jotted down lists of common themes and questions across submissions to select questions and topics that I anticipated would resonate with multiple students. I also specifically privileged questions that addressed complexity. For example, I selected questions that considered simultaneous identities, such as those which centered multiply marginalized identities and those complicating the gender binary. At times, I blended portions of different students’ questions together to create the most space for generative conversation. At no point did I identify who the questions came from, though as the class progressed, individual students chose to proudly highlight questions they’d generated.

My intention for the first 4-hour long class session was to engage with content, but to do so in service of building trust and community. I wanted dialogue to develop between the learners in the room so that our discussions could shift to accommodate emergent ideas and to decenter my own authority in the room. I rearranged the classroom before any students entered, creating a simple circle of chairs facing the middle of the room. The tables were pushed to the outside of the room. This physical set up created the expectation that we would minimize barriers between us; further, we could not rely on simply referencing the materials created by others (such as course texts) instead of engaging with our own experiences, knowledge, and realizations.

I set a flexible agenda which began with introductions, intended to let each individual share what they perceived to be the relevant details of their identity with the class. We then engaged in an extended discussion of how we wanted to interact with one another during the semester. Key ideas that emerged included the desire to be challenged by one another, to focus on combining the theoretical and experiential, to troubleshoot for solutions, and to build on one another’s ideas. I shared the poem “Where I’m From” (Lyon, n.d.) and we spent significant time discussing the poem and free writing in the same style. Using large sentence strips and markers, students each chose their favorite line from their free writing. We used these lines to construct a community poem which remained on our classroom wall for the entire semester; individual lines became shorthand within the course. Finally, we engaged in smaller, more intimate space (paired conversation), then a free-form conversation (whole class), and finally a more intense, focused space (fishbowl) as our trust and comfort with one another grew.

I chose conversation as the primary mode of learning not just for its grounding in Afrocentric traditions (Collins, 1990), but also because it can help form and sustain a sense of community. “Conversation … is about both particular topics and the relationship itself” (Thompson & Gitlin, 1995, p. 142, emphasis in the original). Others echo the effects of conversation as deepening scholarly engagement with content, generating new knowledge, and relationship building (Ellsworth, 1989; hooks, 1994; Martinez-Freeman, 2015; Roland, 2020; Zarate & Mendoza, 2020). Similarly, Dillard (2012) recounted a graduate course she facilitated and recalled how the first quarter of the class was called “The Conversation” (p. 88). This focus on conversation was intended to build relationships to support the learning and engagement that unfolded across the rest of the semester.

I used the seminar preparations as another way to build deliberate relationships with each student. As mentioned above, I wrote individual responses to their seminar preparation documents and also wrote and shared my own seminar preparation document. My comments on each student’s written preparations were occasionally comments or connections to other ideas but were most often questions intended to push the student’s thinking and the contributions they might make in class discussions. In addition, I worked to center questions, rather than conclusions, in my own seminar preparations. These choices emerged from my decision to take an inquiry approach to the course. In fact, the course description was a list of questions as a starting place for the ideas we would consider together. The plan for each class meeting included a variety of pedagogical techniques but the content of the discussions was driven by the questions generated out of my synthesis of the students’ seminar preparations. My inquiry echoes Roland (2020), who names that instructors with an explicit social justice agenda “used probing questions in journal reflections, small group activities, and group discussions” (Roland, 2020, p. 286, see also Dillard, 2006).

Finally, students established relationships in the classroom for multiple purposes. Students established a messaging thread during the first class session which they actively used through and beyond the semester to support one another emotionally, to share about topics related to our course, to reflect on discussions in class, and to plan for collaboration opportunities. The messaging thread established and evidenced the learners becoming “personally invested in each other and in each other’s development” (Young & Laible, 2000, p. 403). Not only did students begin to connect with one another personally and professionally during the class sessions, which subsequently “continue[d] out into the hallways … and into the streets” (hooks, 2010, p. 150), but they also formed connections that carried beyond the end of the course. For example, this course led directly to the formation, writing, and defense of a five-person authored collaborative autoethnographic dissertation on the development of a cross-racial sisterhood of feminist leaders (Wright et al., 2020). In addition, members of the class still consult with one another, years later, for professional advice, to share resources, and to participate in their personal lives. These longer-term outcomes were evidence, as Martinez-Freeman (2015) argues, that “the doctoral classroom” can be “less about the individual and more about the communal” (p. 110).

My Dialogue and Relationships. My interaction in the space itself was also intended to further dialogue and relationships. Roland found “the spatial arrangements” of a classroom “reinforc[e] who [i]s included or excluded” (2020, p. 287). I seated myself among the other learners in the room and participating in two ways: as the agenda-setter/timekeeper and as a contributor to emergent discussions. I intended “to disrupt teacher-student hierarchy and allow for more than one voice or expertise in the room” (Roland, 2020, p. 287). While not discounting the institutional power I brought into the room, my intent was to establish a learning climate that would “enable students to take emotional and intellectual risks toward social justice ends” (Capper et al., 2006, p. 219, see also hooks, 1994; Roland, 2020; Young & Laible, 2000).

Together, the students and I worked to coconstruct a community of 11 learners, even though one of us was the assigned faculty member. My contributions in class and in seminar preparations consisted of my own individual learning, my journey as a leader, and collaborative contributions to our coconstructed and emergent knowledge. These were the same three types of contributions the students were making. In facilitating the course, I emphasized my own use of wait time to ensure that students didn’t become reliant on me to forward the agenda, but rather took the opportunity to shape the conversation themselves. As highlighted by Berry (2010), I was mindful to “tell my stories not just for the sake of telling my stories but always in the context of the curriculum to be delivered” (p. 21). For example, I would add a story from my own leadership if doing so helped complicate or trouble what appeared to be the emerging understanding of a given issue or to bring up an idea that a student had written about in their seminar preparation document but didn’t bring up in class.

As discussed above, I deliberately asked students to coconstruct the learning space and to move toward collaborative approaches and outcomes. I posited that “students were as responsible as … faculty and staff in building the kind of nurturing, supporting space necessary to support growth” (Croft et al., 2018, p. 37), a view supported by research on the role of a faculty member in a critical pedagogical classroom (Ellsworth, 1989; hooks, 1994; Martinez-Freeman, 2015; Roland, 2020; Sweet, 1998; Thompson & Gitlin, 1995; Young & Laible, 2000).

Finally, I was transformed personally and professionally by facilitating and participating in the course. While I entered the course with a disposition toward facilitating courses in the critical pedagogical tradition already embedded in my teaching philosophy and practices, I found that my participation in the course led me to reevaluate and deepen those practices. In their discussion of rehumanizing, critical pedagogy, Jewett and Yanez Medrano (2018) state, “When we, as critical teachers/professors, implement such pedagogy, we are not on the outside” (p. 65), noting that “teachers aren’t invulnerable to … transformation” (p. 70). Multiple students explicitly named my pedagogical practices as parallel to the knowledge we were reading and generating. While I appreciated these comments, I didn’t realize until long after the class ended that I now led in and out of the classroom with greater confidence, intention, and inclusivity. I engaged less in unproductive internal conversations fueled by doubt and imposter syndrome (Clance & Imes, 1978). The practices and perspectives I used in formulating and facilitating this course not only led to transformation for the students involved; as hooks (1994) argued, doing so “aid[ed] [me] in [my] own struggle for selfactualization” (p. 17). In short, while I approached the course through the lens of students’ transformation, I accidentally also facilitated my own transformation.

Educational leaders have an obligation to conceptualize their practice and the outcomes of the institutions they lead through the lenses of diversity, equity, inclusion, and social justice (Jean-Marie et al., 2009). Doctoral study provides a unique time to shape students’ knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In combination, it is critical that educational leadership doctoral faculty enact the pedagogical practices that both resonate with their teaching philosophy and lead to the construction of social justice scholarly identities. This paper described the grounding of a course on women and leadership in an intersectional critical framework centered on Black women, a framework wove through the genesis, structuring, and implementation of the course. The roles of dialogue, relationships, and my own positionality within the space were essential to the enactment of the course.

Anecdotal conversations with students, their written materials submitted for the course, and their contributions made in class meetings suggested these educational leadership students perceived they experienced significant development as social justice-oriented scholars during and perhaps resulting from the course. In addition, the emphasis on collaboration over individualism appears to have significantly impacted the ways in which students engaged with one another both during and beyond the course. Finally, an unintended outcome of these pedagogical practices was my own transformation.

The pedagogical practices that are outlined here and the implications of those practices will require a whole-scale reenvisioning of doctoral education for educational leaders. It would be easy to dismiss these implications for creating new systems and approaches as unknowns, potentially risky strategies. After all, many of the flaws in our current individual and programmatic approaches are known, and some would advocate for the wisdom of a reform approach. A reform approach is based on knowledge of the status quo but also ignores the role of status quo bias, wherein we intellectually minimize the flaws in the status quo precisely because they are known, whereas the possible flaws in the alternatives are unknown. As Samuelson and Zeckhauser (1988) state, “the status quo alternative gains a decision advantage because of the asymmetric position it holds in the decision reckoning” (p. 37). We must pushback against status quo bias and boldly freedom dream (Kelley, 2002; Love, 2023) a more inclusive and expansive educational leadership for justice.

While I worked in a program that was open to critical pedagogical practices and content in the educational leadership doctoral program, this is not the case for many of my colleagues working in other institutions and programs (Porfilio et al., 2019). “Faculty, staff, and departments have few incentives to create and maintain a social justice agenda” (Croft et al., 2018, p. 41), so institutional and program leaders must decide what level of complacency is acceptable absent systemic pressure to embrace social justice. Decades of research have documented the role educational institutions play in perpetuating existing social inequalities (e.g., Kozol, 1991; Love, 2019). These educational institutions have been led by the educational leaders that we have prepared using existing preparation approaches. Choosing to continue existing preparation approaches is not a neutral choice. Doing more of the same is likely to produce the same consistent and persistent educational inequities with which we are already familiar.

Those program and institutional leaders responsible to educational leadership programs must be willing to name current programs and practices as misaligned with supporting the educational leaders we need today and for the future. It will take experimentation; boldness; courage; flexibility; listening to and believing students, their families, and their communities; and a commitment to re-envisioning all aspects of leadership education to produce new outcomes. Some experiments will not work, but grounding the experiments in intersectional approaches will move the field away from the status quo. Only through experimenting with moves away from the status quo will we, as individuals and as a field, discover the practices that result in transformation for our students, ourselves, and our field. Institutional and program leaders must commit themselves to supporting messy moves into the unknown in the pursuit of educational justice.

Individual faculty must prepare themselves to employ critical pedagogical approaches in their planning and in the classroom. Such preparation must begin with education and critical reflection (Brookfield, 2015). Faculty must unearth their own beliefs about teaching and learning and the ways that these two processes interact with questions of power and privilege. Faculty can form learning communities to support critical reflection within and across programs and disciplines. Faculty can engage in autoethnographic research and can partner with students in conducting narrative research around critical reflection for critical pedagogy. Through such practices, faculty must become comfortable with de-centering the ways they were taught and have taught in the past to create space for new possibilities.

The move toward critical pedagogical practices must be accompanied by a shift in a move toward critical content in coursework (Roland, 2020). While this paper details a course centered through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) focused on Black women, learners should experience courses focused on other populations, paradigms, and the logics which construct them (Barcelos, 2019). Research courses could begin with critical, poststructural methodologies as the norm and then introduce more positivist and generalizable methodologies as alternatives. Leadership studies courses could focus on the power of “leading from the middle” and through collaborative approaches rather than perpetuating hierarchical and person-centered approaches. Policy courses could be constructed in community with people from marginalized groups and focus on the harm policies create for groups such as queer students and communities, emergent English speakers and writers, and disabled people/people with disabilities. Such a focus could lead naturally to an emphasis on policy revision, deletion, and creation with avoiding harm as a central tenet. The curriculum itself must be decentered and recentered on the margins in a variety of ways to support critical pedagogical practices and student learning.

The work described above will be challenging and will require continued commitment. Institutions, programs, individual faculty, and individual students will resist moves away from the status quo. There will be moments of discomfort, false starts, and disappointment. But this work is also joy filled. Joy emerges when students realize they have been given permission to learn as their fullest selves (hooks, 1994). Joy resonates when students recognize the power of centering the margins and expanding their imaginations (hooks, 2010). Joy spreads when what is learned in the classroom spreads beyond the confines of a course and permeates the world (hooks, 2003). This work will move us toward mitigating the generational harm that the educational system has been complacent in creating and maintaining, and the mitigation of that harm is incredibly important. But it will also open our system and ourselves to joy.

My own journey of deepening my critical pedagogical practices has brought me immense joy. After almost 20 years in the classroom, I find that the more I challenge myself to create what does not yet exist in my institution and practice, the more passionate my students become; in turn, their passion fuels my own (hooks, 2010). Further, the more I work to create spaces where my students experience healing, the more I myself am healing (hooks, 1994). As I write this and consider the significant and persistent obstacles to justice in our world, what could be more necessary than imagining and enacting joy in our own practices?

I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.