Leading Against the Grain: The Politics and Emotions of Leading for Social Justice in South Africa

Abstract

This article explores the work of leaders who promote social justice against the grain of public expectations. Employing a biographical lens, it describes a study of White South African principals who consciously and deliberately transform their white schools into racially diverse communities of teachers, learners and parents. It looks at the underpinning beliefs, attitudes and concerns that influence the ways in which these school principals lead their lives and their schools, what motivates their decisions to defy the dominant trends, how they balance competing pressures and tensions, and the consequences of their behaviors.

Notes

¹ I acknowledge, with gratitude, that the inspiration for some of these questions come from a small group of colleagues and friends who constitute the International Leadership for Education Research Network (ILern), funded by the National College for School Leadership in England, and ably led by Andy Hargreaves of Boston College, United States.

² Such studies of inclusive school cultures are rare and pose significant methodological challenges not addressed in this paper; see Melanie Nind et al., (2004). The research reported here is funded in part by the National Research Foundation in Pretoria, South Africa.

³ Not a few Black/White colleagues in South Africa have complained that this is another study of White people, and of a minority group at that. Apartheid schooling is, the critics imply, a White problem and it is their duty to desegregate their schools and to unravel their own wrongdoings.

⁴ Gauteng is the name of one of the nine provinces that constitute democratic South Africa.

⁵ Both the school names and the names of the principals appear as pseudonyms.

⁶ The railway boer, those Afrikaners who worked on the state-owned trains as drivers and conductors, stood as a symbol of the Afrikaner underclass that existed throughout the period of Afrikaner nationalist government between 1948 and 1994.

Thompson, P., & Harris, A. (2004). Leading schools that serve neighborhoods and communities in poverty. Unpublished paper, International Leadership in Education Research Network