Unifying messy communities: learning social justice in educational leadership classrooms

Abstract

Learning about social justice is far different from engaging in the emotion‐laden work of learning social justice. Frequently, instructors of aspiring educational leaders find that when social justice content is introduced, the adult classroom becomes a messy community, filled with untidy and unexamined viewpoints, multiple stereotypes, and carefully crafted biases. Transforming perspectives about critical social justice issues seems an insurmountable task. This article draws on the work of Mary Parker Follett, particularly her principles of unifying, to examine instructional practices that foster a self that can weave itself in and out of raced, gendered, and classed relationships, and in turn, gain competence to unify school communities.

Keywords:

• educational leadership
• social justice
• transformative learning
• intellectual teamwork
• self‐contribution