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Leadership for inclusion: what can you do?
Leadership for inclusion: what can you do?

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4.1 Understanding the best option

There are various terms which can be applied to practitioners who are seeking to lead on issues of equity in their everyday lives. One such is Teacher activist. Teacher activists often draw upon feminist and critical pedagogies with a strong focus on social justice. For example, a study by Marttinen et al. (2020) explored how an activist approach could name, critique, and transform inequities associated with school-aged girls’ understanding of themselves and the world around them and the effect it has on their involvement in physical activities. They concluded that at heart of the activist approach was a depth of trust and a capacity to cultivate that trust, and a recognition that it was a process of small steps.

Such activism can be undertaken individually within a learning context but it can also be experienced in a wider, collective context. Let’s consider an example of ‘pedagogical resistance’ from an early years setting in Scotland. The practitioners named their approach ‘Lived Stories’, and it was intended to serve as an alternative to the local authority’s top-down ‘tick-box’ methods for assessing the children. They wished to capture a holistic and more impressionistic portrait of children, illustrating the richness and complexity of their educational experiences.

Activity 9: Knowing best

Timing: 60 minutes

Read the following article: McNair, L. J., Blaisdell, C., Davis, J. M., & Addison, L. J. (2021) ‘Acts of pedagogical resistance: Marking out an ethical boundary against human technologies [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’, Policy Futures in Education, 19(4), pp. 478–492. (Read from p. 483 – p. 489 starting at: Research methods.)

As you read make notes about:

  • The competing values which are at play.
  • The necessity to compromise to achieve goals.
  • The ways in which voices are silenced.
  • The fears you might have in working in a way that subverted what was being expected of you by central authorities.
  • How simple it would be to introduce a new way of working in a system with which you are familiar.

Comment

The practitioners’ had a different view of how to evaluate learning and development and their values were therefore in conflict with the dominant national model. The power of the system to evaluate and judge the setting however made them pull back from a full engagement with the possibilities presented by the Lived Stories approach, including not engaging with the voice of children within the process. This acceptance of compromise allowed them to enact processes that concerned them and to develop their practice. The Author of this course recalled a more extreme version of this stepping back from the challenge in a study about 6 English Language Arts pre service teachers in the United States (Cook, 2021). They recognised injustice and inequity and wished to address such issues as teacher-activists. However, they soon adopted a hands-off approach that the researchers called ‘passive activism’. This allowed them to shield and distance themselves from the visibility and vulnerability that accompanies activist work. As their initial topic became more concrete, they became less directly involved and put themselves at less personal risk. Cook recognises however that such passivity was not necessarily a bad thing but could be seen as a necessary first step into civic engagement; a step which mediates the potential risks.

The Author reflected on the times when they have put their necks on the line for something they believed in. The nature of risk is something which has come up repeatedly in this course. Risk is a fundamental aspect of any consideration of formal and informal leadership; after all even seeking to avoid risk is itself a risky undertaking.

In seeking to put ourselves forward as advocates we put our own sense of identity on the line; we are aligning ourselves with others or with an idea, which by its nature is not the dominant idea of the time – otherwise why would we be having to advocate for it?

It is likely that there will be push back of some kind or further complications in moving a proposal forward. This can have an impact upon our relationships with others in ways which may not be predictable. However, the purpose of taking such a risk is the possibility of a positive outcome. It is also about one’s own sense of empowerment; a moment in which you are agentive in search of a broader social ambition. Of course, the range of issues which need confronting is huge. Our systems are, after all, profoundly unfair for many people. In many ways the things which need challenging may feel overwhelming. This perhaps is part of the problem identified in the paper by Cook; people want to make profound and significant changes, but the reality is that this may be nearly impossible to achieve. This brings us back to the notion of the possible; the importance of small steps and small victories.