Purpose: The purpose of this research article is to illustrate the value of including students’ voices in educational leadership and research practices, to more fully understand what students are actually experiencing in transformative learning spaces, and to determine what we might learn from them in terms of how to improve both leadership practice and our research efforts. Method: The first 2 years of an ongoing ethnography used participant observation, photography, a student survey, and focus group interviews to discover and describe the emergent school culture and the lived experiences of female secondary students in a single-sex public magnet school. Findings: Findings illumine why the young women in this study chose to attend an all-female STEM academy and what makes their schooling experiences at this particular school different from their prior experiences. Students’ voices also bring to the fore unintended negative consequences associated with attending a school devoted to social justice praxis and point to the ways leadership practices must evolve to provide an even more powerful, transformative learning space that better meet students’ needs. Implications: Findings have implications for leadership preparation programs as well as continuing professional development. That is, true transformative and social justice leadership is not static or linear. Rather, it is a fluid process that is dialectical and requires adaptation based on new knowledge and interaction with people and with systems. Moreover, findings implicate the need for educational leadership researchers concerned with social justice to include listening to students’ voices in their research endeavors to more adequately capture the lived experiences of students as well as promote more inclusive research and practice.
The purpose of this article is to illustrate the value of educational leaders intentionally including students in shaping the policies and practices that affect young people’s schooling experiences. First, we share the literature on student voice and introduce Principal Orientations for Critical Youth Educational Leadership as a conceptual model, advocating ways leaders can engage young people in school governance. Second, we share an empirical example from our research that holds promise to build caring, equitable, and responsive classrooms and schools by centering students’ voices. Finally, we consider what our findings mean for educational leadership preparation programs.
The purpose of this "From the Field" article is to share the tentative results of communityengaged research investigating the impact of Restorative Justice Discipline Practices on persistent discipline gaps in terms of race, gender, and special education identification.
The purposes of this article are to illumine the racist genealogy of gifted education policies and practices in the United States, to demonstrate how deficit discourses continue today, and to provide personal examples from the field of how educators can begin to question the status quo, resist taken-for-granted assumptions, and alternatively make substantive changes at the local level. I also aim to demonstrate how giftedness is an example of whiteness as property, or unearned white privilege, that, unintentionally or not, maintains a social caste system in schools.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.