Cases Inquiry as Critical Praxis: Supporting Intersectionality Within Inclusive Leadership Practices

Abstract

This article illuminates the significance of exploring intersectionalities within inclusive leadership practices through case inquiry as a critical praxis. Five educational institutions engaged in a partnership focused on exploring the lived practices and professional knowledge of school leaders as they worked towards supporting a vision of inclusive education within their individual school communities. These lived experiences were represented in written cases that have been captured in a provincial resource, Exploring Inclusive Leadership Practices through Case Inquiry (Sider, Maich, Morvan, Specht, & Smith, 2018). Mobilizing the knowledge and practices within this resource and supporting exploration of this knowledge and associated practices through a lens of critical praxis has been one of the key knowledge mobilization components of the June 1, 2019 conference, Exploring Intersectionalities for Leadership and School Inclusion, held at the University of British Columbia. This knowledge mobilization event, along with other initiatives, such as the case resource, helped to foster critical dialogue and interrogation related to leadership practices that can support or hinder a vision and enactment of inclusive education within school communities.

‘Be prepared and give it a go!’ Transitions into further education for learners with additional learning needs

“…A case study approach was adopted to allow ‘an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon (the “case”) in depth and within its real‐world context’ (Yin, 2015). This offers an opportunity for knowledge mobilization, whereby findings from research become activated and impact upon policy and practice (Morvan & Smith, 2020). The chosen research design also seeks to explore experiential knowledge of a situation by prioritizing the subjective meanings that participants attribute to a specific context and, in doing so, both provides a rich description and facilitates the participant voice (Chadderton & Torrance, 2011; de Vaus, 2001; Cohen et al, 2011).…”

Leadership development, gender and race: Intersectional insights from South Africa

“…Furthermore, this study also draws on the concept of ‘intersectional identity salience’, which contends that certain situations prompt individuals to categorize themself along identity‐oriented criteria; which results in men and women from different racial groups experiencing different versions of masculinity and femininity, and in turn reinforce competition and assumptions of mutual exclusion between identity groups (Atewologun, 2014). More specifically this study explores organizational LDPs as acute sites of intersectionality in that gender‐ and race identity both separately and interdependently influence experience (Browne & Misra, 2003; Morvan & Smith, 2020). This is done by applying the concept of intercategorical complexity, which uses intersectional identities as the analytical starting point to explain the marginalization of certain groups (McCall, 2005).…”