Fostering Movements or Silencing Voices: Learning from Egypt and South Africa, Leading Against Racism

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the role of educational leadership in promoting and/or challenging racism as an intentional outcome of schooling. We focus on Egypt and South Africa, two countries uniquely framed as both deeply divided by race, religion, and/or class and as models of resistance and conscious activism. We draw upon experiences working as, or with, school principals in South Africa and Egypt to reveal how the context of education is negatively shaped by schooling practices that foster race and class-based inequalities. Using personal narratives of school principals, we situate educational leadership as core to understanding how Western educational reforms are structured, conceived, and enacted within Egyptian and South African contexts. This analysis sheds light on how educational inequalities are reinforced and justified by contexts of educational leadership and how efforts to resist are institutionally silenced.

Toward an Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership: A Literature Review

“…Yet in many cases, Indigenous peoples came to resist the colonizing school contexts, and reconnect with their own unique ways of knowing and learning. This reconnection was more successful in some Indigenous contexts than in others, and despite decolonization efforts in both Western and non-Western colonial education systems, colonial ways of education are still ingrained in schooling practices and are often reproduced (Marsh & Knaus, 2015; Shizha, 2013).…”

“…However, curricula that fail to include the voice and experiential knowledge of Indigenous peoples can lead to “cultural repression, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, and devaluation” (Shizha, 2013, p. 1). This often happens within global economic and educational reform movements that neglect the cultural practices and needs of Indigenous youth and communities and thus contribute to normative assumptions of learning and leading (Baker & Campbell, 2013; Hallinger, 2004; Marsh & Knaus, 2015), while diminishing opportunities for the generation of co-constructed knowledge.…”