Abstract
What you will find inside this provocative text: It should come as no surprise, as the collection of papers in this book show that we are up against it. Killing those we despise has become normative in the political minds of both the powerful and the marginalised. Framing those who are weakest as the architects of their own disgusting state ... it has become commonsense in all societies, rich and poor... Any counter-hegemonic project that seeks to rethink social justice and reframe educational leadership is, without question, confronting the enormous power of ordinariness, the commonsense about power, inequality and violence. Jonathan Jansen By virtue of an institutionalized hegemony, the formal scales of social justice are informally tipped in favor of the "haves," leaving the "have-nots" at a distinct disadvantage, and often powerless and defenseless to effect change for themselves or others. How do these critical perspectives change our vision of public schools and of educational leadership? ...Suddenly, new dynamics emerge: race matters, gender matters, sexual orientation matters, ethnicity matters, class matters, power matters, money matters, agency matters, etc. Jeffrey Brooks Historical research is one important way that individuals can heighten their awareness of their own conditions. It can inspire understanding that compels social justice leadership on account of one's status. It can assist potential allies in learning how their own lived experiences of oppression might translate to persons experiencing subjugation along other social dimensions. It can accomplish these ends by provoking us to ask better questions, to understand larger patterns more deeply, and to find inspiration in the infinitely varied stories of human frailty and courage. Jackie Blount To illustrate social injustice we have to look backwards. But our graduates are not going to work in the past. So it isn't enough to work to undo socially unjust practices ... The more complex question surrounding making social justice a thematic anchor and connector of an educational leadership program is the requirement to create within a theoretical framework in which the effects of a curriculum can be empirically assessed, and which can serve as an holistic and heuristic model by which graduate students can engage in a gestalt view/approach to leading schools and school systems in very different directions than before. Fenwick English.