Youth activism, the broad-based leadership among young people who seek to challenge and build alternatives to oppressive social systems, has spread across the nation and globe. Yet youth activism is often hemmed in at school gates, particularly by school leaders charged with maintaining efficient school environments.
Focus of Study:
This article explores the roles and responsibilities of educational leaders committed to justice and asks: What does it mean to lead schools in times of (re)surgent youth activism?
Research Design:
To address this urgent question, we conducted an interdisciplinary review of youth participation in social movements that spans the fields of civic engagement, learning sciences, and social movement studies.
Findings:
We argue that youth activism offers profound sites of consequential learning, generative insights for organizational redesign, and imaginative visions for school and societal transformation. Based on these contributions, we offer the notion of educational leadership as accompaniment: a participatory praxis of leadership reflection and action that foregrounds an ethic of listening, attends to dominant forms of exclusion, and stands in solidarity with youth and their struggles for a more dignified and just world.
Conclusions/Recommendations:
Leadership as accompaniment challenges the deeply rooted managerial imperative in school administration scholarship and deepens opportunities for realizing existing leadership principles, such as those evident in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL). We conclude by discussing the social and material risks impacting those who exercise leadership as accompaniment, and consider what responsibilities such risks demand of education researchers.
AdamsF. (1975). Unearthing seeds of fire: The idea of Highlander. John Blair.
2.
AkomA.ShahA.NakaiA.CruzT. (2016). Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)2.0: How technological innovation and digital organizing sparked a food revolution in East Oakland. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(10), 1287–1307. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2016.1201609
AndersonG. L.ChangE. (2018). Competing narratives of leadership in schools: The discursive turn in organizational theory. In JamesC.KruseS. D.ConnollyM.Eddy SpicerJ. H. (Eds.), The SAGE international handbook on school organization (pp. 84–102). SAGE. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781526465542.n6
5.
AndersonG. L.GrinbergJ. (1998). Educational administration as a disciplinary practice: Appropriating Foucault’s view of power, discourse, and method. Educational Administration Quarterly, 34(3), 329–353. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X98034003004
6.
AnyonJ. (1997). Ghetto schooling: A political economy of urban educational reform. Teachers College Press.
BajajM. (2018). Conceptualizing transformative agency in education for peace, human rights, and social justice. International Journal of Human Rights Education, 2(1). https://repository.usfca.edu/ijhre/vol2/iss1/13
11.
BaldridgeB. J. (2014). Relocating the deficit: Reimagining Black youth in neoliberal times. American Educational Research Journal, 51(3), 440–472. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831214532514
12.
BaldridgeB. (2019). Reclaiming community: Race and the uncertain future of youth work. Stanford University Press.
13.
BallS. J. (1990). Management as moral technology: A Luddite analysis. In BallS. (Ed.), Foucault and education: Disciplines and knowledge (pp. 153–166). Routledge.
BertrandM.RodelaK. C. (2018). A framework for rethinking educational leadership in the margins: Implications for social justice leadership preparation. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 13(1), 10–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/1942775117739414
17.
BiestaG. (2015). What is education for? On good education, teacher judgment, and educational professionalism. European Journal of Education, 50(1), 75–87. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12109
18.
BoggsG. L. (2012). The next American revolution: Sustainable activism for the twenty-first century. University of California Press.
19.
BrooksM. P. (2014). A voice that could stir an army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the rhetoric of the Black freedom movement. University Press of Mississippi.
20.
BurasK. L.RandelsJ.SalaamK. y. (Eds.). (2010). Pedagogy, policy, and the privatized city: Stories of dispossession and defiance from New Orleans. Teachers College Press.
21.
CallahanR. E. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency: A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. University of Chicago Press.
22.
CammarotaJ. (2015). The praxis of ethnic studies: Transforming second sight into critical consciousness. Race Ethnicity and Education, 19(2), 233–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2015.1041486
23.
CammarotaJ.FineM. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge.
24.
CarterP. L.WelnerK. G. (2013). Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give every child an even chance. Oxford University Press.
ChangE. (2022). Curricular countermovements: How white parents mounted a popular challenge to Ethnic Studies. Harvard Educational Review, 92(2), 157–181. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-92.2.157
27.
ChangE.GlassR. D. (2022). Toward a just leadership learning ecology: A CHAT-IT analysis of the Highlander idea. Educational Administration Quarterly, 58(3), 419–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X211054835
ClayK. (2019). “Despite the odds”: Unpacking the politics of Black resilience neoliberalism. American Educational Research Journal, 56(1), 75–110. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218790214
30.
ClayK. L.TurnerD. C.III. (2021). “Maybe you should try it this way instead”: Youth activism amid managerialist subterfuge. American Educational Research Journal, 58(2), 386–419. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831221993476
31.
CohenD. K.NeufeldB. (1981). The failure of high schools and the progress of education. Daedalus, 110, 69–89.
32.
ColyvasJ. A.PowellW. W. (2006). Roads to institutionalization: The remaking of boundaries between public and private science. Research in Organizational Behavior27, 305–353. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-3085(06)27008-4
33.
Combahee River Collective. (1977). A Black feminist statement. In MoragaC.AnzaldúaG. (Eds.), This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color (pp. 210–218). SUNY Press.
ConnerJ.RosenS. M. (Eds.). (2016). Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States. Praeger.
36.
CubanL. (1988). The managerial imperative and the practice of leadership in schools. SUNY Press.
37.
CubanL. (2013). Inside the black box of classroom practice: Change without reform in American education. Harvard Education Press.
38.
CurnowJ.DavisA.AsherL. (2019). Politicization in process: Developing political concepts, practices, epistemologies, and identities through activist engagement. American Educational Research Journal, 56(3), 716–752. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218804496
39.
CurnowJ.UttamchandaniS. (2022). Prefiguration as learning. Rapid Community Report Series. Digital Promise and the International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org//handle/1/7666
40.
DacheA.QuayeS. J.LinderC.McGuireK. M. (Eds.). (2019). Rise up! Activism as education. Michigan State University Press.
41.
De JesúsA. (2003). “Here it’s more like your house”: The proliferation of authentic caring as school reform at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. In RubinB. C.SilvaE M. (Eds.), Critical voices in school reform: Students living through change (pp. 132–151). Routledge.
42.
De JesúsA.Antrop-GonzálezR. (2006). Instrumental relationships and high expectations: Exploring critical care in two Latino community-based schools. Intercultural Education, 17(3), 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/14675980600841660
43.
DiamondJ. B. (2012). Accountability policy, school organization, and classroom practice: Partial recoupling and educational opportunity. Education and Urban Society, 44(2), 151–182. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124511431569
44.
DiMaggioP. J.PowellW. W. (Eds.). (1991). The new institutionalism in organizational analysis (Vol. 17). University of Chicago Press.
GamezR. (2020). Learning ethnoracial difference, division, and unity: Schools and the scripting of boundaries in the “New Latinx South” (Publication No. 0000-0003-2751-6739) [Doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University]. Theses and Dissertations, Electronic (ETDs) database, Johns Hopkins University. https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/handle/1774.2/63526
48.
GarciaA.MirraN.MorrellE.MartinezA.ScorzaD. A. (2015). The Council of Youth Research: Critical literacy and civic agency in the digital age. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 31(2), 151–167.
49.
GinwrightS. A. (2010). Black youth rising: Activism and radical healing in urban America. Teachers College Press.
50.
GinwrightS.CammarotaJ. (2006). Beyond resistance! Youth activism and community change. Taylor & Francis.
51.
GlassR. D.NygreenK. (2011). Class, race, and the discourse of “College for All.” A response to “Schooling for Democracy.”Democracy and Education, 19(1), 1–8.
52.
GonzalesR. G. (2016). Lives in limbo: Undocumented and coming of age in America. University of California Press.
53.
GreenT. L. (2015). Places of inequality, places of possibility: Mapping “opportunity in geography” across urban school-communities. The Urban Review, 47(4), 717–741. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-015-0331-z
54.
GreenT. (2017). “We felt they took the heart out of the community”: Examining a community-based response to urban school closure. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(21), 1–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2549
HaleJ. N. (2011). “The student as a force for social change”: The Mississippi Freedom Schools and student engagement. The Journal of African American History, 96(3), 325–347. https://10.5323/jafriamerhist.96.3.0325
57.
HallB. L.CloverD. E.CrowtherJ.ScandrettE. (Eds.). (2013). Learning and education for a better world: The role of social movements. Springer Science & Business Media.
58.
HallH. R. (2020).Ghosts of Black captivity and the curriculum of Freedom Square. In ShieldA. E.ParisD.ParisR.San PedroT. (Eds.), Education in movement spaces: Standing rock to Chicago Freedom Square. Routledge.
59.
HantzopoulosM. (2011). Institutionalizing critical peace education in public schools: A case for comprehensive implementation. Journal of Peace Education, 8(3), 225–242. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400201.2011.621364
60.
HerrK. (2017). Insiders doing PAR with youth in their schools: Negotiating professional boundaries and healing justice. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 30(5), 450–463. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1303213
61.
HollandD.FoxG.DaroV. (2008). Social movements and collective identity: A decentered, dialogic view. Anthropological Quarterly, 81(1), 95–125.
62.
HorsfordS. D. (2011). Learning in a burning house: Educational inequality, ideology, and (dis)integration. Teachers College Press.
63.
HorsfordS. D. (2012). This bridge called my leadership: An essay on Black women as bridge leaders in education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 25(1), 11–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2011.647726
64.
IshimaruA. (2013). From heroes to organizers: Principals and education organizing in urban school reform. Educational Administration Quarterly, 49(1), 3–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X12448250
65.
IshimaruA. M. (2019). Just schools: Building equitable collaborations with families and communities. Teachers College Press.
66.
JaramilloN.CarreonM. (2014). Pedagogies of resistance and solidarity: Towards revolutionary and decolonial praxis. Interface: A Journal for and About Social Movements, 6(1), 392–411.
67.
JonesD.HagopianJ. (Ed.). (2020). An uprising for educational justice: Black Lives Matter at school. Haymarket Books.
68.
JurowA. S.KirshnerB.TorralbaJ. A.TaraboulsiS. E.TeetersL.BuidalliB.DutillyE. (2014). Theorizing learning in the context of social movements. International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org/bitstream/1/973/1/1302-1307.pdf
69.
KabaM. (2021). We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Haymarket Books.
70.
KahneJ. E.SporteS. E. (2008). Developing citizens: The impact of civic learning opportunities on students’ commitment to civic participation. American Educational Research Journal, 45(3), 738–766. https://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0002831208316951
71.
KaplanL. S.OwingsW. A.Countering the furor around critical race theory. National Association of Secondary School Principals, 105(3), 200–218. https://doi.org/10.1177/01926365211045457
72.
KatzM. B.RoseM. (2013). Public education under siege. University of Pennsylvania Press.
73.
KelleyR. D. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Beacon Press.
74.
KhalifaM. (2018). Culturally responsive school leadership. Harvard Education Press.
75.
KirshnerB. (2009). “Power in numbers”: Youth organizing as a context for exploring civic identity. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 19(3), 414–440. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2009.00601.x
76.
KirshnerB. (2015). Youth activism in an era of education inequality. New York University Press.
77.
KirshnerB.GinwrightS. (2012). Youth organizing as a developmental context for African American and Latino adolescents. Child Development Perspectives, 6(3), 288–294. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-8606.2012.00243.x
78.
KoyamaJ. (2017). Competing and contested discourses on citizenship and civic praxis. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 25(28), 1–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.25.2730
79.
LacV. T.FineM. (2018). The good, the bad, and the ugly: An autoethnographic journey on doing participatory action research as a graduate student. Urban Education, 53(4), 562–583. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918762491
80.
LacV. T.MansfieldK. C. (2018). What do students have to do with educational leadership? Making a case for centering student voice. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 13(1), 38–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1942775117743748
81.
Ladson-BillingsG. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt: Understanding achievement in U.S. schools. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X035007003
82.
LewisA. E.DiamondJ. B. (2015). Despite the best intentions: How racial inequality thrives in good schools. Oxford University Press.
83.
LipsitzG. (2008). Breaking the chains and steering the ship: How activism can help change teaching and scholarship. In HaleC. R. (Ed.), Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship (pp. 31–61). University of California Press.
84.
LoveB. (2019). We want to do more than just survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.
85.
LuggC. A.ShohoA. R. (2006). Dare public school administrators build a new social order? Social justice and the possibly perilous politics of educational leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 44(3), 196–208. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/09578230610664805
86.
MansfieldK. C. (2014). How listening to student voices informs and strengthens social justice research and practice. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50, 392–430. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X13505288
MeinersE. R. (2016). For the children? Protecting innocence in a carceral state. University of Minnesota Press.
89.
Mei-SinghL. (2021). Accompaniment through carceral geographies: Abolitionist research partnerships with Indigenous communities. Antipode, 53(1), 74–94. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12589
90.
MirraN.GarciaA. (2017). Civic participation reimagined: Youth interrogation and innovation in the multimodal public sphere. Review of Research in Education, 41(1), 136–158. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X17690121
91.
MurtadhaK.WattsD. M. (2005). Linking the struggle for education and social justice: Historical perspectives of African American leadership in schools. Educational Administration Quarterly, 41, 591–608. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X04274271
92.
National Policy Board for Educational Administration. (2015). Professional standards for educational leaders.
93.
OakesJ. (1986). Tracking, inequality, and the rhetoric of reform: Why schools don’t change. Journal of Education, 168(1), 60–80. doi:10.1177/002205748616800104
94.
OakesJ.RogersJ. (2006). Learning power: Organizing for education and justice. Teachers College Press.
95.
O’BrienK.SelboeE.HaywardB. M. (2018). Exploring youth activism on climate change: Dutiful, disruptive, and dangerous dissent. Ecology and Society, 23(3), Article 42. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-10287-230342
96.
PetroneR.RinkN.SpeicherC. (2020). From talking about to talking with: Integrating Native youth voices into teacher education via repositioning pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 90(2), 243–268. doi:10.17763/1943-5045-90.2.243
97.
PhamJ. H.PhilipT. M. (2020). Shifting education reform towards anti-racist and intersectional visions of justice: A study of pedagogies of organizing by a teacher of color. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 30(1), 27–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2020.1768098
98.
Politics of Learning Writing Collective. (2017). The learning sciences in a new era of U.S. nationalism. Cognition and Instruction, 35(2), 91–102.
99.
RansbyB. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: A radical democratic vision. University of North Carolina Press.
100.
RansbyB. (2015). Students as moral teachers: A survey of student activism and institutional responses. Diversity & Democracy, 18(4), 1–6.
101.
Rincón-GallardoS.ElmoreR. (2012). Transforming teaching and learning through social movement in Mexican public middle schools. Harvard Educational Review, 82(4), 471–490. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.82.4.46751717307t4j90
102.
Rivera-McCutchenR. L. (2014). The moral imperative of social justice leadership: A critical component of effective practice. The Urban Review, 46(4), 747–763. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0297-2
103.
Rivera-McCutchenR. L. (2019). Armed love in school leadership: Resisting inequality and injustice in Schooling. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 18(2), 237–247. doi:10.1080/15700763.2019.1611867
104.
RobillardK. (2018, March25). Santorum: Parkland students should learn CPR instead of marching. Politico. https://politi.co/2GakmAz
105.
RogersJ.TerriquezV. (2016). “It shaped who I am as a person”: Youth organizing and the educational and civic trajectories of low-income youth. In ConnerJ.RosenS. M. (Eds.), Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States (pp. 141–162). Praeger.
106.
RosaJ. D. (2019). Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Raciolinguistics ideologies and the learning of Latinidad. Oxford University Press.
107.
RosenS. M. (2019). “So much of my very soul”: How youth organizers’ identity projects pave agentive pathways for civic engagement. American Educational Research Journal, 56(3), 1033–1063. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831218812028
108.
ScottR. (1995). Institutions and organizations. SAGE.
109.
SerranoU.TurnerD. C.IIIRegaladoG.BanuelosA. (2022). Towards community rooted research and praxis: Reflections on the BSS Safety and Youth Justice Project. Social Sciences, 11(5), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11050195
110.
ShethM. J.SalisburyJ. D. (2021). “School’s a lie”: Toward a critical race intersectional pedagogy for youth intellectual activism in policy partnerships. Educational Policy. https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048211059478
111.
ShieldA. E.ParisD.ParisR.San PedroT. (Eds.). (2020). Education in movement spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square. Routledge.
112.
StinchcombeA. L. (1965). Organizations and social structure. MarchJ. G. (Ed.), Handbook of organizations (pp. 142–193). McNally & Company.
TaylorV. (1989). Social movement continuity: The women’s movement in abeyance. American Sociological Review54(5), 761–775. https://doi.org/10.2307/2117752
116.
TheoharisG. (2008). Woven in deeply: Identity and leadership of urban social justice principals. Education and Urban Society, 41(1), 3–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013124508321372
117.
TillmanL. C. (2004). African American principals and the legacy of “Brown.”Review of Research in Education, 28, 101–146.
118.
TomlinsonB.LipsitzG. (2019). Insubordinate spaces: Improvisation and accompaniment for social justice. Temple University Press.
119.
TyackD.CubanL. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A Century of school reform. Harvard University Press.
120.
TyackD.HansotE. (1982). Managers of virtue: Public school leadership in America, 1820-1980. Basic Books.
121.
TyackD.TobinW. (1994). The “grammar” of schooling: Why has it been so hard to change?American Educational Research Journal, 31(3), 453–479. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312031003453
122.
VossoughiS.GutiérrezK. (2014). Studying movement, hybridity, and change: Toward a multi-sited sensibility for research on learning across contexts and borders. National Society for the Study of Education, 113(2), 603–632. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811411601413
123.
WarrenM. R. (2014). Transforming public education: The need for an educational justice movement. New England Journal of Public Policy, 26(1), 1–16.
124.
WarrenM. (2018). Lift us up, don’t push us out! Voices from the front lines of the educational justice movement. Beacon Press.
125.
WarrenM. (2021). Willful defiance: The movement to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. Oxford University Press.
126.
WarrenM. R.KupscznkL. A. (2016). The emergence of a youth justice movement in the United States. In ConnerJ.RosenS. M. (Eds.), Contemporary youth activism: Advancing social justice in the United States (pp. 39–58). Praeger.
127.
WarrenM. R.MappK. L. (2011). A match on dry grass: Community organizing as a catalyst for school reform. Oxford University Press.
128.
WatkinsM. (2019). Mutual accompaniment and the creation of the commons. Yale University Press.
129.
WeltonA. D.HarrisT. O.La LondeP. G.MoyerR. T. (2015). Social justice education in a diverse classroom: Examining high school discussions about race, power, and privilege. Equity & Excellence in Education, 48(4), 549–570. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2015.1083839
