Abstract
Introduction
The evasion of race and racism in educational practice (Annamma, et al., 2017) continues despite calls to address the disparate educational opportunities for and treatment of children of color and children living in poverty (Alexander, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Nguyen et al., 2019; Utt & Tochluk, 2020). As educators, we are called to consider what it means to accept educational responsibility at a time when efforts to effect change have been hampered by implicit racism; explicit evasion of color, race, ethnicity, and racism; intense backlash against anti-racist action; and good intentions weighed down by lack of capacity for change. In this conceptual paper, we are interested in the ethical foundations of school leaders’ educational responsibility, considering the widespread evasion of both race and racism. We argue that predispositions toward caring among school leaders are insufficient for the projects of equity leadership and anti-racist education.
In our work studying practicing school leaders and graduate students preparing to become school leaders (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019, 2021; Gunzenhauser et al., 2021), we have come to appreciate the widespread support for the role of educators in caring for the holistic experiences of students (Noddings, 1984; Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2010; Starratt, 2004). At the same time, we encounter widespread evasion of racial difference and the effects of racism on the educational opportunities of students (Annamma et al., 2017; Blackmore, 2010; Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019). Consequently, we argue that the combination of abstract notions of caring for all children and race-evasiveness leads educators to misplaced empathy (Todd, 2003; Watson, 2018) and uncritical assumptions of sameness (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004; Thompson, 1998, 2004; Touré & Dorsey, 2018). Particularly among educators from white and middle-class backgrounds, the result is impersonal caring (Code, 1995), which reproduces racist power relations and reinforces standardized and competitive notions of educating children, wherein responsibility for children’s educational experiences is conflated with accountability for test scores (Biesta, 2004).
In this paper, we work toward a different vision for educational leadership in the current educational climate, a vision characterized by caring, race-consciousness, and communal (rather than individualized) responsibility (Freire, 1990/1970; Furman, 2004; Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018; Smylie et al., 2016). We ground communal responsibility in caring ethics that incorporates race-consciousness and relational knowledge of children, their needs and interests, and the hopes and dreams of educational communities. We argue that ethics grounded in individualized responsibility (or left unarticulated) is a barrier to effective leadership. We propose deepening educational leaders’ engagement in caring through narrative ethics, primarily through engaging with Black womanist theory and traditions of African-American struggle for equity and justice (Bass, 2012; Fraser-Burgess et al., 2021; Green, 2004; Watson, 2018). We contend that the impulses for caring evident in school leaders, while often insufficient, can be built upon by critiquing the class-based and color-evasive conceptual grounding of caring and engagement.
In the following, we built toward our conceptualization of race-conscious caring. First, we address what it means to be responsible and how communities care for racialized and marginalized students. Next, we explain narrative ethics and race-conscious caring as foundations for school leaders’ work for equity and justice. Finally, we conclude with suggestions for building a communal ethics of responsibility, including such practices as perpetual, critical, and self-reflexive study of one’s personal history; the study of community histories; and enacting narrative ethics through networks of critical caring.
What Does it Mean to be Responsible?
First is a question about how to enact responsibility in anti-racist leadership practice. Educational leadership scholars have addressed responsibility as a component of leadership ethics and paired it with both individual and community caring (Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2010; Starratt, 2004; Strike, 2006). In addition, such concerns are reflected in the considerable work on culturally responsive leadership, social justice leadership, and moral leadership, particularly among scholars of color (Bass, 2009; Brooks & Arnold, 2013; Gooden, 2012; Gooden & O'Doherty, 2014; Khalifa, 2018; Khalifa et al., 2016; Theoharis & Haddix, 2013). Interest has recently converged among these leadership areas as scholars have addressed the effects of systemic racism on social injustices, and race-conscious alternatives to the evasion of race and racism are becoming more prominent in leadership research.
Moreover, attention to race, racism, and caring are more visible in the field’s latest standards. The concepts “care” and “caring” appear multiple times in the leadership standards in the U.S. (National Policy Board for Educational Administration, 2015), most strongly in Standard 5: Community of Care and Support for Students, including in this particularly relevant substandard: [Effective leaders] [c]reate and sustain a school environment in which each student is known, accepted and valued, trusted and respected, cared for, and encouraged to be an active and responsible member of the school community. (p. 13)
The choice of the concept “cared for” appears intentional as a particular kind of approach to leadership ethics evident in school leadership theory (Furman, 2004; Louis et al., 2016; Shapiro & Stefkovich, 2010; Starratt, 2004), as various educational leadership scholars have stressed the central importance of caring as the paradigm approach to leadership ethics.
Less prominently, attention to inequities based upon race is also now present in the standards. It is important to highlight that while “racism” is not mentioned in the standards, “race” is mentioned as part of Standard 3, Equity and Cultural Responsiveness: [Effective leaders] [c]onfront and alter institutional biases of student marginalization, deficit-based schooling, and low expectations associated with race, class, culture and language, gender and sexual orientation, and disability or special status. (p. 11)
Indeed, prior versions of the leadership standards have been criticized for evidencing “a conflation of culture, climate, and school culture; a sidestepping of race and race language, and an underdeveloped conceptualization of social justice” (Davis et al., 2015, 336).
To avoid continuing to side-step race, race language, and racism, we suggest that school leaders and those who prepare school leaders think of caring and anti-racist practice together. To do so, school leaders need a strong and specific notion of responsibility. In our formulation, a communal notion of responsibility is vital to leadership practice. To care for students is not solely an individualized practice; the structural effects of racism are too powerful. Instead, the school leader needs to put structures and supports in place to make responsibility a process of collective caring. Needed is a community-based ethics of caring and community-based knowledge, each discussed in detail below.
Communal Responsibility
The context of policy and practice around our current time in the United States has distorted the notion of responsibility as a privatized and economically competitive concept (Furman, 2004). As Biesta (2004) observed, when accountability policy took hold of education policy internationally, the concept of responsibility was rhetorically and conceptually co-opted through the implementation of high-stakes accountability policy. Responsibility (for students) was confused with accountability (for test scores) (see also Fielding, 2001; Fraser-Burgess, 2020; Gunzenhauser, 2012). As Biesta argues, the primary relation in education should be between teacher and student, and that relation deserves protection and enhancement in schools. For equity work to promote democratic goals of inclusion, expansion of opportunity, and social justice, educators need to attend to the quality of the pedagogical relations that they develop with all of their students (Gunzenhauser, 2012). Again, we need these relations not to be standardized or overly individualized but grounded in a healthy set of communal relations.
Unfortunately, communal relations come into conflict with the logic of neo-liberalism that drives many efforts for systemic reform (Biesta, 2004; Lipman, 2011). Highly individualized economic relations between parent and school (along with vaguely defined relations of control between school and state) overshadow the teacher-student relation. These economic relations start to guide the actions of both parents and educators; this is evident in practices that encourage schools to compete for students (Lipman, 2011). Within schools deemed to have less competitive test scores, these economic relations promote whatever practices will raise test scores, such as narrowing the curriculum to tested subjects and focusing intently on students whose scores are just below proficient (Booher-Jennings, 2005; Hamilton et al., 2007). In these scenarios, the school becomes not a community working toward the education of all children but a group of actors strategizing to achieve performance targets (Gunzenhauser, 2012). The individualized logic of market relations (Biesta, 2004; Fielding, 2001) is evident in school personnel’s protecting their school from the threat of being labeled as low-performing, being taken over, or being reconstituted. While rallying to protect a community’s school from being closed or taken over could be considered an act of communal responsibility, that action could be taken merely to preserve individuals’ jobs or reputations. The more responsible and communal action would be to work as a community to protect and enhance the integrity of the educational experience of the children attending the school. As a more faithful communal response, educators might rally to protest the overuse of standardized tests (Rivera-McCutcheon, 2021), work against curriculum constriction, and demand better working conditions for themselves and fairer educational structures and practices for their students (Gunzenhauser, 2012, 2017).
As another example, imagine a well-funded school with a small population of students of color that advertises its high test scores. Leaders may deny racism exists within its walls and systematically ignore the experiences of its students of color, who repeatedly report overt and implicit racist actions by fellow students. Should racist incidents become public, the logic of individualized responsibility would drive school leaders to blame individual actors and to release statements denouncing the racist behavior, claiming it inconsistent with the school’s valuing of diversity, minimizing the particularly racist animus, and prioritizing the school’s reputation (Ahmed, 2012; Bridgeforth, 2021; Hardie & Tyson, 2013). Alternatively, leaders acting with communal responsibility could instead address the systemic conditions that continue to support racism, such as taking responsibility for delayed action on overt racism and more subtle and race-evasive actions and structures that place image ahead of education.
In examples such as these, we need to promote communal responsibility – rather than adopting a failed neo-liberal logic that attempts to change systems through competition. As Michael Fielding (2001) argues, “Because responsibility is primarily a moral, not a technical or contractual notion, it both elicits and requires a felt and binding mutuality that does not depend upon the hierarchical arrangements so typical of accountability” (p. 700). An ethical shift in the thinking of school leaders is needed to eschew competitive logics and instead focus on the core moral relations of educational practices. This ethical shift can be thought of as a move from practice to praxis: relationally grounded, systemic, and critically reflective practice (Freire, 1990/1970). Structural problems that have led to inequity – primarily cultural and institutional racism – need to be centered so that responsibility for solutions rests with everyone involved. A school leader needs to think of community as a process rather than a product (Furman, 2004), a project of building the capacity of everyone in a school community to work together, engage in dialogue, and listen to marginalized voices.
A school characterized by communal responsibility is a learning community that takes its moral purposes seriously and exists to sustain its community (Fielding, 2001). Fielding argues for such schools as communal and person-centered: If we apply this framework to schools, not only will they become more overtly educative in their intentions and their daily work, but the arrangements we devise to enable the schools to fulfil and demonstrate their democratic responsibilities towards the communities they serve will also be educative, engaging, inclusive and imaginative. (p. 705)
We reason a shift is required in school leaders’ thinking to a more communal notion of responsibility that elevates, protects, and enhances the pedagogical relation between the teacher and the student – without falling back into the trap of making the individual teacher the sole party responsible for the educational experience of students.
Looking more closely at the pedagogical relation and the notion of responsibility is an effective starting point. The relation itself, characterized as a complicated relation that deserves our attention, invites consideration of the dynamics of power in the particular relation between the teacher and student (Britzman, 1998; Todd, 2003). For example, one could contrast the relations evident in Paulo Freire’s (1990/1970) distinction between banking education and liberatory or problem-posing education. In praxis that prioritizes the preferred liberatory education, the pedagogical relation is one of mutuality of student and teacher, wherein the teacher and student are both learners and worthy of respect as knowing subjects. By combining communal responsibility with a race-conscious perspective (as we discuss later), school leaders are more likely to understand structures of marginalization for students of color and thus better situate responsibility to create systemic changes.
Responsibility and Community Knowledge
Next is addressing how a school leader can build a sense of communal responsibility. Breaking responsibility into two semantic components – response and ability – one can begin to conceptualize responsibility as having the ability to respond to the wants and needs of others (Starratt, 2004). Breaking it down in such a way surfaces a couple of suppositions. First is that there is something to respond to, a particular want or need that the responsible person understands, appreciates, and can interpret with some level of accuracy. Second is that the responsible person is capable of responding. These two aspects of responsibility suggest that mere interest in responding to others is insufficient: one must be attentive to needs, be able to recognize them, and know how to respond appropriately (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021).
The challenge of responding to systemic racism should highlight the limitations of expecting individual educators to bear responsibility for educational equity by themselves. To avoid the trap of individualization, we should expect responsibility to be extended collectively and communally – collecting together various persons in action for the benefit of the entire, interdependent community. This approach may come as a relief to an educator who believes that in order to respond to all students in their charge, they must understand each student thoroughly and have a full set of expertise to draw from in order to respond to all those needs. We need no more of these super-heroic images of the energetic educator who rises above the mediocrity of their wizened colleagues to finally reach students.
We understand that collective action is hard work. Yet, we need ways for school leaders to cultivate responsibility in teachers as groups of educators and members of school communities who can work together and create collective capacity for responding to systemic racism. To counter the individualism of the educator hero, there are academic and cultural traditions to draw from, notably the principle of Ujima or collective work and responsibility from the African-American holiday tradition of Kwanzaa (Mayes, 2009) and other notions of communal responsibility narratively described as a component of Black feminist thought (Collins, 1990) and womanist ethics (Cannon, 1988). These traditions have been previously connected to education by many theorists (Bass, 2016, 2020; Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2004; Dillard, 1995; Fraser-Burgess, 2020; Fraser-Burgess et al., 2021; Noblit & Dempsey, 1996; Parsons, 2005; Roseboro & Ross, 2009; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004; Thompson, 1998, 2004; Valenzuela, 1999; Watson, 2018).
For her part, sociologist Patricia Hill-Collins (1990) made personal accountability part of her Black feminist standpoint epistemology, making a distinction about the value of knowledge that comes from women who have strong and experiential claims to the knowledge they espouse. For Collins, the stronger knowledge claims are those trusted by communities; she argues that African American communities trust those who take full responsibility for their knowledge claims and have the experiential and lived knowledge to support those claims. Trusting knowledge without those assurances presents a danger to those made vulnerable in institutions such as schools.
Drawing from experiences of continual struggle for liberatory education, Donyell Roseboro and Sabrina Ross (2009) name teaching as coming from “a permanent state of resistance” (p. 35) that requires collective rather than individual effort: This is a liberatory ethic of care based on collective work and responsibility, not individual effort, worth, or merit. It is an ethic of care infused with love, humility, passion, and power. But, most of all, it is an ethic of care that must be political, that is rooted in an understanding of the home and the spiritual as politically creative spaces. (p. 36)
As Roseboro and Ross argue, responsibility ultimately is for racial uplift, and so any individual action is done in the larger context of the project of liberation.
Required then for a notion of communal responsibility is appreciation for the larger social context in which individual actions are placed and the ultimate goals of the praxis. Leaders need to understand the specific positioning of their work in relation to history and a clear sense of their position in relation to the communities in which they are serving (Yosso, 2005). Both privilege and marginalization have histories, and leaders need to appreciate their places in both. Thus, a school leader wishing to build communal responsibility is not only conscious of racial difference but also is able to recognize and respond to racial inequities and discrimination with a sense of caring. As Roseboro and Ross (2009) assert, communal responsibility requires race-consciousness – to which we turn next.
How Do Communities Care for Racialized and Marginalized Students?
To answer the next question, we need to adapt the ethics of caring for the specific project of anti-racist leadership. Enacting communal responsibility through caring requires articulation of the limitations of caring theory as initially articulated in developmental psychology and philosophy of education and to critique the unexpected complicity of caring with perpetuating racist structures and systems. Caring theory has been widely influential in education, and education scholars have greatly expanded its initial formulations in the work of such scholars as Carol Gilligan (1979; cited more than 62,000 times as of 2022 in Google Scholar) and Nel Noddings (1984; cited more than 16,000 times as of 2022 in Google Scholar). The emergence of relational ethics has been a significant development in ethical theory, with many feminist theorists centering the quality of the relation between one-caring and the cared-for, instead of the dominant traditions in Western meta-ethics: abstract principles derived from reason, utilitarian concern for achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, and the cultivation of character through virtuous acts (Noddings, 1984).
The ethical caring imperative is toward proximal others in education settings, characterized by engrossment and motivational displacement and drawing on the memory of natural caring (Noddings, 1984). While caring theory is lauded for its critique of patriarchal norms in theorizing, much more still needs to be done to make the core insights of caring applicable in work against racism (Fraser-Burgess, 2020; Green, 2004; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004; Thompson, 1998, 2004; Valenzuela, 1999). As the following section addresses, what emerges from the acknowledgement of limitations of caring ethics in relation to race-consciousness is an aspect of impersonal caring that can be addressed by educators.
Race-Consciousness
Race-consciousness is a primary assumption of this work, and it needs at this point some explanation. In prior work, we have addressed the value of race-consciousness for leadership practice (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019) as a corrective to the widely popular and tenacious evasion of race and racism in schooling practice (Annamma et al., 2017; Bonilla-Silva, 2014). In our formulation, race-consciousness is centered on the significance of race as a social construct with historic (Trotter & Day, 2010), cultural (Morrison, 1992), legal (Bass, 2019), and philosophical import (Mills, 1998). We start with the assumption that race and racism have material effects on the lives of real persons. As Roseboro and Ross (2009) stress, the material realities of white supremacy and racism mean that the truth of domination should not be up for discussion, and action should not be subject to delay for proof by colleagues who would deny it. Such efforts detract from the acceptance and enactment of anti-racist and liberatory work. Leaders need to recognize the allure of the evasion of race and racism and help others – as part of communal efforts to reckon with living history – to stand strong in race-consciousness and opposition to racism. Further, as a component of individual and group identity, race is a source of strength, resistance, and moral value. Race-consciousness invites dispositions of inquiry and attentiveness, humility and respect. This applies not just in urban centers, but in all school contexts, including contexts where race-evasiveness proves to be a fundamental feature.
Genuine Caring
The evasion of race and racism detracts from caring, making caring impersonal and less genuine. This fault is to be expected, because limitations in caring arise when the caring relation lacks its required quality of connection. Lorraine Code (1995) names “impersonal caring” as the approach to caring on behalf of others without knowledge of the issues and concerns of others. Code characterizes much social science on the experience of women as engaging in impersonal caring and articulated without respect for women as “knowing subjects” but as objects of knowledge. As applied to education, impersonal caring occurs when teachers and school leaders believe they know the best interests of their students but lack the relational knowledge to understand the needs and interests of their students. They treat students as objects rather than knowing subjects. Echoing two key concepts of Noddings’ (1984) original formulation of caring, impersonal carers are unable to establish relations characterized by engrossment and motivational displacement. Relational knowing comes from treating others with respect, living alongside them, engaging together in meaningful work, and coming to appreciate what is most important to their lives (Welch, 1990). This level of interaction requires time, commitment, and humility, much more than good intentions, which often can lead to miscommunication and misplaced actions intended to be caring.
Similar concerns have been raised about acting out of empathy (Watson, 2018). While we advocate for the importance of empathy in leadership practice, there is a noted tendency for persons, especially those in higher positions of power, to assume they understand the emotions and needs of others, when in fact, they have merely interpreted them through their own standpoint and personal history; they have projected their own lives onto others (Todd, 2003). A school leader who avoids engaging with others about how race and racism have contributed to their experiences cannot act from empathy. The leader needs to learn more about the needs and interests of students and families from identities different from themselves. In Todd’s (2003) formulation, educators should strive to learn from others, rather than about others, the difference being that there is tremendous value and ethical import in educators not assuming they know or fully understand the experiences of others, but instead that they are in the position to learn from their differences and be open to serving needs and interests that are not fully understood. Being open always to learning from others should invite sharing in the responsibility for action.
Impersonal Race-Evasiveness
Impersonal caring is especially notable in the example of the educator who proposes to care for all children equally and claims not to “see” color, but who is actually (and actively) evading color, race, and racism (Annamma et al., 2017). Impersonal caring emerges from assumptions that all children are the same and that an educator’s memory of being cared-for (crucial to Noddings’ [1984] ethics of care) is sufficient for understanding the needs of children they encounter. An educator drawing on limited experience of caring in their own life may not understand that children’s experience of caring could be significantly different from their own, particularly across race and ethnicity (Lopez Kershen et al., 2018).
Moreover, an educator who considers racial difference insignificant to their own history may make deficit assumptions about children of color (Blackmore, 2010). In addition to limiting caring to an individual act of responsibility, as we suggest above, these incorrect assumptions project one’s own experience onto others, and when enacting empathetic feelings, project one’s own emotions onto others. In school buildings with largely minoritized populations of students and a predominantly white teaching staff, this disconnection could lead to substantial instances of misapplication of empathy; for instance, color-evasive educators with similar backgrounds could encourage each other to project their shared assumptions onto an entire student body. This danger of misplaced empathy is particularly problematic, considering that in the 2017–2018 school year, 78% of public school principals were white, 11% Black, 9% Hispanic, and 1% Asian (NCES, 2020). Further, the same misplaced empathy can occur in schools with a small population of students of color (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021) and a predominantly white teaching and administrative staff. The culture in such settings lends itself to teachers embodying a color-evasive caring approach, leading to the systematic practice of misplaced empathy (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019).
In both types of settings, these actions not only create a mismatch of understanding between educator and student, but further lead to barriers to establishing meaningful relations when the educator as carer acts on their misplaced empathy. One could say that empathy becomes sympathy, but in any event it leads to ineffective practice (Watson, 2018). Educators project deficit perspectives on children (Yosso, 2005) if the one caring expects a child to respond to their caring efforts in certain ways and the child responds in ways unexpected by the educator. Drawing from misplaced empathy, the educator may perceive the child as ungrateful, rather than realizing there is misunderstanding and disconnection.
Unable to become engrossed in relation, impersonal carers are unable to think or act past their own presuppositions about how students feel, how to care about them, and how students should respond to their attempts at caring. In Noddings’ (1984) language, this is a more complex example of the failure of one-caring to engage in motivational displacement. The caring we suggest is needed cannot be completed unless the motivations of the cared-for are known, honored, and supported. While the motivation to care for a racialized student may be sincere, caring remains abstract, because the one-caring has not done the work that needs to be done to build the relation with the student (Lopez Kershen et al., 2018; Valenzuela, 1999).
To build relation, the educator needs to engage, certainly, but also needs to know the larger social and historical context of race and racism. Doing so, the educator should gain an asset-based understanding of students and communities of color, including the longstanding resistance to racism. Without a strong relation backed by considerable knowledge, caring cannot be received by the cared-for, and the relation between the educator and student is a compromised relation. Recognizing the limitations that can exist for school leaders when enacting caring ethics–informed by impersonal caring and race-evasiness–requires an approach that can help leaders focus on genuine caring.
Coming to Narrative Ethics and Race-Conscious Caring
Exploring experiences with racism and racial difference is particularly relevant for caring as an ethical theory, because caring relations are cultivated through experience, and according to Noddings (1985), ethical caring requires the memory of natural caring relations. Multiple researchers and theorists have grounded the theory in varied epistemological traditions and academic disciplines, whether from the empirical, psychological approach by Gilligan; the philosophically phenomenological approach by Noddings; the embodied nature of caring (Hamington, 2015); or the aesthetic approach by many Black womanists (Green, 2004). The limitations of the initial formulations of caring are the presumption in Gilligan’s case of a single trajectory of development through themes of caring and in Noddings’ case, the lack of broad consideration of experiences and contexts of caring. Since these earlier formulations, embodied, aesthetic, and historically situated approaches to caring have enabled an expansion of caring as an embodied ethics, building the conceptual basis for it not through abstract ethical reasoning but by expanding the narrative resources of ethical thinking (Bass, 2012; Green, 2004; Hamington, 2015; Roseboro & Ross, 2009; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004).
Narrative Ethics
Narrative ethics is an alternative to conventional approaches to ethics (Nash & Yang, 2016). Rather than taking an abstract, theoretical approach to ethics, the emphasis in narrative ethics is placed on how ethical choices draw from and enhance one’s history, character, priorities, and life aims; the emphasis is on the story of being in the world and being in community. While all those components are important to various other approaches to ethics, in narrative ethics there is specific importance given to coherence, contextual understanding, and moral imagination, which applies to the narrative’s author as well as the reader. Narrative ethics draws universally applicable theories about right action from the lives of individuals and/or from the imagined lives of literary figures (Welch, 1990). This is an older, aesthetic form of knowing about the good, the good life, and right action (Coles, 1989; Green, 2004). To address the limitations of theoretical approaches to ethics instruction, some ethics educators have turned to a narrative approach to ethics instruction as a way of helping students and professionals enact a praxis of equity and justice in ways that are morally meaningful to their journeys as individuals and members of shared communities (Nash & Yang, 2016). Moreover, narrative ethics has a longstanding tradition among subjugated persons struggling to survive, thrive, and assert their humanity in an unjust and inequitable world. It is particularly well represented in activist and civil rights struggles and is well grounded in African-American literary and philosophical traditions (Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004).
As a holistic approach to ethics, narrative ethics helps avoid the tendency to place caring in opposition to justice. This binary opposition emerges from a critique that caring emphasizes proximal relations rather than the individual’s contribution to more just relations in society as a whole. The abstract and analytic effort to put the concepts of caring and justice in dialectic with each other will not be our approach, because caring and justice should work simultaneously (Bass, 2012; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004). Green (2004) argues that this dialectical approach appeared to be the case initially in Gilligan’s formulation of caring, placed in tension to the formulation of justice as articulated by Lawrence Kohlberg. But doing so falls into the trap of following the logic of the dominant tradition. For Kohlberg, justice was understood as an abstract principle, and in principle-based ethics, the moral choice is the one that better serves the principle of justice, and the richer, more morally mature rationale for action is the one that appeals most rationally to the universality of principle. One could argue that for many of Gilligan’s subjects, the abstraction of justice, not justice itself, was most at issue. Gilligan’s and subsequent theorists’ work in caring ethics provide an alternative, such that through caring relations, we (as persons, as educators) can advocate for more socially just opportunities and conditions for all persons. Justice is in other words material rather than abstract, and materially evident justice is what many people refer to as “social justice” (Patel, 2016).
If caring is placed in service to social justice, it makes available to current educators communal practices of caring that have sustained communities for generations (Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004). In their historical research, Vanessa Siddle Walker and Renata Tompkins (2004) demonstrate that teachers and principals in Southern segregated African American schools served in the roles of counselor, encourager, benefactor, and racial cheerleader, roles deemed essential to enacting a caring community. In these roles, caring was always understood as being in service to social justice.
As Bass (2012) demonstrates in her contemporary study of African-American women school leaders, sometimes a caring approach is the most appropriate way to enact social justice in a particular situation. In her study, school leaders provide narrative justification of times when “caring trumps justice,” when the most just and caring response is to bend or ignore rules that would subject students to unjust consequences. This can be as straightforward as exercising discretion in a response to student behavior or as complicated as breaking the letter of the law that, if revealed, could lead to the leader being legally culpable. In this sense, caring necessitates risk, raising the stakes of the work, but grounding it in the caring and political clarity required of the relation (Bass, 2012; Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002).
Learning From Narrative Ethics
Similarly to our redefinition of responsibility, then, new and embodied forms of leadership ethics are called for—articulated, enacted ethics that take into account the leader’s history, positionality, and reflective ways of being in the world (Blackmore, 2010). In contrast to dominant, abstract ethical notices, the narrative ethics of womanist ethics draws from narrative sense-making of experience (Green, 2004, p. 61). Working from Gilligan’s notice of women articulating moral decision making in a different voice, Green proposes moral action “in a different room,” in which Black voices are heard “on our own terms” (p. 61). A narrative approach to ethics recenters the experiences of those with embodied understanding of racism. Stories of teachers and leaders working against racism are relevant, vital learning tools for such work. Frames drawn from ethical theory help articulate meaning from narratives, conveying the ethical work that goes on in these “different rooms.” For instance, readers and hearers of narratives may be placed in the position as witnesses of narratives and may be challenged to re-construct their ethical stances accordingly. As Martha Ritter (2008) argues, witnessing entails acknowledgement that one hears an account, recognizes the author, and (drawing from Iris Marion Young) responds with “moral humility.” With moral humility, the task of the witness is to understand the experience and be open to experiences that might challenge the experience of the witness.
For our purposes in this conceptual theory, we are most concerned with witnessing differential experiences of race and racism and their impact in caring ethics. More genuine caring in service to race-consciousness requires experience, reflection upon that experience, and challenges to one’s suppositions. Suppositions that one cares for all students equally or as individuals are faulty. While caring can be found to be a rather common ethical position for school leaders to articulate (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021), knowing how to care is another thing entirely. We suspect this is why race-conscious praxis is a challenge for school leaders without backgrounds and experiences engaging racial differences. While school leaders may understand in the abstract sense the need to care for all children, without the capacity for enacting that caring, school leaders will fall short. Leaders need to understand the needs and interests of racialized and marginalized children and families, to see their individual and community assets, to act in ways that convey genuine caring to those receiving the caring, and to follow through with additional school-based practices that make caring consistent.
We have strong reason to believe that experience with racial difference matters greatly, both in terms of positionality and professional background. This is evident in the literature cited throughout this paper, our teaching of leadership courses, our professional development work, and our empirical work studying school leaders (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019, 2021; Gunzenhauser et al., 2021). School leaders’ positionalities in terms of race, gender, and class (among other positionalities) are part of their dispositions and ethics (Blackmore, 2010), especially when their positionalities contribute to them taking either deficit perspectives or asset-based perspectives on the children in whatever communities they work – whether they be urban, suburban, or rural. As noted in a review of anti-racist programs, while work on the individual person is needed, community-centered approaches to praxis are also needed (Lynch et al., 2017). As Yosso (2005) argues in her development of the concept of community cultural wealth, positionality and background experience enable appreciation and engagement of assets within communities and guard against assumptions of cultural deficit of communities, which is especially troubling and limiting in dominant perspectives about people of color (and people living in poverty).
Community-Based Caring
As we have argued throughout this theoretical paper, race-conscious leadership ethics should be embedded in work with communities. It is an embodied practice with continuity between prior experience and current context. A school leader needs to seek out and engage all communities that make up a school, not just the dominant ones. Whether their schools are in urban, suburban, or rural settings, school leaders need the determination to seek out and to experience difference in its many forms. They need to embrace learning beyond their own limited experience about the wants and needs of all the children and families in their care. In particular, a race-conscious leadership ethics requires a disposition akin to Todd’s (2003) notion of a pedagogy of ignorance (her response to the limitations of projection in empathy), in which the educator operates from the assumption of not assuming knowledge of others and instead is interested in learning from others.
In light of the limited empirical research basis on race-conscious caring ethics in leadership (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021), there is a need to understand more fully what communal responsibility looks like in practice. Leaders who practice strong community engagement make connections with community organizations, extend school activities into communities, build opportunities for community involvement in schools, and foster inclusive cultures in their schools. They are conscious of their schools’ narrative histories in their communities and seek to understand how communities make meaning about the role of the school in their neighborhoods (Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004). In addition, they address the isolation of marginalized persons and communities within their school buildings, proactively addressing issues rather than reacting defensively when members of their school community challenge exclusionary practices. Among their teachers and other school personnel, leaders need to build capacity for engaging with difference, extending that effort also to parents and other members of the school community (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021). This capacity may be especially vital in schools that experience demographic shifts and the enrollment of increasing numbers of children of color. In such settings, leaders need to cultivate a narrative of ethical embrace and forestall teachers’ nostalgia for the homogeneity of the past, especially since the homogeneity may very well have been characterized by exclusion.
Knowing how to care for all children in their school communities is not systematically evident in school leaders (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021; Khalifa et al., 2016). Nevertheless, history provides substantive examples of schooling and leadership practices that sustained Black schools that organized themselves around principles of caring and justice through decades of professional struggle for equitable opportunities and resources for children attending segregated schools (Noblit & Dempsey, 1996; Quigley & Mitchell, 2018; Siddle Walker & Snarey, 2004). As these authors have shown us, community-based caring means transcending the barriers of the school building and having a clear vision of how children’s experience within the school building relates to and is continuous with their lives outside. The school leader does not have individualized responsibility for what goes on in their building but is part of a network of caring persons and organizations that have concern not only for the educational performance of children but their overall experiences and life trajectories. Further, being part of networks of schools and districts advocating for children and families builds community caring. Historically significant and conceptually distinct, communal responsibility traditions are available for appreciation and expansion in our current context and have the benefit of already having proved successful.
Conclusion
We conclude with an emergent framework for race-conscious caring leadership ethics that promotes communal responsibility and informs anti-racist praxis. The framework is composed of three analytic themes: (1) perpetual engagement of growth, (2) the quality of caring relations in community, and (3) the value of narrative ethics for building capacity.
First is that leadership ethics requires perpetual engagement of growth. Experience and community connection matter a great deal, both in positionality and professional background. As Blackmore (2010) argues, “our own biographies inform the ontological and ethical assumptions that effect cross-cultural, racialised, and gendered relation” (p. 655). Echoing Yosso’s (2005) articulation of community cultural wealth, a school leader’s positionality and background experience provide context for appreciating and engaging assets in communities and set up distinct relations of caring, making community-based caring an embodied ethics that embraces material experience, history, and culture. It is a perpetual orientation toward work that requires humility and self-reflexivity. As a team of authors from three distinct racial, cultural, and professional backgrounds, we experience how our positionalities contribute to our caring relations in our professional settings and how our positionalities have contributed to our work together. We also acknowledge the limitations of our positionalities, especially as three cisgender men, for framing the boundaries of a race-conscious leadership ethics.
Similarly, school leaders should critically reflect on their positionalities and the strengths and limitations they provide. They should seek to know the material, real-life effects of racism and other forms of subjugation that students and families experience to ensure that racialized and marginalized students are not pushed beyond the boundaries of love and outside of communities of care (Duncan, 2002). Resistance traditions are rich with examples of successful practices that are available for leaders to adapt to their current contexts, and some principals are enacting these practices currently (Flores, 2018; Gunzenhauser et al., 2021; Khalifa, 2018; Rivera-McCutcheon, 2021). Essential for any leader is learning from histories of communities, their continual struggle against subjugation, and the wisdom of veteran educators (inside and outside of school) who have succeeded in genuine caring. Such educators could be found in community organizations and spiritual groups or among retired educators. It is also important that leaders not be constrained to those holding formal teaching roles.
Second is the importance of the quality of caring relations, owing to the prevalence and variation of impersonal caring relations (Code, 1995) in perpetuating the school leader’s power over students of color. The genuine care called for in the literature is quite often lacking among the principals who evidence minimal or no culturally responsive leadership (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021; Khalifa, 2018). As a growing body of literature affirms, leaders with the knowledge, experience, and dispositions to engage students in respectful and culturally responsive relations are vital (Khalifa et al., 2016; Louis et al., 2016; Parsons, 2005). Emancipatory frameworks, including abolitionist frameworks based in radical love (Love, 2019), radical care (Rivera-McCutcheon, 2021) or a “praxis of politicized care” (Watson, 2018, p. 375), draw from communal, womanist traditions. In contrast, color-evasive approaches to caring (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2021) perpetuate the erasure of students of color and reinforce the power of the school leader, veiled behind a benevolent facade.
Third is a turn to narrative ethics for learning and developing communal caring, and it comes with a caution. Drawing from womanist ethics among African-American theorists, any attempt to incorporate a culturally grounded and specific ethics runs the danger of appropriation, misapplication, and erasure. As cisgender male authors especially, it is important to remind ourselves that womanist ethics arose because dominant perspectives left Black women out of the conversation about ethics, including conversations about the lives of Black women. There is, in short, much to learn from narrative ethics, and a learning-focused and respectful disposition needs to be held firmly in place. One practical way to enact narrative ethics is through networks of critical caring, in which leaders share their stories of anti-racist work. Witnessing provides one potential approach to learning from narratives so that leaders’ ethical perspectives can incorporate their understanding and connection to others’ lives and experiences. Black, indigenous, and people of color in educational communities need to be centered rather than having their work and wisdom appropriated. Narrative ethics should not be merely a theme for a professional development session. Superficial engagement with narrative ethics is likely to foster voyeurism and to reinforce cultural and racial stereotypes. Leaders need to learn from the wisdom of others and rewrite their own narratives to position themselves as learners and more genuine carers.
While in our past work we have found abstract fairness predominantly among leaders from white and middle-class backgrounds, it should be noted that leaders of color can also practice the power of impersonal caring in various settings (Gunzenhauser et al., 2021). That is why we need to pay attention to race-conscious approaches to caring for everyone serving as a school leader (Flores, 2018; Fraser-Burgess, 2020). A race-conscious school leader “takes an asset-based approach with students of color and families, creates opportunity for their staff to engage in discussions about race in order to raise cultural awareness, and continually searches for opportunities to grow their own racial awareness” (Flores & Gunzenhauser, 2019, p. 963). A race-conscious leader actively works against the marginalization of all students of color, regardless of the percentage of students of color represented in the school.
Without a race-conscious approach to ethics, leaders tend to rely upon an abstract moral notion of fairness and a view of the educational system as meritocratic (Blackmore, 2010), providing rationales for inequities in educational outcomes based on student effort, background, or family support. When they do so, they perpetuate racism. To be anti-racist, a race-conscious ethics is necessary, but we should note it is not sufficient – it should lead to changes in praxis, structures, and systems. In our conceptual framework, caring is foundational and neither neutral nor universal in its application; its enactment is informed by power relationships, personal and cultural history, and social context. Thus, for school leaders, embracing the material, historical, and cultural aspects of race-conscious caring means reflecting on their identities (including, but not limited to racial, socio-economic, and gender identities), continuing to listen to racially marginalized parents and children, and not assuming prior experience guarantees understanding and connection.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
