Graduation Year

2018

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ed.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Education (Ed.D.)

Degree Granting Department

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Major Professor

Vonzell Agosto, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Zorka Karanxha, Ed.D.

Committee Member

Deirdre Cobb-Roberts, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Tonisha Lane, Ph.D.

Keywords

Learning, Preparation Program, Teaching, transformative leadership

Abstract

The pervasiveness of injustices is rooted in structures and ideology that reinforce and reinvent oppression; there is a need to engage in transformative change to dismantle systems of domination and subordination. Educational leadership is essential in the social transformation of educational settings and the wider society. In the collective responsibility for transformative change, educational leadership preparation programs serve as spaces to encourage the development of students’ capacity to address issues of oppression and create new power relations for social justice. Faculty play a role in preparation programs to enact teaching that uncover to power dynamics of oppression and domination for social emancipation.

The purpose of this critical qualitative study was to understand how faculty in doctoral educational leadership preparation programs teach to encourage students’ capacity development to engage in transformative leadership. The guiding question for this study is: How do faculty engage in teaching to encourage students’ capacity development to understand and transform social oppression affecting education? Using an interview methodology, data is generated through relational interviewing using artifacts. The conceptual framework of critical pedagogy, transformative criticality, and transformative leadership development guides a sociocultural approach to the analysis of the data. There were four major findings: The participants (1) integrated critical frameworks into curriculum and pedagogical approaches, (2) established spaces in and outside of the formal classroom to engage students, (3) centered student-faculty relationships for support and collaboration, and (4) evoked students’ transformative activism through academic practice. This empirical study will contribute to the research on critical perspectives in educational leadership preparation programs with a focus on faculty teaching as an expression of transformative power.

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