Growing for Justice
A Developmental Continuum of Leadership Capacities and Practices
- Eleanor Drago-Severson - Columbia University Teachers College, USA
- Jessica Blum-DeStefano - Bank Street College of Education, New York, USA
- Deborah Brooks Lawrence
Joint Publication with Learning Forward
Be the leader you want to see in the world.
Educators committed to social justice enter into the work in markedly different ways. Drawing from research with 50 educational leaders from across the United States, Growing for Justice explores how leaders committed to social justice support the growth of others while also developing their own capacities to engage, connect, and lead for change. This groundbreaking book, informed by adult developmental theory and based on a first-of-its-kind study, helps school leaders assess their own strengths and areas for growth—and then take concrete steps toward improvement. Features include:
- Exploration of meaning-making systems and how they affect leaders’ understandings of diversity, equity, and social justice
- A research-based, developmental model of justice-centering educational leadership capacities and practices
- Leaders’ personal stories of growth and development as advocates
- Planning activities and reflective exercises to drive decision-making, action, and internal capacity-building
Wherever you are in your social justice journey, wanting to do better is the first step toward actually doing better. With this book’s help, you’ll outline the supports, stretches, and scaffoldings you need to continually grow for justice.
Free resources
Leading for Social Justice with Instrumental Capacities
For the leaders in our study, the desire to do good and right emerged as a powerful way into justice-centering educational leadership. In this chapter, we zoom in on leaders’ experiences within the concrete domain of our developmental model for justice-centering leadership.
Introducing the Leaders in Our Study
We were privileged to learn from a diverse group of teachers, administrators, former leadership students, and other professionals in the field. Our hope was not, per se, to generate a book of best practices culled from the most successful, most accomplished justice-centering leaders out there (although we do, we are happy to report, get to recount many promising strategies and approaches!). Rather, we were interested in learning from leaders across the widest possible range of perspectives, identities, experiences, roles, geographies, and ways of knowing that we could at the time.
A Developmental Model for Justice-Centering Educational Leadership
Learn how leaders committed to social justice can support the growth and contributions of others while also development their own capacities to engage, appreciate, understand, connect, and lead for change and transformation.
"Growing for Justice brings two areas of leadership into vital conversation: adult development and justice-centering leadership. This book offers an informative map of justice-centering practices currently active in schools while emphasizing justice and equity work as ongoing learning work. As such, Growing for Justice invites us to face our growth-edges in order to take more strategic and intentional action towards realizing more equitable schools and work environments. And all from a dynamic trio of researchers in the field of Adult Learning. This book will be a helpful resource for any teacher and leader committed to ongoing learning towards impactful, just leadership."
"Spectacular! Growing for Justice is a deeply engaging text that will allow educational leaders to develop a capacity to lead schools for justice. The authors’ ability to use a developmental approach for learning about and promoting equity is novel and is exactly what schools need to enact humanizing and lasting system change."
"This text is a magnificent application of a developmental framework to help educators and other professionals engage meaningfully in the important work of social justice."