Cultural Dialogue as Social Justice Advocacy Within and Beyond University Classrooms

Abstract

In this dialogic essay, the authors focus on the topic of leadership preparation as intervention. They theorize about cultural dialogue in educational and public spaces as social justice advocacy. The thesis is that difficult cultural dialogue advances social justice in education. They support their stance by articulating specific contextual meanings about social justice that foster value for cultural dialogue within and beyond university classrooms. These notions, which are intricate beliefs about the value of dialogue as advocacy, inform their work as educational leadership professors in doctoral-granting institutions in the United States. Stimulated by the mold-breaking, textual dialogues of scholars from different disciplines, they describe pivotal concepts and support these with illustrations in the social justice literature. They explore the value of cultural dialogue for consciousness raising and community building, with untapped transformative effects for individuals and their communities. Conversational snippets from dialogue with doctoral (postmaster’s) students imbue these concepts with contextual details. Their students, who reflected on their struggles, are classroom educators and rising leaders in K–12 public schools across Texas and North Carolina. The authors attempt to bring alive cultural dialogue in the social justice contexts of engagement, community, and transformation relative to the complex processes and effects that occur educationally and publicly. Situating their students and themselves as cultural dialoguers, they adopt educationalist Freire’s concept of “dialoguer” by adding “culture” to it. The authors see this work as their ethical responsibility to extend the pedagogy of a democratic theory in action by communicating with new audiences.KeywordsSocial JusticeSchool LeaderSchool CommunityEducational LeadershipConsciousness RaisingThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.