Introduction: Do Promises of Social Justice Trump Paradigms of Educational Leadership?

Abstract

Our commitment and responsibility as educators is to explicitly and publicly combat ignorance. Therefore, social justice is a necessary and fundamental commitment for all educators dedicated to combating ignorance and becoming more informed global citizens. That is the purpose of this international handbook which is divided into seven parts, each framed as interventions at the level of theory and practice: Conceptualizing Social Justice (Part I, Volume 1), Research Approaches to Knowing/Studying Social Justice (Part II), Leadership for Social Justice (Part III), Advocacy/Advocates for Social Justice (Part IV), Sociocultural Representations of Social Injustices (Part V, Volume 2), Glocal Policy Interventions, (Part VI), and Leadership Preparation as a Social Justice Intervention (Part VII). This introductory chapter describes the political decision-making that went into developing and ordering of the parts. It discusses what we mean by representation and how this publication is only a first step in knowledge dissemination. The challenge facing school and university leaders in every nation-state in the world is to reprioritize leadership practices so as to address the pragmatic need to successfully run schools, school systems, and universities effectively and efficiently while, at the same time, ensure, despite the business of their lives, that they address the difficult challenges posed by social, political, and economic realities and disparities by issues of poverty, oppression, conflict, prejudice and by inappropriate uses of power. This work comes down to the fundamental Deweyian question of whether educational institutions and society are one or whether they are separate and apart.