0.1 Beyond convention, beyond critique: toward a third way of  (Page 5/12)

Students in principal preparation classes who are going to engage in critique of sociopolitical and school practices can seek a small group of volunteers from a specific school (usually the school they work in) to form a cultural dialogue group. Pre-service principals can help each other prepare questions to ask in dialogue sessions. Murtadha-Watts and Stoughton (2004), for example, suggest questions that would support culturally based dialogue on a specific school curriculum:

• How does the content of the curriculum (or specific lessons) serve certain established interests and points of view while marginalizing or excluding others? Whose culture is valued?
• How can the curriculum be constructed and connected to the lived experiences of children and families from different cultural backgrounds? What fit exists?
• How can instruction include inquiry by teachers and students that increases understanding?
• What social responsibility and social action will the education lead to? (p. 4)

After leading a dialogue session, students can do written reflections on the experience and discuss the results of the dialogue session in class.

Pre-service principals can engage in a whole range of school-based data gathering and analysis to critique school policies and practices relative to equity and social justice. Existing or student-designed tools can be used to gather data. Bustamante and Nelson, for example, have developed an observation checklist that assesses schoolwide cultural competence across seven domains (Bustamante, Nelson,&Onwuegbuzie, 2009). A rubric designed by Kose (2007) assesses the level of socially just teaching in the areas of achievement rigor, care, and inclusion. My own students have created and used observation tools, surveys, and interview protocols to gather equity data at the classroom, school, and school-community levels. My students also have analyzed school documents and artifacts during equity assessments of (a) curriculum, (b) resource distribution, (c) teacher professional development, (d) student referral, placement, and grouping, and (e) student achievement. Some of the most transformational learning I have observed has occurred when students have shared and discussed equity data they have gathered from their own schools and districts.

Educators need individual critique if they are going to experience the cognitive dissonance that motivates personal change (Festinger, 1957). Critique of the individual educator should be primarily self-critique facilitated by colleagues. Pre-service principals should learn not only how to practice self-critique but also how to foster others’ self-critique. Brown’s (2004) “educational plunge” is an excellent vehicle for self-critique. Students visit an educational setting culturally different from any they have experienced, the selection of setting based in part on their self-assessed level of cultural development. The plunge “pushes students’ comfort zone” (p. 101) and provides for “face-to-face interaction with people from the focal group” (pp. 101-102). Students write a reflection paper on the experience, including a discussion of biases uncovered and challenged, emotions the plunge elicited, and what the experience and reflection on it taught them about equity and social justice.