International Education News

In the fourth part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Daisy Salazar-Garza discusses her firsthand experience of the inequities in the public education system and the impact this has on students, families, and communities. Salazar-Garza is a Ph.D. student in the School of Educational Studies’ Urban Leadership Program at Claremont University. German is a recipient of the Student Travel Award from the Educational Change Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AREA). The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues who lead the Ed Change SIG. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

Daisy Salazar-Garza: The 2026 AERA theme, “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Education Research,” calls us to draw upon our diverse knowledge and lived experiences to engage in meaningful “futuring” for education. For me, as a Chicana educator, scholar, and first-generation doctoral student, this theme feels deeply personal. It is a call that echoes the lessons my family instilled in me from an early age.

My family, especially my father, taught me about life’s harsh realities and the beauty of resilience through the power of storytelling. Around family meals, during long drives, or in quiet moments on the porch, I listened to stories of our history—stories of struggle, perseverance, and hope. These narratives shaped my understanding of who I am and filled me with a deep sense of pride. They taught me to honor the strength passed down from my ancestors and to recognize that storytelling is not only an act of remembrance but also a tool for transformation.

This foundation shapes how I approach educational research. To truly “unforget” our histories, we must center the voices and stories that have been pushed to the margins. Leveraging our collective knowledge requires valuing the lived experiences of those most impacted by educational inequities. By empowering communities with a vested interest in the future of education, we can imagine possibilities rooted in justice, equity, and collective empowerment.

As I continue to heed the 2026 AERA theme, I draw upon this legacy of storytelling and historical remembrance to inform my work. Understanding the social, economic, political, and racial contexts that have shaped communities is essential to serving them authentically—honoring both their strengths and the systemic injustice they have endured. Through remembering and honoring these histories, we can envision and build educational spaces that celebrate our roots and uplift our voices. In doing so, we can cultivate a just and hopeful future that directly confronts the inequities we must transform. 

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

DSG:  Recently, I had the privilege of working with Dr. Osworth to co-author “Outward Portrayals of Equity: An Examination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Los Angeles County School Districts.” In 2024, we collected data from 80 public school districts to assess the current state of DEI commitments in Los Angeles County districts.

From this work, several lessons emerge for practitioners and scholars in the field of Educational Change. First, our findings highlight the need to look beyond surface-level portrayals of equity and focus on how DEI policies are enacted in districts and schools. Value statements made toward DEI without creating infrastructure through policy to support the work does not address the racialized nature of the structures within school districts (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026). Second, schools as organizational systems often reproduce existing inequities. Recognizing these structural patterns is the first step toward redesigning them. Ultimately, transformative change needs to occur at the systemic level to disrupt and dismantle entrenched systems of inequality (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026). Finally, pairing enforcement mechanisms, such as culturally responsive teaching, with policy can contribute to conscious efforts to alter internal patterns of organizational inequity (Salazar-Garza & Osworth, 2026). 

“Value statements made toward DEI without creating infrastructure through policy to support the work do not address the racialized nature of the structures within school districts.”

Together, these insights emphasize that fostering educational change requires both reflective practice and systemic change. Equity efforts translate into improved student experiences and outcomes when we can redesign structures enacting patterns of inequity. 

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

DSG: As a scholar-practitioner, I believe the field of educational change is heading toward a deeper partnership with people who are the most affected by our current educational realities. By centering the voices of teachers, students, families, and communities, we can inspire real progress. Change comes when research and practice work go hand in hand to bridge the gap between theory and lived experience. 

Given the current polycrisis world we’re navigating, where social, economic, and environmental challenges continually intersect, I find hope in collaboration within the field of education (Virella, 2025). Dr. Virella’s Crisis as Catalyst: Equity-Oriented School Leadership During Difficult Times reminds me that even in moments of uncertainty, there is great potential for transformation. As a school principal who was interviewed and whose narrative is present in this research alongside numerous other school leaders, it is a reminder that practitioners are engaging in powerful practices that are meeting the needs of our present moment. It is also a call to action that we can study practices from the field, derive key lessons, and create frameworks that empower and sustain more educators across the field.

What gives me hope is seeing more educators and researchers approach their work not just as inquiry, but as partnership with students, families, communities. When our research centers humanity and lived experience, educational change can lead us toward a more just and human-centered system for all students.

References

Salazar-Garza,D. and Osworth, D. (2026) Outward portrayals of equity: an examination of diversity, equity, and inclusion in Los Angeles County school districts. Leadership in Education Racial Equity and the Organization: An Educational Change Call to Action. Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1642675

Virella, P. M. (2025). Crisis as catalyst: Equity-oriented school leadership during difficult times. Harvard Education Press.

In the third part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Celina German discusses her experiences researching the intersection of community-based youth leadership, after-school club affinity programming, and student activism history. German is a Ph.D. student in the Learning, Literacies, and Technologies program at Arizona State University. German is a recipient of the Student Travel Award from the Educational Change Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AREA). The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues who lead the Ed Change SIG. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

Celina German: While working on my 2026 AERA submission, the notion of Sankofa (also visible in the conference logo) kept guiding me through the process. The Akan symbolism of a bird looking back and the word, literally translated as “go back and get,” made me think about what one returns to as part of the process of going forward. As a former high school English teacher and co-advisor of the Black Student Union, my heart also remembers all the great work that is part of the Summer Sankofa program at Arizona State University. My educational background informs the academics I want to participate in. 

I carry into this work my identity as my family’s first and only birthright citizen. As I navigated the U.S. education system (PK12) as a Romanian-American, gender-question young woman, I saw the unhealthy relationship between whiteness, patriarchal logics, and academic achievement. To engage in coalition work, I deeply reflected (and continue to reflect) on what my positionality and actions say about liberation. My identity hung in the balance of being the only American in a family of naturalized and permanent residents, while at school, I was learning in real time my racialized identity and how others interpreted it. Growing up in southcentral Indiana around very few Romanians, I learned very quickly the gradation of whiteness and how multicultural spaces, like my swim team, filled with mostly first-generation American kids like me, were more accepting of me than most of my educational leaders. However, I thrived in leadership roles despite what adults expected of me. 

I bring this worldview to the interviews, research partnerships, and organizing efforts to 1) acknowledge how fraught multicultural coalitions’ history has been in America, and it is with the mindset to 2) recognize that futuring for education is rooted in trust and empathy. We don’t dream with abandon with those whom we are unsure of, and I try to speak with that honesty and humility in the liberation work I engage in. It is not always well-received, and I am constantly learning how to leverage the privilege I have to ensure that those I care about are heard. However, the first step I take is recognizing that all communities have tremendous privilege.

For those reasons, the critical race feminism and transnational frameworks I operate within were part of a journey of learning about my love for critical and real U.S. history (read: Black, Indigenous, Immigrant history). Still, I would not have gotten there alone without the multitude of college professors who engaged me with what I later learned was at the core of Black studies and Ethnic studies curricula. Therefore, the research I do, which I see as a labor of love, explores the history of antiracist educational activism. To better understand the problems we face today, I look back through high school yearbooks, archives, and oral histories to understand what the youth of the past did, attempted, and did not do to transform school structures.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

CG:  Part of my intellectual commitments towards educational change is writing alongside folks whose genius deserves to be heard and recognized, whether in the academic canon or in community outlets. The good fight is happening in the Black Student Unions (BSU), where advisors are engaging in fugitive mentorship and young people are demanding more of their school sites through an art-based YPAR inquiry (German, Smith, Berard, & Wilkerson, 2026; German, Nguyen, Joyner, & Johnson, 2026). To foster better educational systems, listening to practitioners and students for their insights into school system leadership is crucial. 

In particular, young people in cultural affinity groups, such as BSU, M.E.Ch.A., or AAPISU, are extremely gifted in their critical consciousness of their leadership identities and in their understanding of the inner workings of school power dynamics. Expanding the definition of educational leaders to include student leaders of color, especially women of color, is the focus of my research. If young people are not part of that school-improvement feedback loop or act only as consultants, we are not engaging the school community that the administration aims to serve. Enacting changes because one is listening to young people in these elected roles is my vision of transformative school leadership. 

“If young people are not part of that school-improvement feedback loop or act only as consultants, we are not engaging the school community that the administration aims to serve.”

Part of how I listen is understanding how young people are mentored in out-of-school or after-school programming. I aim to explore how adults co-conspire with youth to bring about educational change. Therefore, I had the opportunity to examine systemic designs for the equity director role through job descriptions. Dr. Ishmael Miller and I researched how institutional logics shape the role of equity directors. Miller’s work reflected on the lived realities of Equity Directors, either through reflexive accounts or historical inquiry (Miller, 2026a); (Miller, 2026b). His work is inspiring me as I explore leadership historically through a review of high school yearbooks illustrating BSU activism. Learning more about non-traditional educational leaders has broadened my perspective on organizational change in community partnerships and out-of-school-time youth organizations.

Lastly, I explore the limits of qualitative methods, such as interviewing, to see where dialogue about educational change can occur across differing, layered identities. Dr. Franklin-Phipps and I are using art to speculate Black educational futures (German and Franklin-Phipps, 2026). Our art inquiry is not to resolve or reach consensus, but to embrace the change needed to keep framing hope when we see sites of Black suffering (Dumas & Ross, 2016). Expanding my methods has inspired me to push the limits of positionality and reflexivity while doing coalition work in the academy.  

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

CG: I find hope for educational change in young people’s responses to adult-led decisions. Whether a student responds in rage or profound patience, that hope compels me to muster the courage I have as an adult co-conspirator to reconcile what can be mended. I see how educational change is still addressing adultism and rewiring frameworks, so youth voice is not seen as performative. The roles of youth in elected leadership, such as school boards, serve as a weathervane of progress in some districts. I think seeing young people presenting at AERA is expanding the horizons of YPAR research.

I also derive hope from all the community youth work organizers who have been in this work longer than I have. Their creativity in structures that run counter to the leadership development of young people makes me refuse to see the tunnel vision with which academia portrays it. Seeing how strong, mutually beneficial research-practice partnerships engage communities of practice is a step in the right direction for the educational change scholarship.  

References

Dumas, M. J., & Ross, K. M. (2016). “Be real black for me” imagining BlackCrit in education. Urban Education, 51(4), 415–442.

German, C., & Franklin-Phipps, A. (2026). Speculating Black Educational Futures: Wit(h)nessing Interviews Through Politics of Knowing. Special Issue. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology (under review).

German, C., Smith, S. L., Berard, L., & Wilkerson, R. (2026). Fugitive Mentorship and Cultivating Expansive Futures: A Collaborative Autoethnography by Black Student Union Advisors. Current Issues in Education, 27(1). https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol27iss1.2384

German, C., Nguyen, L., Joyner, J., Samuel, C., Johnson, A. (2026). Creatively Investing in Today’s Changemakers: Setting a YPAR Precedent for Empowered Student Leadership in Our Black Student Union. Journal of Participatory Research Methods. (under review) 

Miller, I. A. (2026a). Refuge from The Weather: An Organizational Autoethnography about Black Male Administrator Fugitive Space. Equity & Excellence in Education, 1–17. https://doi-org.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/10.1080/10665684.2026.2614956

Miller, I. A. (2026b). Historicizing the Equity Director Position: Black Community Advocacy by an Intergroup Relations Specialist. Journal of School Leadership, 36(1), 21–45.

Reed, E., German, C., Geraghty, P., Brown, K., & Carmichael, J. (2025). Editorial Introduction: Reflecting on Our Shared Educational Futures: A Global Need to Belong for Transformative Learning. Current Issues in Education, 26(2). https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol26iss2.2475.

In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. Paul Campbell discusses his experiences researching educational change, leadership, and policy. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Leadership at The University of Hong Kong and President-Elect of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI). His research focuses on how diverse approaches to knowledge production and research engagement shape reform, and offer new ways for understanding what it means to lead, be a leader, and exercise leadership. Dr. Campbell is a recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

Paul Campbell: The 2026 AERA theme invites us to remember the histories that have shaped our field while imagining futures that are more inclusive, equitable, and transformative. My scholarship begins with the belief that we cannot imagine new futures without first acknowledging the epistemic closures of the past. Educational leadership and change have long been dominated by Anglo-American traditions, privileging certain ways of knowing while marginalising others. To move forward, we must confront this history directly and commit to advancing epistemic diversity.

In my recent paper with Sefika Mertkan (Campbell & Mertkan, 2025), we argue that while geographical diversification of scholarship is a foundational step, it is insufficient on its own. What is more critical is epistemic diversity; the recognition and mobilisation of multiple epistemological traditions. This requires interrogating who produces knowledge, what epistemologies are applied, how knowledge is circulated and cited, and whose voices are solicited. As we wrote, “advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.” Remembering this history of epistemic dominance is essential if we are to imagine futures where pluriversal perspectives thrive. Only then can new possibilities emerge for how we understand the nature and purpose of leading educational change, and only then can more just realities for learners and communities thrive.

“Advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.”

My work also examines how supranational discourses shape our understanding of leaders, leading, and leadership in policy, research, and practice. In ‘Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the GEM Report 2024’ (Campbell & Sum, 2026), Nicola Sum and I show how global accountability frameworks often fail to take local realities into account. By applying a leadership-for-learning lens, we highlight pathways to reimagine futures where global frameworks are translated into contextually responsive practices. This reflects a desire to bridge histories of epistemic dominance with futures of inclusive, situated knowledge.

Taken together, this body of work reflects both optimism and frustration. Optimism, because there are genuine opportunities to rethink how educational change is understood and enacted. Frustration, because leaders are often positioned within policy-saturated environments that constrain their agency, and because knowledge production practices too often reproduce dominant paradigms rather than center the voices of educators and leaders themselves. The increasingly complex realities facing school leaders, shaped by global norms and demands, local contexts, and broader socio-political realities, require us to rethink not only what leadership and change are, but also how we study and support them.

Heeding the call of the 2026 AERA theme, therefore, means committing to a dual task: remembering the exclusions and closures of the past, while actively constructing futures that are plural, inclusive, and transformative. My scholarship seeks to contribute to this by interrogating the structures that sustain epistemic hegemony, amplifying diverse voices and thinking, and reimagining leadership and the leadership of educational change as a relational, educative, and contextually grounded practice. In doing so, I hope to support a field of educational change that is globally relevant and locally meaningful; one that ultimately serves the needs of students, educators, and communities in more just, equitable, and necessarily diverse ways.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

PC:  “I’m working on the margins in order to shake the core” was how one principal, in my study of principals’ life histories in relation to education reform, described the theme of their professional life and work. This articulation captures the complex realities of how leaders, their leadership, and change are positioned within systems, and the consequences this has for the enactment and possibilities of educational change. From this and related work, several lessons emerge for both scholars and practitioners.

Collaboration must be understood as socially and culturally situated. In ‘Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), I show how hierarchical traditions, accountability demands, and conflict avoidance complicate the intentions and enactment of collaboration. Principals navigate tensions between policy ideals and lived realities, revealing that meaningful collaboration requires relational trust, cultural sensitivity, and reflexive leadership. This highlights the participatory dynamics of collaboration: who is involved, how power is exercised, and how goals are negotiated. Collaboration cannot, therefore, be reduced to structural arrangements or compliance mechanisms; it must be cultivated through participatory processes that respect cultural norms and empower diverse voices.

Agency is central to reimagining leadership in complex systems. In ‘“I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”: Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), principals describe how they enact agency through temporal, experiential, and relational dynamics. The agency framework articulated in this work, temporal (drawing on reform histories and aspirations), experiential (learning through practice and mentorship), and relational (building trust and mobilising communities) dynamics, offers a lens for understanding how leaders navigate, reinforce, or resist systemic constraints. For scholars, this challenges dominant conceptions of leaders’ positioning within and against system structures and constraints, and for leaders and educators in sites of practice, it underscores the need to support leaders in exercising agency within, with, and against systemic structures.

Organisational and socio-cultural dynamics must also be foregrounded. Accountability regimes, governance arrangements, and resource allocation shape the possibilities for collaboration and agency. At the same time, socio-cultural dynamics, comprised of hierarchical traditions, community expectations, and cultural dispositions toward conflict avoidance, mediate how leadership is enacted. Leaders must constantly negotiate these forces, balancing compliance with innovation and authority with relational trust. For educators, this means recognising that leadership is enacted within layered organisational and cultural contexts. For scholars, it calls for analyses that move beyond abstract models to examine how leadership is lived and contested in specific contexts.

Innovation in processes of change must also be conceptualised as situated and contested. In ‘Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change’ (Campbell et al., 2026), our editorial team and authors identified five themes requiring consideration for the leadership of innovation: innovation as relational, leadership as enabler or constraint, tensions between policy and practice, supportive cultures, and equity. Innovation is not a neutral construct; it reflects power relations and dominant epistemologies. For policymakers and professionals in sites of practice, this means developing organisational cultures of trust and inclusion. For scholars, it requires interrogating whose knowledge is valued and how innovation intersects with equity and justice.

Together, these insights highlight that educational change is shaped by participatory dynamics, organisational structures, socio-cultural contexts, and the agency of leaders. To reach better systems for all students, we must support leaders as active agents of change who navigate this dynamic complexity and are appropriately prepared and supported to do so.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

PC: Despite persistent challenges, and what seems like a relentless intensification of complexity in education systems, I find hope in several directions.

First, epistemic diversity. Scholars are increasingly interrogating citational practices, editorial structures, and epistemic injustices, creating space for alternative epistemologies to shape the theoretical core of our fields. This movement holds promise for dismantling universalist narratives and cultivating pluriversal perspectives. It also signals a shift toward valuing multiple ways of knowing and being, and toward scholarship that is globally open but locally meaningful.

Second, leadership is reframed as educative, relational, and political. By moving beyond managerial and compliance-driven framings, we can reimagine school leaders as agents of justice, democratic ideals, and community empowerment. My work with school leaders in Hong Kong demonstrates that even within high-accountability systems, leaders exercise agency to sustain trust, adapt practices, and preserve professional identity. These acts of agency, often enacted “on the margins,” provide seeds of transformation that can “shake the core” of entrenched structures. They remind us that leadership is so much more than positional authority; it is a practice of agency, enacted through relationships and values.

Third, innovation as relational and inclusive. As our editorial in School Leadership & Management (Campbell, MacGregor & Sum, 2026) argued, innovation must be understood as a situated process of change rather than a discrete product. It is inherently political, reflecting epistemologies, power relations, and assumptions about whose knowledge counts. Equity and inclusion cannot be treated as add-ons; they must be central to how innovation is defined, led, and legitimised. When innovation is framed this way, it becomes a vehicle for addressing systemic inequities and fostering cultures of collaboration. This is where I see the field heading: toward a more nuanced, contextually grounded, and justice-oriented understanding of educational change.

Fourth, collective capacity. Ultimately, my hope lies in the collective capacity of scholars, policymakers, and professionals in sites of practice to remember histories of exclusion, interrogate present structures of dominance, and imagine futures of inclusivity and equity. The provocations we posed in the editorial mentioned earlier, innovation as process, leadership as dilemma space, and innovation as political, are invitations to debate, but also to act. They call for research and practice that is conceptually plural, empirically grounded, and ethically serious.

By centering agency, collaboration, and epistemic diversity, educational change can become truly transformative. The future of the field depends on our willingness to embrace complexity, to resist reductive framings, and to cultivate leadership and change that are relational, inclusive, and equity-oriented. In this, I find hope: that even amid constraints, leaders and scholars can work on the margins to shake the core and, in doing so, reimagine futures that are more just and humane.

References

Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools, Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2026.2636612 

Campbell, P., Macgregor, S. & Sum, N. (2026). Editorial: Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change, School Leadership and Management, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2026.2631919

Campbell, P. & Sum, N. (2026). Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the Global Education Monitoring Report 2024 and Its Local Implications for School Leadership, Management in Education, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206261430580

Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). “I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”:  Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship, Journal of Educational Administration, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1108%2FJEA-06-2025-0246

Campbell, P. & Mertkan, S. (2025). Geographical Diversification of Educational Leadership Research: Gaps in Our Understanding, Management in Education, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206251407030