This month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview features the new leaders of the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association, Patricia Virella, Tayeon Kim, Lauren Bailes, and Elizabeth Zumpe. This week IEN shares excerpts from those interviews focusing on the connections between their work and the work of the SIG and the wider field of educational change. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and sponsored by the Educational Change SIG. A pdf of the full interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change Interview with Patricia Virella
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?
Patricia Virella (PV): Over the past year, I prioritized immersing myself in school environments, spending approximately 30 days actively engaging with students, teachers, and staff. This hands-on experience allowed me to gain profound insights into the unique challenges that students are facing in today’s educational landscape, including mental health issues, ongoing crises, and persistent inequities. Witnessing the resilience and joy demonstrated by students in the face of these challenges was incredibly inspiring. It reinforced the importance of understanding the realities of schooling in the present moment. All of us must pause and truly comprehend the current state of education before forging ahead with our plans and initiatives. This firsthand exposure has deepened my commitment to advocating for comprehensive support systems that address the multifaceted needs of students and educators alike. It has also fueled my passion for promoting holistic approaches to education that prioritize well-being and equity. I am driven to leverage these insights to inform my work and to champion initiatives that empower schools to create environments where every student can thrive.
LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?
PV: The idea of change is inherently exhilarating. While change often implies embracing entirely new approaches, I also ponder whether it involves a return to foundational concepts and theories that have yet to manifest their full potential, such as liberation, transformation, and experiential learning. This dual perspective prompts me to consider how we, as a collective of academics, can effectively support change that embodies the spirit of equity. I recognize that achieving equity can sometimes feel elusive, but it does not have to remain this way. My commitment to exploring the multifaceted nature of change and equity has deepened my resolve to advocate for inclusive and transformative practices within academic and institutional settings. By critically examining the intersections of change and equity, I am dedicated to fostering environments where all individuals have equal opportunities to thrive and contribute meaningfully. I am driven to channel these reflections into actionable strategies that promote systemic change and advance the realization of equity within educational and academic spheres.
Dr. Patricia M. Virella is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. Dr. Virella’s research focuses on implementing equity-oriented leadership through leader responses, organizational transformation and preparation. Dr. Virella also studies equity-oriented crisis leadership examining how school leaders can respond to crises without further harming marginalized communities.
Lead the Change Interview with Taeyeon Kim
LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?
TK: My research offers several contributions to the field of Educational Change, focusing on three main areas: revisiting policy through the voices of equity leaders, critically examining policies and systems by centering racially and linguistically marginalized communities, and promoting cross-cultural dialogue using transnational and decolonial perspectives. Given that my work was previously featured in the Lead the Change series (See the Lead the ChangeOctober issue of 2023), I would like to highlight some insights from my recent publication on leadership learning.
As a leadership educator, I view learning as a core tenet of leading educational change. My scholarship on educational leadership and policy has led me to explore how to guide meaningful learning for aspiring leaders who pursue equity and social justice. My recent work, published in the Journal of School Leadership (Kim & Wright, 2024), presents a conceptual-pedagogical framework that on guides students through emotional discomfort when learning about inequities and injustice. This research underscores the importance of emotion in learning, which can drive change at both individual and social levels. When negative emotions are not properly addressed and processed, meaningful learning cannot occur, undermining leaders’ efforts to redress inequities, injustice, and harm. However, with appropriate guidance, emotional discomfort can be a valuable source for transformative learning and changes (see Mezirow 1997). Traditional scholarship on educational change often relies on rationalistic approaches; however, my recent study emphasizes the role of emotions and the holistic aspects of learning in effecting change. It also highlights the crucial role of facilitators and educators in developing equity leaders.
Thus, my work reveals that effective leadership learning involves addressing the emotional dimensions of learning about social justice issues. By integrating these emotional and holistic aspects, educational leaders can foster more profound and lasting changes in their practice, policy, and scholarship. This approach can help prepare leaders, better equipping them to navigate and address the complex challenges of inequity and injustice in education.
LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?
TK: The field of Educational Change is particularly exciting due to its emphasis on partnerships and interdisciplinary approaches, and its appreciation for international perspectives. As a transnational scholar, I often notice that AERA’s discourse tends to be US-centric and predominantly features scholarly thoughts and contexts published in English. This observation underscores the importance of the Educational Change SIG’s foundations and history, as it can potentially extend the boundaries of our educational scholarship.
To advance the field, I urge educational change scholars to critically engage with issues of geopolitics, coloniality, and global whiteness (e.g., Chen, 2010; Mignolo, 2008; Leonardo, 2002) that influence knowledge creation and dissemination. When we embrace “interdisciplinary” and “international” perspectives, it is crucial to interrogate whose knowledge is being prioritized and how it is being represented.
“To advance the field, I urge educational change scholars to critically engage with issues of geopolitics, coloniality, and global whiteness.”
With our new leadership team, I aim to extend the field of Educational Change through several focuses. First, I urge the field to integrate diverse onto-epistemological understandings. The field can benefit significantly from including non-Western, indigenous, and other marginalized ways of being and thinking. By incorporating these perspectives, we can challenge the dominance of Eurocentric paradigms and enrich our understanding of educational practices and policies. Second, educational change scholars need to consider the power dynamics involved in knowledge production and dissemination. This means questioning who has access to academic platforms, whose voices are amplified, and whose are marginalized. Future activities organized by the Educational Change SIG could better support multilingual scholarship and inclusive platforms that are accessible to scholars from various regions and backgrounds, ensuring that a variety of voices are heard and valued. This will eventually promote cross-cultural and transnational collaborations. Finally, integrating critical theories such as postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and feminist theory can provide valuable lenses through which to examine and address systemic inequities in education. These theories can help scholars and practitioners understand the historical and structural factors that perpetuate educational inequalities and identify pathways to more just and equitable educational systems.
By taking these steps, the Educational Change SIG can play a pivotal role in promoting a more inclusive and globally informed approach to educational change, ensuring that the field continues to evolve and respond to the complex needs of educational communities worldwide.
Taeyeon Kim is an assistant professor in the department of Educational Administration at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Her scholarship explores intersections of policy and leadership, with a particular focus on how educational leadership can challenge unjust systems and humanize educational practices to empower marginalized students and communities.The Educational Change SIG would like to acknowledge and congratulate Taeyeon Kim as the recipient of the 2024 Educational Change SIG Emerging Scholar Award. Her work was featured in the Lead the Change in October, 2023.
Lead the Change Interview Lauren Bailes
LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?
LB: I aim to share with the field a clear emphasis on systems change for equity, especially in the ways we think about who leaders are. My research focuses on identifying the systems, practices, and mindsets that perpetuate inequities in the careers of educational leaders. Most of my work problematizes the notion of ‘pipelines,’ especially in educational leadership and how career experiences like preparation, promotion, and evaluation are differentially distributed by race and gender (e.g., Bailes & Guthery, 2020; Bailes et al., 2023). When we consider careers to be pipelines, we might wrongly believe those pipelines are neutral, and that everyone has an equal chance of entering or flowing through the pipeline. That is fundamentally untrue: Women and People of Color, as well as people with intersectional identities, experience sorting at every career juncture, even when they are equivalently qualified relative to white or male peers. Further, these career inequities often result in adverse outcomes for faculty and students—especially faculty and students of color.
“Most of my work problematizes the notion of ‘pipelines,’ especially in educational leadership and how career experiences like preparation, promotion, and evaluation are differentially distributed by race and gender.”
A second thing I hope to share is the critical importance of partnering with current practitioners and myriad ways of incorporating their perspectives to deepen, clarify, and implement approaches to and findings of research. The profound systems changes required to shift unjust organizational practices are unlikely to come only from the academy. While research like mine can and does inform practice, I value, seek, and incorporate the perspectives of folks who have experienced injustice in their career trajectories. They are uniquely capable of showing me what I might be missing and how to better capture and learn from what they have experienced or what they know might work to change the system. I also want to be clear that there is much I am still learning from colleagues in this SIG and throughout our field. I’m looking forward to deepening those connections and bringing my own learning to bear on my research and partnership efforts to shift systems in service of equity.
LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?
LB: I think there is a broad appetite—among researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and families—for change in education. That appetite often results in misguided and harmful movements toward neoliberalism, isolationism, or the erosion of schooling as a public good, but there may be opportunity for broad and supportive coalitions for some of the interventions, innovations, and structures that do preserve and enhance equitable and accessible education for every student.
Lauren P. Bailes is an associate professor of education leadership in the School of Education at the University of Delaware, where she is the coordinator of UD’s EdD in Educational Leadership. After teaching middle school language arts in New York City, she earned her doctorate at The Ohio State University. Now, she researches school leadership preparation, promotion, and evaluation; school organizational characteristics; and the intersection of school leadership and policy. Lauren’s favorite days are still the ones spent in schools alongside teachers and leaders.
Lead the Change Interview with Elizabeth Zumpe
LtC: What are some of the ideas that you hope the field of Educational Change can learn from your work to inform practice, policy, and scholarship?
EZ: Prevailing ideas about Educational Change tend to come from scholars and policymakers who work far from the realities of schools. Too often, these ideas rest upon wildly false assumptions about existing capacities in schools, overlooking how many operate amid chronic adversity. Chronic adversity occurs when schools regularly face inadequate resources to meet their community’s needs, unproductive pressures to improve, and a lack of support for the profession. When designed from afar, educational reforms tend to presume that school challenges stem from educators’ ‘lack’ of motivation or competence and that improvement thus depends upon intensive intervention from the outside.
My research offers a different perspective: school improvement amid adversity as a struggle to develop collective agency (Zumpe, 2024). Agency is an inherent driver of human motivation and of educational improvement. But agency can become constrained when people are regularly subjected to demands for which they do not have adequate resources and experience inevitable failure.
As part of one RPP described above, I collaborated closely with a school facing challenging circumstances (Zumpe, 2024). At the start of our collaboration, we realized that our partnership’s theory of action had not considered this school’s needs and context. Across years of being labeled as ‘failing’ and facing daily struggles to ‘reach’ students and cover classrooms, the school’s leaders had tried various initiatives to improve. However, most of their efforts faltered and sputtered out, leaving conflict and cynicism behind. By their own account, the faculty struggled with the “basics” to get along well enough to launch and sustain improvement.
When the school’s leadership team invited me to help, I tried to capture their efforts to develop a foundational capability to work together to solve problems, which I called collective agency. Through participant observation with several work groups, I traced how their collective agency became enabled and what shut it down. I also launched and studied a new group using action research.
Comparing groups, I found that efforts to develop collective agency collapsed when educators faced overwhelming and complex problems for which they could see no solutions within reach. In these situations, they avoided their problems, pointed fingers at each other, and expressed a sense of helplessness that nothing could be done. On the flip side, efforts to develop collective agency surged when someone charged the group to ‘do something,’ and when this initiative was combined with a simple solution that the group felt they had the capacity to enact. In these situations, members affirmed each other, perceived the group’s potential for success, and pulled together to make progress towards addressing a problem.
These findings suggest a need for policies and reforms aimed at enabling school improvement in the ‘next level of work’ (City et al., 2010). To do this, we need to partner with educators in challenging circumstances to define and frame goals for improvement within reach and incrementally build organizational problem-solving capacity. Policymakers and scholars need to recognize educators as partners in research and development, without whom our educational system cannot remedy or repair.
LtC: What excites you about the field of Educational Change, and how might we further those ideas through the work of the Educational Change SIG?
EZ: I find hope in the growing number of education researchers seeking answers to existential questions about the role of research in education. Many educators and scholars are deeply concerned about the future of our planet and our democratic values. Looking around at the pernicious grip of racism, the fracturing of civic values, and the erosion of our public education system, many scholars are asking, how does our research relate to this? What are we – as scholars– doing about it? Out of our collective angst comes a growing willingness to expand how we think about academic research and to innovate.
I am excited by the growing number of scholars, especially early career scholars, working to build a more humanistic and justice-forward academic culture. Within our Educational Change SIG and scholarly communities working in RPPs and continuous improvement in education, I am inspired by efforts to actively build a culture in which academics care about each other as people, carry our status with humility, open ourselves to be vulnerable as learners, and treat social impact as a core value.
To further those ideas, I think the Educational Change SIG should reimagine how we organize and schedule AERA sessions with the intention involving more PK-12 practitioners. One way the SIG can do this is to develop a conference call and session formats that encourage and elevate practitioners’ voices and expertise. The SIG might consider offering sponsored conference registration awards for presenting practitioners. The SIG executive committee can also advocate with AERA to schedule specially designated conference sessions for practitioners that are held during after work hours.
I think the Educational Change SIG should support the diversification of our membership and international learning as a facilitator of cross-national and trans-global exchange. One way to do this is by furthering our existing partnerships with the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (https://www.icsei.net/about-icsei/) and journals that explicitly seek scholarship with an international perspective, including the Journal for Educational Change. I would also like to see our SIG do more to promote and support international participation in AERA and other remote events for scholarly exchange throughout the year.
Elizabeth Zumpe is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma. A former K-12 public school teacher for over a decade with National Board Certification, Elizabeth holds a Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Berkeley.
References
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder.
Virella, P., & Liera, R. (2024). Nice for what? The contradictions and tensions of an urban district’s racial equity transformation. Education Sciences, 14(4), 420.
Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press.
del Carmen Salazar, M. (2013). A humanizing pedagogy: Reinventing the principles and practice of education as a journey toward liberation. Review of Research in Education, 37(1), 121-148.
Kim, T., & Mauldin, C. (2022). Troubling unintended harm of heroic discourses in social justice leadership. Frontiers in Education, https://doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.796200
Kim, T., & Wright, J. (2024). Navigating emotional discomfort in developing equity-driven school leaders: A conceptual-pedagogical framework. Journal of School Leadership, 10526846241254050.
Leonardo, Z. (2002). The souls of white folk: Critical pedagogy, whiteness studies, and globalization discourse. Race Ethnicity and Education, 5(1), 29–50. doi:10.1080/13613320120117180
Mezirow J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12.
Mignolo, W. D. (2008). The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. In M. Moraña, E. Dussel & C. Jáuregui (Ed.), Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate
Bailes, L. P., Ahmad, S., Saylor, M., & Vitale, M. N. (2023). Quality or control: High-needs principals’ perceptions of a PSEL-based evaluation system. Journal of Research on Leadership Education, 18(4), 622-648.
Bailes, L. P., & Guthery, S. (2020). Held down and held back: Systematically delayed principal promotions by race and gender. Aera Open, 6(2), 2332858420929298.
City, E. A., Elmore, R. F., Fiarman, S. E., & Teitel, L. (2009). Instructional rounds in education (Vol. 30). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
J., & Steup, L. (2021). Research-practice partnerships in education: The state of the field. William T. Grant Foundation.
Mintrop, R., & Zumpe, E. (2019). Solving real life problems of practice and education leaders’ school improvement mind-set. American Journal of Education, 125(3), 295-344.
Mintrop, R., Zumpe, E., Jackson, K., Nucci, D.,& Norman, J. (2022). Designing for deeper learning: Challenges in schools and school districts serving
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