Educational Leadership for Transformation and Social Justice

Narratives of change in South Africa

John Ambrosio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317410973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Educational Leadership for Transformation and Social Justice examines the relationship between the lived experiences of educational leaders at the University of the Free State in South Africa and how they think about and practice leadership for transformation and social justice. Based on biographical information, public speeches, published writings, and in-depth semi-structured face-to-face interviews, the book presents and analyses seven chapter-length narratives of these leaders.

This book explores how some leaders at the University of the Free State – from the vantage point of various racialized and gendered identities, and generational experiences – conceptualize and enact leadership for transformation and social justice. Ambrosio argues that there are certain values, beliefs, concepts, principles, and ways of thinking that cut across their experiences and demographic differences. The narratives are presented in the leaders' own words, and describe how their lived experiences shaped their values and identities, and inform how they think about and practice leadership for transformation and social justice. One convergence that emerged among these leaders is that their leadership is an extension of who they are, of their core values, identities and ethical commitments. Another is that they are motivated by visions of change that go beyond the University; by bigger dreams that infuse their work with meaning and purpose.

With its in-depth analysis of the narratives, this book will provide educational leaders who have an orientation towards transformation and social justice with insights that enable them to think differently about how to make the policies, programs, and institutional culture of their own universities more equitable and just. It will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, educational justice, higher education, educational leadership and change, social justice and racial justice.

1
What is educational leadership for transformation and social justice?

John Ambrosio

Educational leadership for transformation and social justice must be rooted in the particular social and historical conditions in which it is practiced. As such, there is no single unifying, one-size-fits-all or all-encompassing notion of what it means. While there are certain values, ethical principles, and beliefs that may inform their work, educational leaders who seek transformation and social justice must respond to the inherent contradictions and problems that emerge within a particular social formation at a certain moment in time. That is, the meanings of transformation and social justice are constituted and delimited by the specific conditions and circumstances that define the context of leadership, which are always changing.

While the concepts of transformation and social justice are not synonymous, they intersect in important ways. In contemporary South Africa, especially in institutions of higher education, transformation is a highly politicized and contested concept. For Jonathan Jansen, the internationally renowned vice chancellor and rector of the University of the Free State (UFS), transformation refers to changes in social relations and how individuals and social groups view and interact with one another, especially with regard to race, and to changing the institutional culture of the university to make it more welcoming and inclusive. On the other hand, social justice is concerned with redressing past injustices, that is, righting the wrongs of centuries of exploitation and oppression by ensuring a just and equitable distribution of resources and opportunities for previously excluded and marginalized individuals and social groups.

Professor Jansen, as students and staff typically call him, frames his leadership goals in terms of two major initiatives: the Human and Academic Projects. The Human Project seeks to transform the nature and quality of human relations on the campus, especially among people who have been racialized differently, to create a more humane and inclusive climate, whereas the Academic Project focuses on the drive for academic excellence, which includes raising academic standards, attracting high-performing students, providing students and faculty with opportunities for personal growth and professional development, and cultivating a rigorous and vibrant intellectual culture at the UFS. In this way, his vision of change is similar to the notion of transformative leadership articulated by Shields (2011), which “emphasizes the need for education to focus both on academic excellence and social transformation” (p. 4).

However, transforming the social relations and institutional culture of the UFS will not be successful unless issues of social justice are seriously addressed. In postapartheid South Africa educational leaders must focus not only on transforming human relations, on changing the way people see and treat one another, but on transforming relations of power and privilege. These two goals are ineluctable: changing the hearts, minds, and cultural practices of people in a post-conflict society like South Africa, with a long history of racial oppression and exclusion, cannot succeed in the absence of a demonstrable and sustained commitment to social justice. Thus, leaders of institutions of higher education in South Africa must pursue transformation and social justice simultaneously and walk a fine line in seeking both reconciliation and redress.

A key aim of this book is to illuminate the relation between the lived and embodied experience of some leaders at the UFS and how they understand and enact leadership for transformation and social justice. To this end, I prepared chapter-long narratives of seven educational leaders based on biographical information and in-depth, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews I conducted as a Fulbright Scholar in the Faculty of Education from March to June 2014. I was drawn to the UFS by the international reputation of its vice chancellor and rector, Jonathan Jansen, and the leading role it plays among universities in South Africa in institutional transformation and integration. The UFS is the first historically Afrikaans university to fully embrace a nonracial vision of South Africa and is pioneering efforts to improve access and equity for previously excluded and marginalized people.

The educational leaders included in this book are situated in various places in the organizational structure and hierarchy of the UFS. Because they have different racialized and gendered identities, as well as generational experiences, their perspectives reflect the lived experience of leaders from a range of social and historical locations. Despite this, as I argue in Chapter Nine, there are certain concepts, values, principles, and ways of thinking that inform their approaches to leadership. Thus, in addition to examining the relation between their lived experience and leadership practices, a central aim of this book is to identify ways of conceptualizing and practicing leadership for transformation and social justice that can inform and contribute to the work of leaders in institutions of higher education in South Africa and elsewhere. My hope is that these narratives will encourage and inspire other leaders to critically reflect on their practice and to incorporate, in whatever way makes sense in their particular contexts, the lessons and insights they derive from these narratives.

Regardless of the context, leadership for transformation and social justice requires moral courage and a willingness to challenge what is for what should be. It often means going against the grain, advocating for unpopular causes, and taking both personal and professional risks. As I discovered, their embrace of leadership for transformation and social justice is less a conscious choice than a natural expression of their core values, identities, and lived experiences.

While scholarship on leadership for social justice has increased significantly in the United States and elsewhere over the past 15 years, there remains a dearth of research on leadership regarding institutions of higher education in South Africa. This project was inspired, in part, by the work of Professor Jansen, who has written extensively on the emotional, psychological, and political costs and challenges of “leading against the grain” in postapartheid South Africa (Jansen, 2005, 2009). In his work, Professor Jansen emphasizes the importance of employing a biographical lens and examining the underlying values and beliefs that inform how educational leaders think in seeking to understand what motivates their leadership (Jansen, 2006).

Rather than tell other people’s stories, it is important that these leaders speak for themselves in their own words. Thus, after providing some biographical information and relevant context, the narratives consist mostly of conversations between myself and the individual leaders. While I explored some of the same issues with each of the leaders, I also posed questions that were specific to their lived experiences, public lectures, and various publications. All of the interviews were conducted in English. Although English is the official lingua franca of public life at the UFS, it is not the mother tongue of most of these leaders.

It is important to note that I did not approach this research as a neutral or disinterested observer but as someone with a long-standing and deep commitment to promoting equity and social justice in schools and society. As a white male university professor from the United States, who benefits from white racial privilege and male privilege in both the United States and South Africa, I was acutely aware of my social location within South African society. My privileged position as a white male from North America was always foregrounded in my consciousness when interacting with South African colleagues. During the year I spent at the UFS (August 2013–July 2014), I developed personal and professional relationships with some of the leaders in this book and had many opportunities to participate in university events, including the summer and autumn graduation ceremonies, the Open Day welcoming assembly, as well as numerous public lectures, conferences, colloquia, discussions, and informal social gatherings.

The transformation process at the UFS is supported by an infrastructure of institutes, research centers, and degree programs that include the Institute for Reconciliation and Social Justice; the cross-disciplinary program on Trauma, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation; the Center for Research on Higher Education and Development; and the Institute for Institutional Research and Academic Planning. The transformation process is also advanced through various university initiatives such as the F1 Leadership for Change study abroad program, which sends a group of first-year students to universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia for two weeks every year to learn about other cultures, and the Prestige Scholars’ program, which provides some newer scholars with research assistance, financial support, and faculty mentors. Together, these programs and others aim to transform the institutional culture of the UFS by changing the dominant norms, values, and practices and by producing a cadre of student leaders and a new generation of scholars with an orientation toward social justice.

One of the hallmarks of Professor Jansen’s leadership is that the recruitment of high-performing students, the distribution of bursaries (scholarships), and inclusion in initiatives like the F1 Leadership for Change program are allocated on a nonracial basis. He is deeply committed to supporting all students in need, whatever their racial assignment, and to maintaining a diverse student body at the UFS. To this end, Professor Jansen donated part of his first year’s salary, and the profits from two of his best-selling books, to provide bursaries for students.

I chose to privilege the voices of these educational leaders in the narratives because it can potentially reveal, better than stories about them, the meaning and essence of their thoughts. In my reading of various collections of interviews with leading figures in literature and philosophy, I found that something significant is often illuminated in the ebb and flow of dialogue, in the ordinary back and forth of conversation, that may not otherwise be accessible (Lotringer, 1996; Taylor-Guthrie, 1994). The sheer randomness and unpredictability of dialogue can open a window into a person’s reasoning process and motivations.

The socioeconomic context

While a political revolution took place in 1994 in South Africa that led to the establishment of the first democratically elected government, many analysts argue that the political revolution was not accompanied by a similar transformation of the economic system (Alexander, 2013; Bundy, 2014; Terreblanche, 2012). While a relatively small black elite and middle class emerged after the transition to democracy, most of the wealth, income, and economic power remains in the hands of the Afrikaner minority. In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended a one-time wealth tax on corporate and private income to address extreme inequality in South African society, but it was ignored. As a result, the majority of blacks, who constitute more than 80% of the population, continue to live in conditions of abject poverty.

One of the challenges for the African National Congress, the dominant political party in South Africa since the end of apartheid, has been to create enough jobs that pay a living wage to satisfy the fast-growing and relatively young population and to adequately prepare working-age people to participate in the labor market. In 2013, South Africa had an official unemployment rate of more than 25%, which does not account for workers who are available but have given up looking for work. When these workers are included in an expanded definition of unemployment, the rate is nearly 37% (Statistics South Africa, 2016). Thus, South Africa has an unemployment rate that far exceeds the worst years of the Great Depression in the United States, which is the new normal. This extraordinarily high unemployment rate also has a racial dimension: unemployment is four times higher for blacks than whites.

In 2013, about one-third of 15- to 24-year-olds in South Africa, about 3.5 million youth were neither employed nor in school or training (Statistics South Africa, 2016). Many of these young people dropped out of severely under-resourced and largely dysfunctional public schools before taking matric (the high school graduation exam) in 11th grade and thus have few economic opportunities. Nearly one-third of South Africans, and about 46% of all households, receive at least one social security grant from the national government, which are small monthly payments for old age, child support, foster care, dependency care, and disabilities (South African Info, 2014). Often, entire households survive on the social grant of one family member.

The educational context

Despite spending nearly 6% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on public education, which is relatively high when compared to other nations of similar size (but less so given that 15–24-year-olds comprise more than 20% of the population), many public schools that serve the poorest students, who are predominantly black, remain severely under-resourced and lack basic facilities such as electricity, running water and indoor toilets; school supplies like books and desks; and libraries and science labs (Equal Education, November 14, 2012). In addition, many teachers in these schools are poorly trained, have insufficient content knowledge, and lack a sense of professionalism. As a result, about 80% of all public schools in South Africa, typically in rural areas and townships, are mostly dysfunctional. The combined effect of the deplorable conditions in many public schools is that official claims to the contrary, only about 40% of learners in 2013 passed matric despite the low bar set for passing. Of those who passed, only 16% qualified for university admission (Spaull, 2014).

This context presents enormous challenges for leaders in institutions of higher education in South Africa who seek transformation and social justice. Students who manage to qualify for university admission typically arrive underprepared for college-level work and are in need of significant financial and academic support. To compound the problem, as a dual-medium university, the UFS offers all courses in Afrikaans and English, which means that students who do not speak Afrikaans, who are mostly black, must take classes in English, which is typically not their mother tongue. In South Africa, questions of language and culture have become a proxy for issues of race, power, and privilege, which is why maintaining the Afrikaans language and culture at the UFS has become a primary concern and rallying point for the Afrikaner community and media.

Efforts to change the racial and gender composition of leadership at the university, to make the institutional culture more diverse and inclusive, have run up against persistent opposition from members of the Afrikaner community, who typically see themselves as victims of the new social order, as a persecuted minority whose language and culture are under the threat of extinction. In this emotionally charged context, incidents between whites and blacks are instantly transformed into racial conflicts that provoke outrage and ignite strong passions on all sides.

Thus, educational leaders at institutions of higher education in South Africa have an arduous and potentially explosive road to travel: they must find a way to pursue reconciliation and social justice simultaneously. Whereas reconciliation requires understanding and forgiveness, social justice requires a reallocation of resources, power, and privilege. Educational leaders must continually negotiate the competing and often conflicting demands of the Afrikaner community, which claims victimization in the postapartheid era, and the black community, which demands immediate access and inclusion, and an equitable distribution of resources and opportunities. Walking this fine line is a daunting task, a balancing act that pleases very few people.

Jonathan Jansen was appointed vice chancellor and rector of the UFS in October 2009 in the midst of what became known as the Reitz incident, in which four white students humiliated five black employees of the university. The incident was videotaped by the students, posted on YouTube, and became the focus of a fierce and bitter national debate about race. Professor Jansen was under tremendous pressure from powerful leaders in the ANC (African National Congress) and elsewhere, who demanded the immediate expulsion and prosecution of the students. In addition, many blacks called for severe penalties for acts of perceived white racism and a faster transition to positions of power for members of previously marginalized and excluded social groups.

Given this situation, educational leaders at institutions of higher education in South Africa are caught between a rock and a hard place: They are harshly criticized by many in the black community if they are viewed as being too lenient in punishing instances of perceived white racism or too slow in transforming the social relations of power and privilege, and they are loudly denounced by many in the Afrikaner community and media if they are viewed as moving too quickly or too far in changing the racial demographics of leadership and the institutional culture of the UFS. The situation in South Africa is reminiscent of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States during the 50s and 60s, when African American leaders faced a similar dilemma.

Educational leaders in South Africa must address the legitimate demands of those who were exploited and oppressed under apartheid and the fears and economic insecurities of the white beneficiaries of apartheid. Walking this fine line is especially challenging given the conflicting narratives of blacks and whites about what actually happened during the apartheid era and the failure of many ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 What is educational leadership for transformation and social justice?
• 2 The soft revolution: Embracing the better versions of ourselves
• 3 The question of fairness: Creating opportunities to succeed
• 4 Something much bigger: Doing what is good and what is right
• 5 Repairing the brokenness of the past: Working through the unfinished business of trauma
• 6 There is nobody innocent here: Shared complicity and the sharp edge of social justice
• 7 Transformation as an intellectual and ethical project: Changing inherited patterns of thought and social practice
• 8 A new hope: Believing in a fairer, more decent, and more humane society
• 9 A bigger dream: Visions of educational leadership for transformation and social justice in South Africa