Promoting Teacher Advocacy as Critical Teacher Leadership

Jill Bradley-Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367556099
• eBook ISBN: 9781000529579
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Timely and accessible, this book critically explores the meaning and practice of teacher advocacy. Drawing from the work of teachers who advocate with and for students who are traditionally marginalized—including students of color, students with exceptionalities, students in poverty, and immigrant students—this volume investigates classroom realities like inequitable distribution of resources, student trauma, and uneven support for teachers' work from administrators.

Unlike other texts on teacher activism, this book embeds activism within an existing leadership framework and strategies that teachers enact within the classroom, across the school, and in their communities. Foregrounding data in the five case studies, this book is an invaluable resource for pre-service teachers and scholars in teacher education, social justice education, and educational leadership.

Part 1

Teacher Advocacy With and for Students

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094289-1

Part 1 frames teacher advocacy with and for students who are traditionally marginalized, clarifying existing notions of activism and advocacy found in the literature. It details the research conducted to explore 20 teachers’ advocacy practices, describing the data collection methods used, as well as the sites for each study and the 20 teachers who participated in the research. Chapter 1 reviews the teacher activism and advocacy literature and establishes the need to connect teacher advocacy practices to existing theory. Chapter 2 describes characteristics and dispositions of teacher advocates from the literature, followed by an introduction to each of the 20 teacher advocates whose practices are featured in the book.

1
The Importance of Advocacy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003094289-2

It is important to explore the ways that teachers advocate with and for their students, especially those students who have been traditionally marginalized. The role of teacher goes beyond assuring that children and adolescents have mastered a set of learning standards. Teachers also serve as surrogate family members to many of their students, a role that demands teachers care for and nurture their students. Many teachers embrace this role, committing themselves to doing as much as they can to ensure that their students’ needs are met and that they feel valued. Moreover, although the work is emotionally arduous, numerous teachers persist as advocates with and for their students. It is tempting to view these teacher advocates as unique, or to attribute their investment of time and energy to special qualities that most teachers do not possess. However, increasing numbers of students need advocates, and thus it is crucial for teachers to develop advocacy skills. Thus, uncovering the practices that guide the work of teachers who practice advocacy is imperative to our understandings of this teacher work.

The study of teacher advocacy as a practice of leadership is in its early stages. While there exists a body of research focusing on teacher activism and teacher leader advocacy, this research has not utilized theory to frame teacher advocacy as a practice of leadership. For example, Nieto (2015) identified teachers who do advocacy as teacher leaders; however, she did not examine their pedagogical work through the lens of leadership theory. This is common across the literature that examines teacher leader advocacy. Thus, there is only an assumption that practices of advocacy are analogous with teacher leadership without a full development of how advocacy aligns with what scholars have previously identified as leadership. In addition, research on teacher leadership has been criticized for being “largely atheoretical” in the literature (Wenner & Campbell, 2017, p. 147; York-Barr & Duke, 2004, p. 291). There is also little research addressing “issues of equity and diversity” within teacher leadership (Wenner & Campbell, 2017, p. 164).

These criticisms are problematic because without a clear understanding of teacher advocacy and a cohesive theory to define and structure the practice of teacher advocacy, it is much more challenging to develop pre- and in-service teachers to think and act critically as teacher leaders in their schools and communities. To address these gaps, I collected data through five case studies and then utilized theories of critical pedagogy, collaborative leadership, and ethical leadership to frame teacher advocacy with and for students who are traditionally marginalized. The studies focused on teacher advocacy with and for a variety of students who have been traditionally marginalized in schools, including boys of color, English learners, first-generation college students, students from poverty, refugee students, and students with exceptional needs.

This book presents a theory, grounded in case study data, that through their advocacy, teachers combine the practices of critical pedagogy and school-based leadership to demonstrate how a particular way of teaching, carried out in the classroom, across the school, and with the community, provides a model for critical teacher leadership. Although I first introduced the ideas shared in this book in an article in the International Journal of Teacher Leadership (see Bradley-Levine, 2018), I continued collecting data after that publication in order to establish a stronger foundation to elaborate on those initial ideas. In total, I collected more than 87 hours of observation data and 41 hours of interview data with 20 teacher advocates, 13 administrators, 22 teachers, two instructional assistants, and one parent. This book advances the theoretical model that I developed through these studies of teacher advocacy as both a practice of teacher leadership and a practice through which teachers educate and lead for social justice. I identify this model as a theory for critical teacher leadership.

The book is divided into three sections. Part 1 is an introduction to teacher advocacy that provides an expanded definition to clarify existing notions found in the literature, establishes that advocacy is a practice of leadership, and describes characteristics and dispositions of teachers who advocate. In this chapter, I will define teacher advocacy within the literature and explain why the study of teachers who advocate is important in the context of current education policy and the political climate. Additionally, this chapter will establish the need to identify, understand, and cultivate teacher advocacy as a practice of teacher leadership, leading to the development of a theory of advocacy as the practice of critical teacher leadership. Chapter 2 will describe specific teacher advocates who typify or extend what we know about advocacy within the existing research. The chapter will introduce the teacher advocates who participated in the five case studies that provide evidence to support the grounded theory I present in this book. Their stories serve as exemplars for how critical teacher leaders develop through personal and professional experience.

Consisting of Chapters 3, 4, and 5, Part 2 is a detailed description of the practices that teacher advocates utilize in their classrooms, schools, and communities, embedded in existing theories of pedagogy and leadership. Chapter 3 depicts the ways that teacher advocates design and implement classroom structures and programs that meet the specific needs of their students who are marginalized. I will provide specific data from the case studies, framing teachers’ advocacy using critical pedagogy theory. Chapter 4 explains how teachers’ advocacy work influences their colleagues to join them in advocacy with and for students who are traditionally marginalized. In addition, I will illustrate through data from the case studies how teachers’ advocacy resulted in a professional culture of mutual leadership and responsibility using collaborative leadership theory to frame their work. In Chapter 5, I will share the ways that virtues of ethical leadership guide teacher advocates’ work with and for students who are traditionally marginalized. Data from the case studies will be framed through ethical leadership theory.

Part 3 is a discussion of challenges to teacher advocacy and presents data demonstrating how administrators and networks can support teacher advocacy as a practice of critical teacher leadership. In Chapter 6, I will provide examples of supports for advocacy that teacher advocates described during the case study research. In addition, the chapter will expound the ways that the theories examined in Part 2 assist our understandings of these obstacles and provide insight into how such challenges may be overcome. I will also share the ways that administrators supported teachers in their advocacy work, and describe how a teacher leader network supports teacher leaders’ advocacy by providing them with a concrete process for developing advocacy and leadership skills, as well as a space in which to engage in collaborative growth external to their school. In Chapter 7, I will summarize the theory of critical teacher leadership and connect it to the supports discussed in Chapter 6, offering a list of practices for critical teacher leaders.

Teacher Advocacy Through Activism and Leadership

The small body of research on teacher advocacy explores the concept from two perspectives, the teaching perspective and the teacher leadership perspective. The former associates advocacy with teacher or educator activism while the latter locates advocacy within practices of educational leadership. When described as activism, teacher advocacy is viewed as political and something that sometimes extends beyond the classroom and school. However, within the teacher leadership literature, advocacy is viewed from an organizational perspective where teacher leaders’ work across the school is examined.

Teacher Activism as Advocacy

Early literature on teacher advocacy depicts teachers as promoting at best, the teaching profession, and at worst, their own interests (Goldstein, 2014; Levenson, 2014; Lortie, 1975/2002; Quinn & Carl, 2015). For example, Wagenaar (1974) described teachers as “activist professionals” whose “militancy” was played out through heavy strike activity in the 1960s (p. 372). These teachers engaged in advocacy on their own behalf rather than on behalf of their students. However, this portrayal of teachers as self-serving advocates fails to acknowledge the work that teachers carry out in support of students, especially those who are traditionally marginalized.

Conversely, teacher advocacy literature of the twenty-first century presents teachers as activists whose primary goal is supporting their students. Picower (2012b) defines “teacher activists” as “educators who work for social justice both inside and outside of their classrooms” (p. 562). She identified three “commitments” that allow teacher activists to pursue social justice for their students (p. 564). The primary commitment is characterized by teachers’ belief that education can simultaneously emancipate and oppress students. To resolve this contradiction, teacher activists pursue two additional commitments. First, they organize their classrooms to be both democratic and caring learning spaces, utilizing place-based and culturally relevant instructional approaches to empower their students. Pantic (2017) describes this as teachers having an interest in assuring their students’ “well-being,” and that students have “access to equal opportunities for learning” (p. 229). Second, according to Picower (2012b), teacher activists take action outside of the school to achieve systemic change (Haywood-Bird & Kamei, 2019; Niesz, 2018). Through this engagement, teacher activists become transparent; they share what they do and why they do it with external audiences. Further, they seek solidarity with other teachers through collective struggle on behalf of their students rather than themselves (Stern & Brown, 2016). Taken together, the three commitments provide a framework for teacher activism that demonstrates “that teachers are people ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Teacher Advocacy With and for Students
• Part 2 Teacher Advocacy as Leadership Practice
• Part 3 Advocacy as Critical Teacher Leadership
• Index