Pixel International Conferences

The need for inclusive educational leaders is significant at the global, international, and transnational levels. Calling for the preparation of educational leaders who are ready to build and maintain inclusive school communities; and work towards the elimination of racism, inequalities, and injustices. Although inclusion and inclusive education in the literature most often refers to students with disabilities, it also refers to race, class, gender, bilingual learners (most often referred to as English language learners), and other marginalized students. In this context inclusive education is about countering exclusionary schooling that isolates those who are othered.

A review of professional standards for educational leaders in the U.S. underscores a tendency to write and operate from a position of “colorblindness”, and highlights the importance of preparing inclusive social justice education leaders in a time of colorblindness. Additionally, a survey of extant literature related to transformational and transformative educational leadership, critical race theory and critical social theory, and the preparation of social justice principals and educational leaders resulted in the identification of three potentially valuable frameworks [1]: Furman (2012) [2], Brown (2004) [3], and Capper, Theoharis, & Sebastian (2006) [4]. Each of these frameworks challenges current practices and moves beyond the standards—making a significant contribution to the preparation of social justice educational leaders. This paper argues the global importance of inclusive social justice education, the utility of these extant frameworks, and the telling of one university’s experience in using these three frameworks to critique its program with the intent of sparking dialogue and debate about the current state of leadership preparation—and to argue for the importance of inclusive educational leadership, inclusive education and inclusive schools as a form of transformation.