Decolonizing Educational Leadership: Exploring Alternative Approaches to Leading Schools

“Grounded in historical context, Lopez draws on her experience as a practitioner and scholar to methodologically examine ‘the continued tensions in education and schooling.’ Decolonizing education in these unprecedented times amid a pandemic and racial unrest is a call to action in schools and society.”
—Gaëtane Jean-Marie, Dean and Professor of Educational Leadership, Rowan University, USA

“Lopez effectively and brilliantly presents the case for critical and liberating approaches to educational leadership. The work is massively unique in its temporality in that it focuses on an area that has somehow mostly avoided the urgent need to examine its structures and outcomes. Indeed, the contents of this book are forwardly recasting educational leadership as a pragmatically constructed, cognitively dynamic, and programmatically inclusive platform for polycentric teaching, learning, and leadership. It will greatly benefit educational leadership scholars, students, and professionals.”

—Ali A. Abdi, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, The University of British Columbia, Canada

This book offers new ways of engagement for leaders seeking to connect theory to practice in decolonizing education. In the current climate where xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, and other forms of exclusion make up much of the discourse, educational leaders need to seek ways to foreground other forms of knowledge and transfer them into their daily leadership practices. Lopez contributes to other critical leadership approaches while foregrounding a decolonizing approach that unsettles the coloniality manifested in education and school practices. Chapters provide school leaders with examples of ways they can challenge coloniality, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression in schooling that negatively impact some students and their educational outcomes.
Ann E. Lopez is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Director of the Center for Leadership and Diversity, and Provostial Advisor on Access Programs at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Leadership in Diverse Contexts: From Theory to Action (2016).