Jeff Zacharakis

Leadership Education and Development for What?: Civic Imagination for a More Just and Democratic Society

When institutions assign meaning to individual rights and distribute resources in ways that shape the life chances of people, if appropriately designed they strengthen social justice aims. Yet the natural outcome of how individuals relate to institutions does not automatically align with justice. Communities are in constant struggle to align the arrangement of social institutions to meet standards of justice. This issue of Educational Considerations explores how social justice and leadership education contributes to the capacity of students and community to advance and manage competing claims of justice. The relationship between institutions and the requirement of justice are central to the field of education. Education intersects questions of justice from both internal and external perspectives. From the inward perspective, teaching methods, content, curriculum, and access to quality teaching and learning prepares students with necessary skills, knowledge, and dispositions to advance claims of justice in civic and public spaces. From an external perspective, institutions of education inform the opportunities available to individuals, and inform the context in which dimensions of justice are realized. As such, education and civic leaders are forced to consider, at a minimum, how educational institutions relate to equality of opportunity and meet thin understandings of justice as fairness. New perspectives in the fields of educational and civic leadership are increasingly considering how educational institutions, both internally and outwardly, frustrate and/or enable progress toward a more justice society. There are a range of understandings and approaches to how individuals think, define, and realize dimensions of justice in this special issue. However, there is a critical mass of leadership educators who overlook contested spaces of justice and assert that social justice can be reduced to content and teaching methods. This approach should be viewed as necessary to leadership education, but not sufficient. Our experience suggests this approach does not do enough to prepare students to exercise leadership in spaces in which notions of justice are openly contested. Leadership Education and Development for What?: Civic Imagination for a More Just and Democratic Society