School as Community: From Promise to Practice

3. The Role of Community in Spiritually Centered Leadership for Justice

CHAPTER 3 The Role of Community in Spiritually Centered Leadership for Justice Colleen A. Capper, Madeline M. Hafner, and Maureen W. Keyes The purpose of this chapter is to examine how and to what extent ideas of community surface in the literature and in our research on spirituality and leadership. We overlay the analyses of the literature and our empirical work to consider critically how the ideas associated with spirituality and community are similar to, and different from, one another. Ultimately, we want to know how the intertwining of spirituality and community support and constrain leadership for equity and justice. The topics of spirituality in education and spirituality in leadership have exploded over the past ten years. Books, conferences, workshops, and study guides are easily available to educators and leaders from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. Spirituality in education has emerged in the fields of educational philosophy, educational theory, curriculum and instruction, and educational leadership. Spirituality in leadership is discussed within leadership conversations involving organizational theories, leadership theories, corporate enterprises, business strategies, and the administration of schools, both K-12 and higher education. It is from these differing and varied discourses that we ask our research questions. First, to what extent does the literature on spirituality in education and spirituality in leadership express the idea of community and to what extent is this expression justice oriented? Second, how is the idea of community expressed in the work of spiritually centered leaders for justice? For the first question, we reviewed and analyzed the related literature. To address the second question, we probed more deeply into a recent empirical investigation on the role spirituality plays in the lives of leaders leading for justice. In this study, we were curious about four questions: (a) What is the spiritual and justice history of these leaders committed to justice and equity 77 for all? (b) How does the intertwining of spirituality and justice effect their decision-making and leadership behaviors? (c) What are the obstacles and constraints of a spiritually entered leadership oriented toward justice and equity? (d) In a society that “downplays” spirituality, may even be suspicious of it, and in a society in which human need and suffering seems too overwhelming , how do these leaders persist? We collected data over a six-month period from a variety of sources, primarily through interviews with twenty-one leaders who the public or community has recognized as oriented toward equity and justice, equally distributed among K-12, higher education, and nonprofit institutions. Participants were also selected who represented diversity in race/ ethnicity and spiritual beliefs. We conducted a secondary analysis of this data to determine the role “community” played in these leaders= efforts to work toward equity and justice in their institutions, and how their ideas of community intersected with their spiritual beliefs. In this chapter, we ask, Toward what end do we practice community and spirituality? We distinguish between modernist and feminist poststructural views of community and spirituality. We follow that with an extensive analysis of the spirituality and leadership literature to discern the role of community. In the last section, we reveal glimpses of feminist poststructural perspectives of spirituality and community in the literature and in our research. But first, we discuss what we mean by the term spirituality and the application of this meaning to the work in this chapter. BEYOND SPIRITUAL/RELIGIOUS DICHOTOMIES One of the first questions we are asked about our work, whether in response to our writing or teaching is, What do you mean by spirituality? For example, in our research, most participants want clarity right away about our definition of spirituality, and most are quick to distinguish spirituality from organized religion. Interestingly, for some participants in our study, it was their past history with justice/equity that led them away from organized religion. A male, African-American dean explained, “some of [my activist work] certainly lead[s] me away from any religious connection. Because for me fundamentally the question was, ‘If I accept this kind of standard religious representation about how the world is supposed to work, then how come all of this stuff was happening?’” We do not position organized religion against spirituality. Some individuals do not find a connection between their spirituality and organized religion; for others, however, they do in fact draw spiritual strength and guidance from an organized religion. We believe both positions have value, and that ultimately, each person’s conceptualization of spirituality is the right one for him or her. 78...