Examining How Social Justice Leadership Relates to Student Engagement in High Schools

Abstract

The present study elaborates on the relationshipbetween school principals’ social justice leadership behaviors and studentengagement in relation to high school students’ opinions. The study wasconducted on 968 high school students from two different school types:Anatolian and vocational high schools. The data was collected by Social Justice Leadership Scale (SJLS) andStudent Engagement Scale. Data wasanalyzed by utilizing Pearson correlation, and hierarchical multipleregression. Main results indicated that student engagement and social justiceleadership has a moderate level of positive relationship; support dimension ofsocial justice leadership predicted 28 % of the variance in student engagementitself; and all demographics, and dimensions of social justice was found topredict 34 % of the variance in student engagement. Limitations are presented, andfuture implications for research and practice in the field of educationaladministration are discussed in relation to the results of the study.