“They Didn’t Even Talk About Oppression”: School Leadership Protecting the Whiteness of Leadership through Resistance Practices to a Youth Voice Initiative

Abstract

In this article, we deepen understandings of leadership resistance to youth voice initiatives (YVIs) by interrogating the resistant actions of a group of white district leaders who initiated a student voice program to support transformative district improvement. We engaged a fusion collaborative autoethnographic research design rooted in critical race methodology to analyze our experiences of district resistance to a youth voice initiative. Our analytical narrative reveals how district leaders’ web of resistant practices obscured their goals, allowing them to exploit a group of students of color, district teacher, and university partners to promote their public image of being leaders committed to justice and equity. The specific resistant practices that leaders engaged in included (a) maintaining a lack of transparency around their goals for the initiative; (b) controlling the agenda of all interactions with youth and facilitators; (c) positioning course instructors in contradictory binaries such as trustworthy/untrustworthy; and (d) determining the value and presence of expertise among youth, course facilitators, and district leaders. Our Whiteness as property analysis illuminates district leaders’ deployment of resistance as a means to protect school leadership as a propertied expectation associated with whiteness.