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- [01:01]
Dr. Christina Gessler
So good, so good. So good.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I always find something amazing.
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Dr. Dakota Irby
Just so many good brands. I get an extra 5% off with.
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- [01:27]
Dr. Dakota Irby
That's why you rack welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler, and today I am so pleased to be joined by Dr. Dakota Irby, who is the author of Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change. Welcome to the show, Dr. Irby.
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Dr. Dakota Irby
Thank you, Christina for having me on.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and that we get to dive into this book together today. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
- [02:08]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Yeah. So as you mentioned, my name is Dakota Irby. I am an educator, author, I'm an artist, a father. I wear many hats like many people do. I'll talk a little bit first about some of my values. I'm deeply committed to advancing educational justice equity and ensuring that black and Brown students are treated with dignity in their education spaces. I am a school improvement scholar. I focus on helping adults. Primarily, you use their resources to improve the educational experiences and opportunities that children have in schools. I do that through organizational improvement approaches. I believe that if children, young people have the right conditions that their aspirations and their performance and their outcomes follow and mirror the set of conditions that they're actually in. Formerly, I'm a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago in the Department of Educational Policy Studies. I'm also a co director of UIC center for Urban Education Leadership, and I'm also director of Brothers Teaching Initiative in the College of Education, which recruits and prepares males of color to go into teaching. In addition to that, I was born and raised in South Carolina. I've lived in numerous places. Philadelphia, where I did my graduate work, lived in San Francisco for a year, Milwaukee, and I've been in Chicago now for two years. I'm a father of two wonderful children and I have a wonderful partner. We live on the south side of Chicago, and we're always outside, whether it's at community gardens or baseball games, softball games. We're very involved and engaged in our community. So that's a little bit about me. And as you mentioned, and the reason that we're talking today is that I'm one of the editors of a new book published by Teachers College Press called Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and System Change. And it's a book that I'm very proud of and that I worked on with my colleague Ann Ishumaru, who's not with us today, but wanted to mention and give her a shout out because a lot of what I'll be talking about are ideas that she and I formulated together in collaboration with our co authors, who wrote many of the chapters in the book along with us.
- [04:57]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And we're going to deep dive into the book in a moment. First, I'd like to circle back and ask you a question that many listeners of academic life are always curious about, which is your own academic path. Did you know this is where you wanted to end up? And how was your pathway?
- [05:13]
Dr. Dakota Irby
No, I did not know that this is where I would end up. I grew up not I didn't even know what a doctoral degree or master's degree was when I was growing up. I didn't know what college was, vaguely. So my path, like I said, started back when I was growing up in South Carolina. I would say that the career fits me very well because I've always been a very curious person. Even as a as a child, I was very curious. I asked a lot of questions. I didn't think a lot of things were fair or right, and I was always curious about why things were the way that they were. And so I think that my curiosity is what led me to this profession. I graduated from high school and attended the College of Charleston in South Carolina at The College of Charleston. I majored in economics. I thought that I was going to go into kind of like finance. I became interested in that when I took an economics class in high school, and we played this stock market simulator game where we had to read the Wall Street Journal and look at the stock performance. And I just became very fascinated in economics had always worked. I worked at age 14, I had my first job washing dishes at Pizza Hut. And so I was always interested in how money worked and how to make money grow, how to save those sorts of things. So once I graduated with my degree in economics, I moved to Philadelphia to pursue a master's degree in geography and urban studies. My idea was that I was going to be working in kind of more community development space, thinking about how to create economic opportunities in black communities. And when I was there, I was working at Sunglass Hut in King of Prussia Mall, selling sunglasses to wealthy people, trying to make a commission. And it was not very fulfilling. So I started to think about and explore ways to volunteer. And the first time that I started to work with young people in the educational space was when I volunteered to teach young people how to use email. Because at the time, the financial aid application process was moving to online. And at that time, most people, if they weren't in college, didn't have, you know, didn't use email. I started volunteering with those young people. Long story short, it was fun. I had a ball. The young people were a total trip. And I ended up starting to volunteer and do a lot of work with young people. That led to me becoming a director of a program called Young Scholars Program at Temple University, where I was doing my master's degree at the time. And that was the first time that I started to have a better sense of the role of research. And I started to research and understanding, kind of like education, educational opportunity. The thing that really bugged me at that time was that the young people that I worked with and their families had all of the ambition and aspirations to go to college, to pursue the American dream, to achieve upward mobility, to live stable, secure lives. And their pathway for trying to accomplish that was through college. And despite doing most things by the playbook, the majority of the families and students that I work with didn't see those aspirations come to fruition in terms of being able to go to college and pay for college, graduate from college. And that didn't sit well with me. And I became very curious about why that was the case. And that led me to apply to a PhD program in urban education. And from There, you know, I did the graduate school thing, learned how to become an academic, you know, attended conferences, did presentations, worked as a research assistant and did some evaluation projects. Just really immerse myself. I was fortunate to be a full time graduate student, so I was able to immerse myself in the process and experience of what it is to be an academic. And from there, graduated. I took my first tenure track job at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and was there for five years before I came to University of Illinois Chicago in the AI Policy Studies department. So that's my trajectory. I think the only other thing that I would add is that when I was at College of Charleston, I majored in economics, but I had a work study job at a research center called Avery Research center for African American History and Culture. And while I was at Avery, I worked in the archives. We had a library that was filled with black and African authors. And during my downtime at work, I would sit in the stacks and just like go through books and just, you know, just read, you know, just read everything that I could read. I would just be lost in the stacks and my supervisor would come and say, hey, we about to close. And I would be like, oh. And I put the book back and walk out. So that experience of being in a library and being in a place with so much rich scholarship written from the perspective and vantage point of people from the African diaspora was very formative for me in terms of understanding what it means to kind of like produce knowledge and to write and the importance of writing and importance of books. And then that was really. And at that research center, because it's a research center, we had people come from all over the world to conduct their research on low country African American history in South Carolina. And it was cool because I actually got to meet people from, you know, London who will come, they will have a fellowship and they will come to do their research for a month. And as an undergraduate I got to sit and have conversations with them and actually help them understand the history that would actually be used and pull the artifacts and resources that they were, their primary resources that they were using for their own dissertations and book projects. So that was my first kind of introduction to, you know, understanding research and really starting to understand and value. I didn't call it this at the time, but the, not the, the, the process of producing knowledge. I didn't realize what it was at that time. I didn't really realize the significance of my experience at Avery Research center until I actually became a graduate student. And then I was like, oh, this is what everybody was doing when they were at Avery because I was suddenly in a position where I was the person who was seeking out primary sources and doing interviews and visiting historical sites and conducting observations to identify patterns so that I could write up what I'm seeing and what I'm learning. So, yeah, so that's a little bit about my background. I never would have thought or imagined that I would be an academic, but it fits me well because like I said, I'm a naturally curious person and I always tell people I'm blessed because I get to read, write, think and talk for a living.
- [12:58]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book is called Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change. And you tell us in the book that it was nearly a decade of primary research. There was partnership work with leaders in U.S. school districts. There were countless interviews that were conducted. We have sample of many of the interviews throughout the book. And one of the things I'm struck by is the coupling of the two things in this book. It's Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for justice and for systems Change. Often we find a book that's about one or the other and as you were sharing about your early background and your interest in finance and economics, that's very much a systems analysis type of work. What is the system doing and how does that create a certain type of outcome, particularly around rise and fall of finances? For so many people who experience injustice, lack of equity, they often experience it at a personal level and it creates a lot of silences. This happened to me. And they maybe share with a trusted person and they maybe say, please don't tell anyone else. When it's moved into a system level analysis, we, we see it from a different lens that yes, it's happening to people, but it happens in this system because of designs within the system, right?
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Dr. Dakota Irby
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you know, as I mentioned when I introduced myself, I've always been interested in conditions. That's a hallmark of all of my scholarship is I'm interested in how the conditions, how circumstances, you know, really shape humans behavior, how we treat one another, whether we think there's abundance or whether we think there's scarcity. A lot of this has to do with the systems that we operate and live within. One of the ways that I often talk about systems and in particular, you know, my focus being at the organizational level, whether the district. We think about school districts as organizations or schools as organizations, it's very difficult for individual humans to have the wherewithal to operate the way they want to in a System that has a history and that has a set of kind of cultural norms, institutional logics, expectations that make you want to do something that you may not ever have thought you would do. A basic example that I like to give people is if we think about, for example, you know, it could be like a baseball game or sporting event, right? If, when the, when people stand up in the United States, which this hasn't always been the case, people didn't always do this. But now at sport, sporting events, people sing the national anthem and when the national anthem starts, there's this announcement, right? There's this expectation throughout this entire.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
System.
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Dr. Dakota Irby
Of sports and athletics in the United States. And people are expected to stand up. Most people stand up whether they want to or not. Even if you had never been to a game in the United States, you come from, you know, another country that has a different set of norms where they don't say the Pledge of Allegiance. When you come and you go into that game, more likely than not, when you're instructed to stand up and you see everybody else stand up, you probably going to stand up. It actually takes a tremendous amount of energy and wherewithal to not stand up. And then if we think about people like Colin Kaepernick, who actually took a knee, that takes a different amount of kind of consciousness and energy to actually go against what is expected of you by this cultural expectation, by this norm that this system actually asks people to conform to. We could say the same thing. For example, if you go into religious institutions, when people stand up to sing a song or a hymn. I grew up in a, in a black Baptist church. I remember sometimes my friends would come with, you know, for that were like from New York would come to church with me. And when everybody stood up to sing a hymn, although he wasn't a church going person, had never went to church, he stood up. And even if he didn't know the words, he kind of started to kind of like hum along. And even if it felt uncomfortable, you kind of do it. And that's how, that's how systems work. And I try to tell people that because there's these ways the systems shape our everyday lives. Whether it's how we drive, right? How in the United States, we're really, really good at forming lines. We're really good at forming lines in a way that is not the case in places all, you know, in places outside of the United States. So all of these things demonstrate that systems profoundly impact our behaviors. And so this book is really about how leadership is used to actually reshape the norms and the rules of the system itself in ways that allow people who, for example, might not want to stand or don't know why they're standing or would want to do something different with their time. It gives them the space to be able to do whatever that thing is that they want and need in a self determined way. And so even if we think about the system of schooling, what the folks who we write about in our book were primarily committed to was changing how the system works to create more space and opportunity, to create a different set of power dynamics and opportunities within the system. And the way that you do that, the way that you give people new experiences and different experiences, is by changing how the system itself actually functions.
- [19:20]
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- [20:20]
Dr. Dakota Irby
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- [20:32]
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- [21:05]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Early in the book, on pages two and three, you take us into understanding equity leadership and right away you define two key terms for us. One is equity and one is justice. Can you define those for the listeners, please?
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Dr. Dakota Irby
Yeah. So how, you know, we think about equity and both of these words have some relationship to one another. We write about equity as not necessarily equality of opportunity, but really as fairness, both in terms of the process of how people are treated as well as outcomes, and that we achieve equity not by giving people equal resources, equal opportunities. We achieve it by redistributing resources and opportunities in a way that that produces a more equitable outcome. One of the basic ways to think about it, you know, when I talk with, you know, my children, if I'm thinking about my own children, thinking about, like, what's equitable? Well, if, you know, you have a pizza and you know there's eight slices and you know, one person had a full meal before they got the pizza and they're full, they want the pizza for the taste, but their stomach isn't growling and there's somebody else whose stomach is growling. The equitable thing would be to make sure that the person who didn't have the opportunity to have any food before the pizza party gets enough pizza to make sure that their stomach is no longer growling. That doesn't mean that the person who had food before shouldn't get any pizza. They're eating it for the taste. But the equitable thing to do would be to make sure that I already ate. I want to make sure you get some food. I want to make sure you get enough so that you feel full so that we're both on equal footing. Neither one of our stomachs are growling after we eat this pizza. So that's the way that we think about equity as really thinking about fairness in terms of process, who gets what, and then outcomes, how what people get actually sets them up to be at a particular place within the context of again, the historical, economic and social kind of like backdrop that they've experienced. Justice gestures. In our book, we argue that justice gestures towards something more broader that really focuses on issues of power and oppression. So we're really dealing with bigger ideals here. When we're talking about justice related to liberation, freedom, self determination, and the pursuit of those kind of things are more aligned to the language of justice. And so we don't necessarily use these as interchangeably within the book, but at certain points, we're talking about things that leadership accomplishes that are focused on equity. Right. So we're thinking if we're talking about, like, at a school, which is what the book is about, and in districts, we're talking about allocating resources to the schools that need it the most. Well, that can achieve equity, but it might not necessarily achieve larger justice aims around whose knowledge counts in a particular school setting. And those are the kind of issues that we're seeing play out right now in this current moment with the book bans. These are about issues of justice, because privileging or prioritizing a particular historian or a particular set of books, particular set of intellectual materials as though they're superior to. And also while erasing certain peoples, in particular black people's LGBTQI people's historical record, is an assault on justice and the dignity of people, that's a bigger set of priorities and considerations than equity is. But both of these ideas are really important. But the broader push that we see leaders working towards is the pursuit of justice.
- [25:40]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book is organized into basically three sections that map as morning, midday, and evening. And you open each section with a black woman or black women narrating strategies they employed within school systems. And then you conclude with research papers that offer this bird's eye perspective on the work in each respective period. And there's a reason that you organize the book into these headings of morning, midday, and evening. What do they represent?
- [26:14]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Yeah, thank you for this question. So it represents our situating and organizing the book within a broader framework of how change actually happens historically. So we write about how we know that change is not this kind of, like, linear, straight process, but instead, it's this process that's very cyclical, where we see moments of. In our particular case, we see moments of progress for people who have historically experienced oppression and marginalization. And then we see these periods where we regress back to, you know, experiences where people are oppressed and marginalized. So if we think about just the kind of cycle of change, that's the important thing that we really wanted to convey. And so in the book, we write about a particular period of equity leadership. And that particular period starts with President Barack Obama's second term. And in particular, we focus in on what we call an awakening where Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman. So that's the opening. And we argue that this was awakening. It was a point where in large part because of the release of the 911 audio, like people's consciences were touched in a way that maybe people hadn't been touched since, you know, maybe like Rodney King video was released. And everybody was able to see that, but people were able to hear, you know, George Zimmerman being a neighborhood, you know, watch person and engaging in historically what we would call vigilante behavior and kind of like tracking Trayvon Martin, you know, a 16 year old boy. So we start there and really place this book in the context of that awakening. And we argue that that awakening leads into a morning. And in the morning people became increasingly conscious, aware and concerned about creating a world where Trayvon Martin does not get profiled and shot in a world where someone like George Zimmerman has experienced the kind of education that helps him understand how problematic his assumptions and behaviors are about this person who he didn't know and he took it upon himself to police. So we start there and that's the mornings. And this is really about a lot of kind of consciousness rating raising that leaders did through creating policies, providing information to school boards. This is the period where we saw not a lot, but some select school districts, primarily, interestingly, in suburban school districts, thinking about how to create school environments that affirm and support the increasing number of black and brown students that rely on U.S. public education. That was the morning we described what that morning work was. Then we move into part two of the book, which is about, we call midday. The midday is marked by a proliferation of equity leadership activities. This is where we saw large urban districts, lots of suburban districts, hiring and creating formal equity offices, the adoption of black history curricula, a more expansive set of what's acceptable to read in districts throughout the United States, largely driven by the people who were engaging in what we call the work of equity leadership. So that period we saw really a focus on institutionalizing a lot of leadership practices. For example, how we look at data, how policy decisions are made everywhere, from budgeting to school naming policies, to adoption of restorative approaches as opposed to zero tolerance approaches to school discipline, to how we think about equitable grading and how we think about detracking and who has access to advanced placement and honors level courses. So this was a period that was really characterized by a lot of open.
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- [31:14]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Ambitious, I would say is the word leadership practices that were intended unapologetically to support students, that has historically not been served well by school systems. And then the final part of the book is evenings. And the evening section really brings us into a period where there was a lot of resistance to the proliferation of equity leadership practices. And so this is where we started to see death threats to equity people who are doing the work of equity leadership. So death threats, superintendents getting fired, conservative groups attending and berating school board members, conservative groups organizing to run candidates for school boards. All of these kinds of activities started happening. And in response, the way that the leadership that school districts were engaged in started to shape itself to the current kind of like context. So, for example, the so called attack on critical race theory, which was Never taught in K12 schools. Critical race theory is a legal theory that most people get access to if they go to law school or graduate school. More increasingly now in graduate school, never has been taught in K12 settings. Attacks on DEI, attacks on the people who are doing diversity, equity, inclusion work, justice work, if we think about higher education, attacks on the consultants and the scholars who are producing the scholarship that these leaders rely heavily on during a period of kind of like proliferation. And so that's what we characterize as like the evening work. And the leadership in that particular time focused more on building solidarity amongst districts, building solidarities amongst folks who were engaged in the work, creating formal networks, codifying practices, creating professional learning communities, associations, those sorts of things to really give the work a kind of solidarity that didn't exist in the kind of mourning period where people were working kind of like as individuals and as small teams within districts and schools. And so we end the book with a chapter that's focused on the idea of dreaming. And what we argue is that we are moving into a period where folks who are engaged in equity leadership practices are under attack, being silenced, being fired, receiving death threats. And so we argue then that this represents a kind of night that we're in in terms of the trajectory of change. But we end on a hopeful note. We have a wonderful afterword written by our colleague Keisha Scarlet. And in that afterword she basically argues that we have to ask ourselves the questions, what do we do with the night? What do we do during this time that things feel very dark because we know that another morning is going to present itself. And so that's kind of where we ended the book. One thing that I like to like to share with people is that we, we were supposed to have this book into the publisher in November of 2024, after President Trump was elected for a second term. We realized soon, especially with the executive orders that were signed on day one that we had to really bring the book up to the current moment. And so we took the time to bring the book up to where we are and to reflect the kind of like socio political context that we're in right now. So we ended up submitting the book in April of 2025 and it just. So that was just a stroke of luck. If we would have turned the book in in like October, it would have been. We wouldn't have had the opportunity to bring it up to the current moment of what we call night. So that's a little bit about the framework and how the book is organized. The other thing that I think might people should be aware of is that Black women and other women of color play a central role in engaging and advancing justice and system change in schools. They've done that before, these positions, and this work was formally recognized. They did it in between and they'll continue to do it. But they're also the people who were attacked, threatened. But it really has been their creativity, courage, ingenuity, fortitude that has really led to a lot of the improvements and benefits that black and brown children have experienced in schools. And we open the book with a chapter that's written by a Black woman, the second chapter is by a Black woman, and we open every section of the book with chapters that Black women contributed to really centering their stories, their practices and their ideas. And of course, we, as I mentioned, conclude the book with the voice and the perspectives of a Black woman as well. So that's another feature of the book that was intentional.
- [37:04]
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- [37:33]
Dr. Dakota Irby
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Dr. Dakota Irby
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- [38:04]
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- [38:05]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Sort of.
- [38:06]
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- [38:11]
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- [38:32]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book has 10 chapters, an intro, a conclusion, and afterward an index. And at the back is notes introducing us to all the editors and contributors and giving us a a nice sized bio on each of them. So the book has multiple authors and each and brings in so many different voices. You signposted for listeners the release of the book we are taping in 2025 in the fall of 2025. And I have an advanced uncorrected proof of the book. So that's how new access to the book is. At the time of taping. You co authored a number of the chapters and one is chapter three, Appreciating the Fruits of Unsuccessful Leadership. You did that with your co editor and with Dr. Green and you take us right into what this actually means. Appreciating the Fruits of Unsuccessful Leadership. And the subtitle of it is Looking Back to Seed Forward. And immediately we meet an educator named Loretta Richards. And this whole section here takes us into the difficulty that educators have in seeing the success of their work given the structural impediments that they face on the daily. Can you take us into this chapter, please?
- [39:55]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think this is one of those chapters I was, I recently did. I was recently a part of a panel that was focused on the Underground Railroad. And I was invited to be a panelist to respond to a lecturer about the significance of freedom seekers and the Underground Railroad in northeastern Illinois. And one of the speakers talked about this idea that with that in this current political moment we. Well, let me say. So basically what she said is that like in this current political moment we have to understand that this feels. It may bring about like anxiety, it may make us nervous or worrisome because she argued we were born into what she called many of us were born into a sweet spot. You were born like in the 70s. We were born into a sweet spot where we read about struggles but we didn't have to actively engage in the kind of struggles. We haven't seen a lot of, you know, the force of the government specifically being put to use against citizens in the way that we read about in history. And we're seeing that now. And so the other part, she said, is that we were born into a sweet spot because we are the recipients. We were able to reap the harvest of all of the efforts that so many people put into making a society where the force of government is not going to be used against us to harm us. And so what I appreciated about that is it was very much aligned with the argument that I make here in chapter three about appreciating the fruits of unsuccessful leadership. When we conducted our research, we started this research project. We started conceptualizing this research project in 2016. And our first thing that we did was we started to identify people who were engaged in these equity, these new kind of like equity leadership positions. And when we talked to those people, most of them didn't have a lot of positive things to say about what it was that they were trying to do. It was like, you know, I've spent two years trying to get this policy through our board. This is, you know, we've been trying to get teachers to adopt a more expansive and racially, ethnically gender representative curriculum. So all of these different sorts of things, and most of them didn't feel like their work was successful. The cool thing about our research project is that, like I mentioned, we started conceptualizing the project in 2016, and then we were able to see much later 2020, 2021, especially during the COVID 19 pandemic, during the global racial uprising against violence against black folks, we were able to see all of those policies, all of that effort to create affinity spaces, to make sure that the curriculum and the readings were diverse culturally, racially and gender representative to reflect the populations, that dual language was a priority. All of these different sorts of things that folks had worked on in 2014, 2015 and 2016 that they largely said, here's what I've been doing, but it hasn't yielded any fruit. Then we didn't see that come until 2020, 2021, 2022, where really a lot of schools got through the COVID 19 pandemic, adopting many of the practices related to family engagement, related to taking a more restorative approach to student attendance, embracing social emotional learning as a part of what's supposed to happen in schools. All of that, all of those things and those practices and things that equity leaders were advocating for, pushing for, and creating the process they were creating in 20, 14, 15, 16, 17 were the very practices and ideas that actually helped us get through the COVID 19 pandemic and beyond. So that's what really that chapter was about. And it's, you know, it makes the argument that when you're in the work, a lot of times when you're doing the work of equity leadership, you won't see the fruits of your labor. You won't see necessarily what you want to see in your lifetime necessarily. And again, when we talk about, we tried to write a book in a way that recognizes also what we know from history. You know, there's, I'm, I'm, I'm black. You know, I grew up in South Carolina. You know, there were people who had, who did all kinds of things, for example, during a period of US enslavement that they didn't really see the, the fruits of. Right. I'm the fruit, I'm the beneficiary of things that people did back then, small and large. Everything from teaching someone to read. Right. Which was illegal and criminal. It was illegal for enslaved Africans to possess a book. It was criminal for white people to give enslaved Africans a book and to teach them to read. So these were criminal offenses. These were, this, this, this was illegal. So those were small things that were grounded in a kind of subversive, kind of fugitivity and self determination, like teaching an enslaved person to read or an enslaved person taking the risk engaging in a criminal act, so called criminal act of teaching themselves how to read. Now they, so that's a small act. There were bigger acts. So for example, being self determined and deciding, I'm going to escape all of these small acts, these acts of courageous individuals, we see now, years later, the, the fruits of those kinds of things that they were doing in the pursuit of justice and self determination. So I think that those, that's really the argument of that particular chapter is to make the case that doing the work of equity leadership is about pursuing something that you may not necessarily see the benefits of in the time that you're actually doing the work, but that the work is worthwhile, important and necessary. And the struggle is necessary because it actually lays the blueprints and the groundwork for the people who are coming behind you. That's really what we wanted to convey in that chapter.
- [47:22]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And the book wants to make visible the, the work that, that people have been doing. In many ways, it's to leave a blueprint for people who will be coming after you. And you co authored a number of chapters in the book. We won't have time to dig into all of them. But I'd like to dig into chapter six a bit because it takes us into a second section of the book. We've just been talking about a chapter that's in the first section that. And as you explain, that's the section called Mornings. If we go into chapter six, we're at midday. And chapter six is called Designing Work Routines and Processing Tools and Infrastructure of Strategic Equity Leadership. In this one, it's really digging into organizational routines and how they really are a key part of assessing and implementing equity leadership. Can you take us into that chapter, please?
- [48:14]
Dr. Dakota Irby
Yeah, sure. This is, this is a great chapter. Co author with Maurice Sweeney, who is a practitioner. And I should say that most of the chapters we really wanted to bring in a practitioner perspectives. We didn't want this to only be, as you mentioned earlier, a bird's eye, kind of like sociological analysis in view of equity leadership. We were committed to making sure that the people who actually do the work have done the work on the ground, creating the tools, creating the processes, teaching people to read all of those different sorts of things. Stories were central to the book. This chapter, Designing Work Routines and Processing Tools, stems from a series of conversations that I had with the co author, my co author, Maurice Sweeney, about things that he did as the first equity chief of equity or equity officer in a large urban US District. And it was, you know, we had to get this chapter into the book because, you know, Dr. Sweeney was like, so strategic and thoughtful about how he wanted to go about institutionalizing equity in a way by not focusing on changing a policy necessarily, for example, but on thinking about how to create and get a district to adopt a process for changing policies that takes into consideration issues of equity and justice, community voice, student voice, input of resource allocation. So his priority was really thinking about how do we focus on processes and routines that will give us equitable experiences and equitable outcomes, as opposed to thinking about changing the actual policy in and of itself. So by way of example, I'll just give one really quick example. I'm trying to remember if this one is in the. So basically, he stepped into the role, asking himself the question, what needs to be in place and what do I need to do so that when I'm no longer in the role, the way that I'm thinking and we think about what equitable leadership looks like continues beyond my tenure. So that meant thinking about everything from who needs to know what, for example, if we're going to have a policy about student voice. Right? Student voice Is a good example. If we want to make sure that student voice is a part of everything that we do, we don't want to just go to a school and say the student voice is important and we're not just going to sing that song like student voice, you need a student council. Rather, his approach is to think about what are the formal governing bodies that exist within a particular school in a particular district, and how do we actually create the processes so that students have voice and representation and decision making on committees that already exist, as opposed to trying to create something new. So then he asked the question, who needs to understand the importance of student voice? Who is the person who is best suited to help the students understand how to participate in these spaces, so on and so forth. So he was just very strategic in terms of thinking about how do we make sure that equity, the kind of thinking and processes that are required, that people who have a commitment to equity and justice think about, do, what questions do they ask, and making sure that that's embedded in all of the processes that exist within the school district. And so chapter, the second section, as you mentioned, midday, focuses a lot on that kind of work, which was possible in part because the midday was the period where there was amount of investment and resources and hiring that allow people to have the time, the space to be able to do that kind of deep thinking. And not only time and space, but also the influence, right? So this was a period, this was a. An office that was created with a staff. This was a cabinet level position in the district. So this person had direct access and influence to the superintendent, which was something that we didn't see in the mornings. These were people who were equity specialists much further away on the organizational chart from the superintendent and didn't have as many resources they might have been. A lot of people talked about being an office of one, but we saw in the midday where people had teams, they had resources, they had budgets, they were able to hire consultants, they were able to do a lot more to actually institutionalize a lot of the equity thinking. Going back to, again, what I talked about earlier in the episode, about the systems things, right? So these were people who had the resources to say, okay, if we have the national anthem, we're also going to make sure that we sing the Negro national anthem, for example. So it gives people a broader range of possibilities of how they come to the sporting event and what they experience when they come to the sporting event. So these are the people who we're really able to try to really, really. This was a Period where people were really taking what they learned from the people who did the morning work and were able to say, here's what worked in the mornings, here's what didn't work in the mornings, here's the things that we need to learn from the policies and the way that people use data, and here's how we can actually begin to use those things in a way that's going to actually reshape and change how we do things as a system. And that was really what characterized the midday in which all of the chapters in that section are about.
- [55:07]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The book has the three sections we've had an opportunity to touch on the introduction and on two chapters. In two different sections, listeners will also find eight more chapters. The conclusion and the afterward. You let us know that whatever section and period in the book that we're in, there's a constancy of oppression, resistance, pushback, and intentional institutional violence. But you also tell us that there is creativity, strategy, fortitude, conviction, and the power of equity leadership. We are coming to the close of our time together and my final question is, what do you hope listeners will take away?
- [55:45]
Dr. Dakota Irby
You kind of summed it up there. I think we want people to take away an appreciation for how courageous and how creative this work has been over the past decade plus. And really, I think the key takeaway that we hope people will walk away from this book is understanding that there's some good ideas here and some good practices presented in the book that demonstrates that when leadership is used to color outside of the line, so to speak, to do things differently, that you actually get a different set of results. I like to often talk about this idea of a probable future and a preferred future. And a probable future is the future that we get when we do what is familiar and what we are used to doing. A preferred future is something that we can pursue. The future that we hope people who pick up the book are interested in pursuing is a preferred future of justice, equity. People who have their material, emotional, spiritual and psychological needs met in a society that has an abundance of resources to go around. Those are the kind of people that we wrote this book for. And we hope that they close the book and leave this book having a sense of what some things are that they can do to work towards that preferred future and also have some hope that working towards a preferred future might not yield what you want in the moment. So that goes back to chapter three, right? But that the work is not in vain and that the work lays a foundation, lays a seed that will come to you know, fruition that will grow and it will be able to be harvested after night and when there's a new morning and when the conditions are right. So that's what we really hope that people will take away a sense of possibility, some ideas about specific things they can be doing and thinking about, as well as some hope in a sense that what they're doing right now is worthwhile.
- [58:22]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Irby, and sharing from doing the work of equity leadership for justice and systems Change. You've been listening to the academic life. Please join us again.
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