Educational Leadership as Accompaniment: From Managing to Cultivating Youth Activism

Background/Context: Youth activism, the broad-based leadership among young people who seek to challenge and build alternatives to oppressive social systems, has spread across the nation and globe. Yet youth activism is often hemmed in at school gates, particularly by school leaders charged with maintaining efficient school environments. Focus of Study: This article explores the roles and responsibilities of educational leaders committed to justice and asks: What does it mean to lead schools in times of (re)surgent youth activism? Research Design: To address this urgent question, we conducted an interdisciplinary review of youth participation in social movements that spans the fields of civic engagement, learning sciences, and social movement studies. Findings: We argue that youth activism offers profound sites of consequential learning, generative insights for organizational redesign, and imaginative visions for school and societal transformation. Based on these contributions, we offer the notion of educational leadership as accompaniment: a participatory praxis of leadership reflection and action that foregrounds an ethic of listening, attends to dominant forms of exclusion, and stands in solidarity with youth and their struggles for a more dignified and just world. Conclusions/Recommendations: Leadership as accompaniment challenges the deeply rooted managerial imperative in school administration scholarship and deepens opportunities for realizing existing leadership principles, such as those evident in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL). We conclude by discussing the social and material risks impacting those who exercise leadership as accompaniment, and consider what responsibilities such risks demand of education researchers.