Professor Beycioglu and His Team: How Social Justice Leadership in the Field of Education Promote School Development
2018-12-26
On the afternoon of December 20th, Prof. Kadir Beycioglu and his team from Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey made an academic report on “Effects of Leadership: Social Justice Leadership Practices in schools”. The forum was hosted by Prof. Chen Shuangye, who is the deputy director of ICI.
Professor Beycioglu is one of the representatives of non-Western scholars active in the field of social justice leadership research in recent years. He and his team are dedicated to revealing different understandings and leadership practices of social justice in non-Western cultures and social structures.
In 2016, Professor Beycioglu founded a journal: Research in Educational Administration & Leadership. Two years later, the journal was included in the ESCI database.
In the lecture, Prof. Beycioglu began with his understanding of “social justice” and pointed out that the goal of social justice is to enable all groups to fully and equally participate in a society shaped to meet their needs. In this society, individuals can realize the full development of their abilities and gain democratic interaction with others.
In the field of education, social justice is directly related to providing equal opportunities for everyone in the school regardless of their race, culture, social class, wealth, gender, family structure, sexual orientation and so on.
Unfair distribution in school education will lead to the development of differences between students’ “success and failure, prosperity and poverty, and their hope and despair”. As an antidote to unfair distribution, social justice leadership has a compensatory effect on the injustice caused by the differences in economic and cultural background.
Professor Beycioglu emphasized that the central role and responsibility of school leaders in educational justice. School leaders and their efforts to create fair schools have a significant impact on promoting school justice.
Finally, Professor Beycioglu and his team conducted in-depth exchanges and discussions on the questions raised by the teachers and students of ICI.
