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Before 1954, Inc.

Full Description

Phase 1: Understanding the Social Structures and Governance Systems, Schools, and Districts

 

Phase 1 modules challenge the leader to examine their contributions to systems of privilege and oppression while igniting their commitment to seek self-determination. 

 

Before 1954 Inc., they applied a conceptual understanding of the implicit and explicit landscape of the district or school within a more extensive educational ecosystem. This critical first step frames the leader's positionality of how they are observed and experienced by eurocentric educational systems. Learning includes examining the organizational history and interrogating the ways systemic racism made way for institutional racism, bias, and privilege. This phase consists of the initial equity audit to provide the leader with opportunities to examine how the power structure privileges status quo relationships, abdicates responsibilities to children of the Global Majority and resists equitable outcomes for Black and other children of the Global Majority.

Phase 2: Applying Ethnos and Culture to Leadership Ways of Knowing, Movement, and Memory.

 

Phase 2 modules move the leader into revising and creating new ways of being, leading, moving, and reflecting that affirm children of the Global Majority.

Before 1954, Inc. guides leaders to examine their strengths and affirm how culture informs their leadership behaviors, practices, and decision-making. Delving into their equity audit, leaders move from accountability to responsibility by understanding their homophilic kinship to the children they serve and affirming the shared culture and community, manifested through their leadership pedagogies (ways of knowing) leadership actions (movements), and historical lesson of our leadership predecessors (memory). Leaders leverage the power of community, networks, mentors, and other partners committed to the academic and economic success of children of the Global Majority. This phase is the revision and creation of policies, practices, pedagogies, and other ways of knowing that authentically inspire our ethnocultural leadership in service of self-determination and a liberatory praxis.

Phase 3: Making Meaning out of Ethnocultural Leadership to Clears Paths and Expand Impact

 

Phase 3 modules model coaching, feedback, and facilitation of courageous actions to move beyond uncomfortable conversation to explicit action to address and confront anti-black racism. 

Before 1954, Inc. coaches the leader with role plays based on real-time challenges. The leader learns the affirming and culturally affirming language to help others assess their relationship to Black (and other children of the Global Majority), their responsibility to children of the Global Majority, and how their actions either resist or embrace anti-Black racism or any system of privilege and oppression. Data analysis of the leader's performance metrics, school policies, master schedules, instructional practices or pedagogies, etc., informs the high-leverage leadership actions that propel the leader into a self-determining and liberatory praxis. Leaders learn to sustain their leadership practices by interlocking centralized and other senior leadership teams in partnership with ethnocultural leadership to support the larger organization to resist anti-Black racism by affirming relationships with and the educational responsibility to children of the Global Majority.

Each phase:

 

  • Creates agreements, establishes relationships, naming identities, new learning of ethnocultural framework and cultural competencies, and evaluates organizational data for patterns, trends, and implications.

 

  • Centers on the shared humanity of people of the Global Majority and the diverse expressions of Black culture while embracing the messiness and discomfort confronting racial bias in education.

 

  • Challenges whiteness and hegemony inherent in meritocratic privilege that replicates myths of Black intellectual inferiority in organizational structures that also inform eurocentric ideology in teaching, learning, leading, and assessing.

 

  • Critiques federal, state, local, and school policies and practices such that leaders can ideate ethnocultural ways of knowing that reflect confidence, compassion, commitment, and courage.

 

  • Captures the joy of leading and the genius of strategic innovating with rich cultural history, movement, memory, and meaning-making necessary to transform organizations into thriving spaces for Black children.

 

  • Curates courageous and authentic experiences that endure organizational transitions and leadership changes to produce sustainable anti-racist schools and districts with observable and obtainable short and long-term outcomes. 

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