Learning to Lead Democratically: A Democratic Imperative for Leadership Preparation 101cisions about all practice; a critical pragmatist concerned with the consequences of decisions
and actions in relation to the “others” in the school community.
Inquiry is necessary to addressing the problems in education today. Schafer (1967), a
Dewey scholar, is instructive in his argument:
[W]e can no longer conceive of the school simply as distribution centers for dispens-
ing cultural orientations, information, and knowledge developed by other social units.
The complexities of teaching and learning in formal classrooms have become so for-
midable and the intellectual demands upon the system so enormous that the school
must be much more than a place of instruction. It must be a center of inquiry—a pro-
ducer as well as transmitter of knowledge. (p. 1)Education leadership that is informed by democratic inquiry must necessarily become
characterized, in part, by approaches to inquiry, which recognize that knowledge is “socially
constituted, historically embedded, and valuationally based. Theory serves an agentic func-
tion, and research illustrates (vivifies) rather than provides a truth test” (Hendrick, 1983, p.
506).
By regarding classrooms, programs, and school culture as contexts of inquiry into learning
and events and experiences as sources of information for critical reflection and interpretation,
democratic leaders can examine and articulate their interpretive frameworks for understanding
practice and their generative frameworks for constructing knowledge. This effectively blurs
the lines between inquiry and teaching or administering and between theory and practice.
Situated within communities of practice, the teacher or building administrator as democratic
leader “cannot only blur the boundary between theory and practice resulting in a more rele-
vant and authentic outcome, but also have the skills specifically designed to foster a critically
contextualized common purpose” (Horn, 2000, p. 5). When practitioners redefine their rela-
tionships to knowledge and to their students and colleagues as knowers, they often reconstruct
their practice to offer different opportunities for learners to learn and to realign their relation-
ships with brokers of knowledge and power in programs, schools, universities, and the larger
political contexts of state, regional, and national policy agencies.
Democratic Practice
Democratic practices build upon and acknowledge the social, intellectual, cultural and po-
litical capital of students and their families. Importantly, practices that are democratic are
marked by attentiveness to “the interconnections and struggles that take place over knowl-
edge, language, spatial relations, and history” (Giroux, 2001, p. 9). As Greene (1973) ex-
plained, democratic practice is practice toward the liberation of the public, initiating leaders,
teachers and students “in certain patterns of thinking and acting.... [enabling] them to rec-
ognize and choose among the options presented to them” and which enables the leader,
teacher and student “to comprehend their society’s professed ideas: freedom, equality, regard
for the individual” (p. 290). Fundamental to the democratic credo, practice that is democratic
focuses on distinguishing and dignifying the democratic way of life, ingraining leadership and
learning experience with “conceptions of what ought to be” (p. 290), premised on the norms
of democracy, norms defined, as Dewey (1916a) argued, by the people of democracy. In this
sense, democratic practice, as Dewey (1916a) noted, takes “part in correcting unfair privilege
and unfair deprivation” rather than “perpetuate them” (pp. 119–120).