Bio

Currently, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy studies at The University of Texas as San Antonio. I earned my Ph. D. in Educational Administration from the University of Texas at Austin. I was a fellow in the Cooperative Superintendency Program, a nationally recognized doctoral program designed to prepare candidates for the superintendency. I earned my M. Ed. (Counseling), and B. A. (Spanish) from the University of Texas at Pan American.

My experience in K-12 education is extensive and diverse. I have been a teacher, counselor, director of an alternative education center, school principal, field service agent, and school superintendent. In addition, I have served students not only in Texas, but also in several states across the country including Colorado, Ohio, New York, Washington, Florida, and Maine.

After 31 years as a K-12 educator, I joined the faculty at UTSA six years ago. My teaching and area of specialization is school leadership preparation at the doctoral and master’s level. My teaching and leadership philosophy is firmly grounded on the notion of social justice advocacy. It is also shaped by my lived experiences as a migrant student, my pedagogical training, and my experiences as an educator.

One of my most significant contributions has been my role as lead faculty and coordinator of the Urban School Leaders Collaborative (USLC), a partnership between UTSA and San Antonio I.S.D. (SAISD) to prepare aspiring school leaders. It is a program with a strong focus on social justice leadership and customized to meet the needs of the school district.

I also serve as Co-Director for the University of Texas Center for Collaborative Research and Policy. This is a joint research focused collaborative composed of four member institutions (U.T. San Antonio, U.T. Pan American, U.T. Austin and Texas State University).

Research

My research focuses on the preparation of school leaders who serve in schools with predominately minority student populations. My experiences as a K-12 educator (teacher, counselor, principal, and superintendent) provide me with heuristic knowledge that is critical to my research. As a scholar-practitioner whose scholarship employs a critical theory perspective, my research focuses on three themes: 1) the study of minority student success, 2) the preparation of principals as leaders for social justice, and 3) the exploration of school district/university partnerships with respect to preparing principals as social justice advocates.

I. Minority Student Success. My research on minority student success focuses on the strengths and resiliency of Latino students. The findings of this research challenge the pervasive deficit-thinking paradigm in schools and the persistent belief that school failure is an inevitable outcome of poverty. My seminal work in this area is the study of academically successful migrant children, Resiliency and Success: Migrant Children in the U. S. (Garza, E., Reyes, P. & Trueba, E., 2004). An abbreviated version of this work, A study of migrant children in the U.S. appeared in the Praeger Handbook of Latino Education in the U. S. (Garza, E. 2007). The purpose of this research was to elucidate the complex and positive life journeys of academically successful migrant students. The findings of this research indicate that the migrant lifestyle that is often blamed for the academic failure of migrant children must also be given credit for their success. That is, a lifestyle that deems migrant children as “culturally disadvantaged and severely “at-risk” and bestows upon them the low expectations of a deficit thinking society is also the very lifestyle that can empower them to become resilient and invulnerable. This study confronts the conventional wisdom as well as the traditional academic literature regarding the educational attainment of migrant children; the participants in my study were academically successful precisely because of their migrant lifestyle, not in spite of it. This book was the first research study of its kind to reframe migrant children’s experiences as a positive, rather than a solely negative force with respect to the academic achievement of these children.

II. Preparation of principals as leaders for social justice. The second area of my research focuses on the preparation of principals as leaders for social justice. My work in this area draws heavily from my lived experiences as a practitioner. Two articles that exemplify this insider perspective are Social justice is an attitude: Response to: “Yes, but . . .’ : Education leaders discuss social justice.” (Garza, E. 2004) and Autoethnography of a first time superintendent: Political and social factors that impact leadership for social justice (Garza, E. 2008).

The first publication was an invited response to an article by Catherine Marshall and Mike Ward, highly respected scholars in the field of social justice research. Based on the research they conducted, they reluctantly propose that school leaders can be “taught” to be champions for social justice if proper training is provided and mandated by policy. I make a strong counterargument, maintaining that even when candidates are immersed in such programs, there are no assurances that they will adopt a social justice leadership perspective when they assume leadership positions. Leading for social justice consistently challenges the hegemonic culture in defense of the subordinate group and this inevitably incites political unrest. Standing up to the incessant political and social pressures requires a strong sense of ethics, integrity, and most of all, courage. My response was published in the Journal of School Leadership, one of the top journals in the field of educational leadership and generated a great deal of discussion at the national level with respect to the need for an alternative paradigm regarding the preparation of school leaders as advocates of social justice. Specifically, my response introduced a great deal more complexity into this notion than had previously been the case.

The article Autoethnography of a first time superintendent: Political and social factors that impact leadership for social justice (Journal of Latinos and Education) was significant along two dimensions. The first relates to my utilization of critical autoethnograpy as a research method. Autoethnograpy is a writing practice that consists of highly analytical, personalized accounts through which authors draw extensively from their lived experiences to extend understanding of a particular culture, discipline, or phenomena. My lived experiences, as recorded in my daily journal, provided the data for this inquiry. This methodological approach is seldom undertaken by academics because they lack the experiential base from which to engage in deep self-reflection as a practitioner. It is one of very few (if not the only) studies conducted from an insider perspective in two ways; first as a Mexican-American, Latino scholar and second, as a former superintendent. It is my intent, as a native researcher, to inform the field using my own voice. Most other studies about the superintendency have been conducted by educational researchers who observe and/or interview the educational administrators about whom they write.

In addition to its contribution to the literature, this research has practical significance with respect to the preparation of leaders for social justice in that it is an area of training that is missing in most preparation program. This autoethnograpy defines real-world, everyday experiences of a first year superintendent and the pervasive political challenges I encountered in my efforts in leading for social justice. This study focused on the political and social factors that impeded the implementation of my social justice philosophy. Further, this article provides aspiring school administrators with a clear and detailed account of the specific challenges that they are likely to encounter as advocates for children, and as such, occupies a singular place in the literature.

III. Exploration of school district/university partnerships. My third area of research focuses on school/university partnerships, particularly those that employ alternative models of leadership preparation. My scholarly activities in this area build upon my work in the first two areas of research by examining the implications of these studies for leadership preparation. A 2006 article, The urban school leaders collaborative: A school-university partnership emphasizing instructional leadership and student and community assets (Garza, E., Barnett, B., Merchant, B., Shoho, A., & Smith, P., 2006, International Journal of Urban Educational Leadership) describes the early stages of the development of the Urban School Leaders Collaborative and examines the experiences of the first cohort of master’s students. Throughout the program students, as well as faculty members, engage in critical self-reflection and evaluation about their program, their professional practice, and their interpersonal interactions. Faculty and student collaboration in the early stages of this collaboration led to the generation of a framework for what has resulted in an on-going study of the USLC. The major findings of this study indicate that there are three main factors that are critical to a successful school-university partnership: 1) Establishment of a clear need to identify and prepare quality school leaders; 2) Sanction of the collaborative from top-level leaders; and 3) Trust between the two organization’s leaders. It is important to note that an unintended, but significant, consequence of engaging students as researchers in the systemic investigation of their experiences in the collaborative has been the enrollment of several of these students in the university’s doctoral program in educational leadership.

The book chapter, American Culture: Latino Realties (Garza E. & Merchant, B., 2009, Leadership and Intercultural Dynamics) presents the findings of a two-year longitudinal study of the USLC described above. In contrast to the 2006 article that focused on the structure and implementation of the collaborative, this piece examines the data from the first two student cohorts in the USLC for the purposes of critically examining our programmatic efforts to prepare school leaders to practice in schools where the student population is predominantly Latino. Our findings indicate that this leadership program differs from traditional models of leadership preparation in several distinct ways. First, this program is driven by a philosophy of social justice advocacy. The focus of preparation is initially on attitudes and mindsets, and then on the development of professional skills. Second, this is a truly collaborative partnership; both entities (school district and university) are actively involved in the selection, planning, teaching and evaluation processes. Third, this is a closed cohort model, only for employees of the partnering school district, and the leadership preparation is intentionally customized to meet the needs of the children in this school district. Fourth, professors have moved away from their home campus into the field; all classes taught by department faculty are held in campuses throughout the school district. And fifth, support continues through the mechanism of the collaborative even after the students graduate and assume leadership positions.

Download Vita

Download Encarnacion Garza's Vita Here: VitaGarza.pdf