Which Hill Would You Die on?: Examining the Use of War-Normalizing Metaphors in Social Justice Leaders’ Discourse and Practice
Abstract
Metaphors are deeply embedded in educational discourse, yet few studies examine how educators use these linguistic devices to conceptualize, articulate, and make sense of their professional practice. This article examines the metaphors that 38 Canadian and American school leaders used to describe how they accomplished their social justice work in complex political environments. Our analysis revealed that while participants used a variety of metaphors to describe how they subverted inequitable practices to achieve their social justice goals, for the most part, their discourse coalesced around war-normalizing metaphors. We explore the nature of these metaphors, how they contradict and cohere with popular educational discourses and ideologies, and their implications for practice. We further discuss how policy makers, practitioners, and professional development programs can employ metaphors as discursive tools to assess and reconceptualize practice and advance social justice leadership.
The last three decades have been a hectic and challenging time for educational leaders who are committed to achieving equity and social justice in schools. In many jurisdictions across Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, high-stakes, high-stress, and low-support environments are the norm (Larsen, 2009; Lyons & Algozzine, 2006; Ryan, 2012) due to conflicting reforms and rigid accountability frames that eschew difference and equity, narrow curricula, and widen educational disparities (McMahon & Armstrong, 2014). In Ontario, the advent of conservative movements, such as the 1995 Common Sense Revolution, was a turning point for social justice work. Education was depicted as broken and in need of repair (Larsen, 2009), educators were blamed for most of the problems of the time (Sattler, 2012), drastic reforms and financial cutbacks were instituted, and existing equity policies were repealed. Educators in the United States have also experienced stressors with federal and state policies such as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core that favor standardization, marketization, and privatization (Lyons & Algozzine, 2006; McMahon & Armstrong, 2014). Although ostensibly introduced to close achievement gaps for racialized and low-income students, these neoliberal policies “have expanded inequities and exacerbated a discourse of failure regarding teachers, public schools, and teacher preparation programs. Consequently, public confidence in teachers, teacher preparation programs, and student performance is at an all-time low” (Croft, Roberts, & Stenhouse, 2015, p. 70). These “false political narratives” (Croft et al., 2015, p. 73) of improvement, combined with excessive testing and the transfer of financial and curriculum control to state and private bodies, have created difficult environments where educators are under immense pressure to comply with accountability measures and are closely monitored to ensure that their own and their students’ performance meet district, state, and provincial expectations.
As the research on social justice leadership continues to grow in response to pervasive inequities, we are learning more about the challenging nature of social justice work in education (Armstrong & McMahon, 2014; Ryan, 2012; Shields, 2014). However, less is known about the discursive strategies educational leaders use to achieve their social justice goals and the relationship between their words, thoughts, beliefs, and actions (Armstrong, Tuters, & Carrier, 2014; Ryan & Armstrong, 2016). This article fills this gap by reporting on the metaphors used by 38 Canadian and American educational leaders (teachers and administrators) to describe their efforts to create equitable schools. Data were derived from a larger study examining the micropolitics of social justice leadership. While exploring the micropolitical strategies participants used in their practice, our analysis uncovered that participants often employed “war-normalizing metaphors” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2009, p. 153) when describing their work and contexts. While evidence of war-normalizing discourses in the academy exists (Taber, 2014), little (if any) research has been conducted regarding their use by social justice leaders in K–12 settings. Our article fills this gap by examining the nature of these war-normalizing metaphors and their relationship to the existing educational leadership literature. We further discuss how educational leaders and preparation and professional development programs can use metaphors and other discursive tools to assist educational leaders in articulating, critiquing, and reconceptualizing practice.
Metaphors in Educational Discourse
One way of exploring how educational theory and practice are constructed has been through the investigation of metaphorical discourse (e.g., Henze, 2005; Lumby & English, 2010; McCandless, 2012). This is because metaphors are powerful linguistic tools that allow individuals to borrow and transfer concepts from one system of thought to another. Departing from literal meanings facilitates our ability to understand and experience one idea in terms of another and results in different ways of seeing and thinking (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Spicer & Alvesson, 2011). A review of the literature shows that metaphors are engrained in educational discourse and that theorists and practitioners use them to illustrate the intricate relationship between theory, policy, and practice. For example, role metaphors are commonly used in educational discourse to conceptualize, problematize, and imagine possible and existing roles of educational leaders in relation to different actors (e.g., students, teachers, and society). Murphy (2002) identifies educator, moral steward, and community builder as three common role metaphors used to describe educational leaders, highlighting the importance of pedagogical leadership, modeling and instilling sound morals and values, and creating coherent educational communities, respectively.
Despite the presence of the moral steward, educator, and community builder metaphors, there has been a sharp increase in academics’ use of war-normalizing metaphors to describe educational contexts and practices (Taber, 2014). Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) analysis of common metaphorical usage identifies common discursive patterns where terms such as “winning battles,” “strategizing,” and “being effective in combat” are frequent and situations are often depicted as zero-sum. These authors argue that militaristic metaphors are so commonly used in scholarly discourse that they have become unremarkable. Scholarly discussions about social justice are also imbued with war-normalizing metaphors (Archambault & Garon, 2013; Hwami, 2014; Lumby & English, 2010) that depict schools as battlefields and educators as warriors. With respect to preparing educators to engage in social justice leadership, Marshall and Olivia (2010) use war imagery to describe educational contexts. They assert that “[M]etaphorically, if not literally, we are still at war against the inequities…the subconscious or unintentional war against the marginalized is the most insidious and damaging” (p. 2). They go on to suggest that educators need revolutionary strategies, “courageous interventions and articulate stances [that] will redefine school leadership” (p. 4) for social justice and equity.
It has become almost commonplace for theorists to use war-normalizing metaphors to describe teachers’ efforts to achieve social justice and to encourage the use of critical pedagogy and activist approaches. For the most part, these tactics are consistent with Marxist ideologies that advocate class warfare to subvert hegemony and achieve radical social transformation in civil society (e.g., education, church, and media). For example, Gramsci’s (1971) work is grounded in military discourse and his metaphors of war of maneuver and war of position represent complex series of military actions that revolutionary forces must undertake to win. Gramsci’s war of maneuver can be described as a quick assault against dominant social forces while his war of position implies a passive revolution by subordinate classes (Cammaerts, 2015). Although presenting two different military strategies, Gramsci’s wars of maneuver and position should be used simultaneously to successfully counter hegemonic capitalism and liberal democratic systems (Egan, 2016), making these two strategies critical for social justice leadership. While many leadership theorists (e.g., Marshall & Olivia, 2010; Shields, 2014) call for revolutionary strategies, less is known of educational leaders’ efforts to engage in social justice leadership and their use of metaphors to conceptualize and guide their practice. Shields (2014) refers to vicious battles with school boards, stakeholders, and some faculty over engaging in social justice pedagogy. She highlights how leaders must decide if a battle is worth fighting, “if it represents the hill one is willing to die on” (p. 337). In this contested context, it is taken for granted that conflict will happen, and one must be prepared to engage in challenging, warlike interactions.
Some researchers have begun to challenge the taken-for-granted discourse of social justice as war because it is antithetical to mainstream ideals of education for social justice in schools which espouse inclusivity, equity, and positive relationships (Henze, 2005; Kelly & Brandes, 2010). Lumby and English (2010) caution that while metaphors can sharpen analysis, generate new ideas, and improve the way people lead, they can also be used to “manipulate, to shut down thinking, to deflect creativity, and to harm. Their very ubiquity, their indispensableness, lends metaphors great power” (Lumby & English, 2010, pp. 2–3). Thompson (1996) also highlights the political power of metaphors by stating that “Military strategists stress the importance of controlling the high ground; political strategists stress the importance of controlling the metaphor” (p. 190). Commenting on the power of discourse to implicitly and explicitly shape practice, Henze (2005) asserts that “Once we have accepted a particular metaphor into our discourse, it becomes difficult to think of the concept otherwise” (p. 246). In the context of our research, this statement suggests that educational leaders can and should use metaphors to reflect on their experiences and determine future actions, while also developing critical consciousness of how metaphorical discourses are constituted and impact leadership practice.
Spicer and Alvesson (2011) indicate that studying metaphors allows researchers to (a) capture the “folk knowledge” (p. 32) that practitioners use to understand and negotiate leadership and (b) opens the field of leadership to additional exploration and creative insights that are often obviated by conventional modes of inquiry. Like Oswick and Grant (1996), we believe that we still have a partial insight into the fundamental metaphors that shape organizational theory and action. Therefore, to gain a deeper understanding and knowledge, we need more “empirical work that isolates and makes transparent the metaphors, and groups of metaphor prevalent in the discourse on organization and those to be found within organizational settings” (Oswick & Grant, 1996, p. 219). Our study contributes to this gap in research by investigating the use and utility of war-normalizing metaphors for social justice leaders in achieving their equity goals.
Method
In this study, we used an interpretative qualitative approach (Kahlke, 2014) to understand how educational leaders articulated and made sense of their social justice work. Kahlke (2014) defines an interpretive qualitative approach as research that refuses to claim full allegiance to any one established qualitative methodology. Data were derived from a larger study that explored the challenges that Canadian and American social justice leaders encountered and the micropolitical strategies they used to achieve their social justice goals. Leaders were broadly defined as teachers, students, and administrators who exerted influence in their attempts to achieve social justice. Participants were chosen using purposive stakeholder and snowball sampling (Palys, 2008) based on their reputations as social justice leaders. They were selected from public schools based on referrals from colleagues and supervisors, and they re-presented a range of years of experience, types of schools, professional roles, and ethnicities. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 social justice leaders. These interviews lasted approximately 75 minutes and sought to determine the participants’ conceptualizations of social justice leadership, their understandings of their political environment, the obstacles they encountered, and the micropolitical strategies they used to achieve their social justice goals. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim to ensure accuracy, transcripts were sent to the participants for review and feedback, and then imported into NVivo 9 for analysis.
To achieve a rich description of social justice leadership in education, we used an inductive approach to data analysis and developed “open codes, categories, and thematic analysis” (Lim, 2011, p. 52). A priori codes related to the research questions were used to inform the coding process. We initially coded the first three interview transcripts individually and then met to discuss and negotiate codes and code definitions. A code book was then developed for coding the remainder of the interview transcripts. Although a broad lens was used to capture all the participants’ responses, we discovered the prevalence of metaphors in the participants’ descriptions of their social justice work and decided to pay further attention to this discursive pattern. After grouping the codes and identifying multiple themes, we were intrigued to discover that the most frequently occurring codes emerging from the data were related to metaphors. The prevalence of war-normalizing metaphors prompted us to reanalyze the transcripts. Our coding process was also informed by conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), which proposes that most conceptual thought is expressed in families of metaphors. We therefore paid attention to the complexities and ambiguities related to the participants’ actual usage of metaphors (i.e., we explored the primary metaphors used in situ, as opposed to imposing new metaphors). This entailed selecting related texts, highlighting target phrases, identifying underlying metaphors and concepts, and grouping and counting common phrases (Spicer & Alveson, 2011). While individual participants’ metaphors provided a partial view of reality, when amalgamated, they created a more comprehensive picture of how these social justice leaders interpreted their practice and environments.
Findings
The data analysis revealed that the participants experienced social justice leadership as fraught with conflict, resistance, and subterfuge. Although participants’ discourse about social justice varied, for the most part, their metaphors (72%) coalesced around warlike imagery (e.g., doing battle, working in the trenches, building allies and networks, staying in the weeds, marshalling troops and resources, employing tactical skill, gaining the upper hand, and winning and losing). This predominance of war-normalizing metaphors suggested that participants experienced social justice leadership as an embattled, strategic, and subversive enterprise. These metaphors and associated discourses are organized under the following themes that emerged from the interviews: knowing the lay of the land and camouflaging action, choosing battles, and marshalling people and resources.
Knowing the Lay of the Land and Camouflaging Action
For many participants, engaging in social justice work involved navigating difficult organizational terrain while acquiring in-depth knowledge about their political environment. Participants emphasized the importance of having a full perspective of the school and district landscape and manipulating this knowledge to further individual and organizational social justice goals. Consistent with military strategies, whole system knowledge was honed through an ongoing process of environmental scanning, constant vigilance, and attentive listening. While expressing discomfort with the subversive nature of this process, participants believed that “working” their overall knowledge of people, systems, and organizations to their own and their students’ advantage was critical to achieving more socially just schools. Sharon described the subversive nature of social justice work:
Although Sharon identified subversion as an important part of social justice work, she went on to say that knowing the lay of the land did not always mean operating beneath the surface:What comes to mind is what you can get away with. Which sounds really subversive and negative but sometimes when you do equity work you have to be subversive, and I think it’s knowing the lay of the land and working it in whatever way you need to. (Sharon, teacher)
This increased knowledge of the organizational landscape allowed participants to determine their barriers, enemies, and allies and to inform their strategic decision-making, planning, and action.And sometimes you know the lay of the land and you say too bad. And you have to make people uncomfortable and maybe angry at you because if we don’t, then nothing is going to change because we know status quo is very comfortable for everybody. But, I think it is understanding too where the organization is at, which means where the people are at, and where we need to start to move people along. (Sharon, teacher)
All participants experienced resistance to social justice interventions by peers and supervisors. Principals, in particular, chose to “lie low” and do most of their work under cover and they used terms such as avoiding the light, flying under the radar, and staying in the weeds, to describe the evasive strategies they used to fight injustice. Janet highlighted the importance of combining quiet subterfuge with dogged perseverance:
Garreth reported using quiet tactics such as “staying in the weeds” and “keeping his head in the sand” for fear of possible “career suicide” if his social justice work attracted attention. He described how he went out of his way to avoid increased scrutiny from superintendents who might curtail his professional autonomy and his ability to serve his students and community. Having learned over the years that his superintendents were worried about optics, Garreth feigned compliance with board mandates to avoid trouble when intentionally disregarding district directives. If found out, he would pretend that he had made a mistake and apologize. Garreth elaborated on how using evasive tactics allowed him to save valuable time which could be directed toward addressing inequities:So, if I am out there shouting and I am bringing attention to the fact I am doing things, maybe that is not the way the world wants me to do them. Instead, we just carry on and fly under the radar.
Knowing the lay of the land and using concealment and camouflage allowed the participants to reduce conflict with supervisors, preserve professional autonomy, and buffer their schools from unwanted external intrusions. Working beneath the surface also allowed them to remain hidden while interpreting and implementing district mandates and policies in ways that benefitted their students.I always prefer to stay in the weeds, and that means we do our best with system directives. We don’t do a lot of complaining. Don’t put your head out of the sand too much. And then you can look after your kids. As soon as you start protesting vehemently, publicly, or too strong on a non-important issue, I think the light shines on you…And then your freedom can be reduced somewhat. (Garreth, principal)
Choosing Battles
The participants described doing social justice work in schools as a constant battle due to multiple areas of injustices, persistent resistance, and limited time, energy, and support. Consequently, they reported having to be clear about their aims and to be judicious about which social justice issues they were willing to stand up for. While most participants preferred to avoid conflict, some challenged supervisors directly when faced with morally reprehensible practices. Barb recounted an incident where she chose to confront her principal regarding inequities in school, although she was aware that doing this might jeopardize her career:
This teacher’s assertive stand may be contrasted with the tactics some administrators used to challenge injustice. Although these administrators used similar discourses related to knowing and picking their battles, they favored less direct approaches. In the first instance, a superintendent and her equity committee intentionally handpicked and chose to dialogue with teachers who were already committed to equity work. They then encouraged these teachers to talk to their principals directly and to work in their schools as social justice advocates, as explained below:I have to know what my battle is. I have to also know that I am willing to fight for it. Because there are certain ones that I would not back down on and that I would be willing to argue for and at the end of the day. And I have said to my principal—if you are telling me that this has to happen, then you tell me that, and I am telling you that, for the good of X, this needs to stay. (Barb, teacher)
Three principals, Jake, Karen, and Sue, also described making difficult choices when faced with the challenge of fostering teachers’ commitment to student learning. For the most part, these participants used conciliatory strategies to avoid conflict (e.g., dialoguing about the issue, sharing information, and coaxing). Jake reported appealing to teachers’ sense of purpose by reminding them of their professional duty to do the best for all students:I think to pick your battles, which was something we all found. I think when we wanted to have a dialogue about certain things we knew which teachers to go to and which teachers to avoid. (Farren, superintendent)
When faced dealing with resistant teachers, Karen also eschewed direct confrontation to avoid further conflict and resistance:And so, it’s a constant battle, which is something that certainly I’m very mindful of…that we always need to appreciate the importance of educating the kids that we have, not the kids that we want. (Jake, principal)
Sue also highlighted the importance of selectively choosing which battles to fight and using indirect strategies to win them. This entailed deciding which issues to take on, which individuals or groups to challenge, and which ones to ignore. In addition to deciding which people to work with on different initiatives, she chose to be strategic because of the risks entailed in doing social justice work. Drawing on tactical imagery such as going around, backing off, getting through, and flying, Sue illustrated the different indirect strategic moves she used to negotiate her “battles” while avoiding direct confrontations:The biggest obstacle is that some people are really entrenched in their own thinking and it is really difficult to convince them otherwise…the only thing I don’t do is, I don’t confront people. I don’t make it into a clashing kind of thing because I know that doesn’t work. In the times I had clashes, you get people to be entrenched more into their beliefs even more when you clash with them. (Karen, principal)
Many participants felt vulnerable due to power imbalances in the district hierarchy, and they used topographical metaphors related to distance and elevated terrain to describe their challenges. Their frequent use of war-normalizing discourses evoking images of journeys, loss, suicide, and phrases such as “deciding which hill to die on” captured some of the fears they experienced when navigating this dangerous political terrain. For example, when faced with resistance from staff, Sue avoided some issues while doggedly pursuing the ones she believed to be important despite the risks: “Some things you persevere regardless, and some things you say—you know what, I am going to leave that one there and move on, it is not a road to die on, so then let’s leave it off.” Reflecting on the personal and professional costs of challenging authority, Garreth also emphasized the need to think carefully before upsetting supervisors or refusing to comply with district mandates:If you are trying to do something and you get half the staff who won’t do it, then you have to go around them to get through it. And sometimes you back off because you are like—it is not going to fly here, it is not worth it. You have to choose your battles. (Sue, principal)
These participants’ discourses of death and suicide communicated the professional dangers involved in directly confronting powerful forces and the importance of using subterfuge and subversion to sustain social justice work in schools.You have to be aware of the system directives, and if you are being told by your boss to follow them, then the old saying is that you have to decide what hill you want to die on…Absolutely. You have got to decide—is this a hill you want to die on? (Garreth, principal)
Marshalling People and Resources
These social justice leaders recognized the importance of people and resources in creating systemic change and they intentionally enlisted a critical mass of people at different organizational levels. Military languages such as forces, alliances, allies, maneuvers, circling, and fighting were used to describe how they marshalled and mobilized individuals to achieve equity in their schools and communities. Both teachers and administrators described the existence of multiple coalitions in schools representing different interests and working for and against social justice and they spoke of the need to disrupt these factions and to enroll supporters and detractors to obtain the resources required to sustain school and district initiatives. Two teachers, Stacy and Priya, described ongoing threats to social justice work and underscored the need to develop diverse allies and workers at the school, district, and broader community levels. Stacy, who worked in an economically disadvantaged, school emphasized “joining forces” with multiple community and governmental agencies and engaging in collective dialogue and action at all levels in order to dismantle unjust structures:
While Priya also reported building multiple alliances, she was constantly aware of adversarial forces inside and outside of her school that were working against social justice because of the discomfort these ideals provoked:There is a lot of hopelessness…so what we’re doing is joining forces right now. And I really believe for schools to be part of something is rejoining the forces with the city, with the criminal justice, with the attorney general’s office, with parks and recreation, with the library, with public health. And we’re sitting down collectively around the table to work together to say: What structures and what celebrations, what community programs can we start to put together as a team to begin to turn this neighborhood around? (Stacy, teacher)
I think there are many people that are in alliance with me, but I think that there are multiple forces that don’t want this there. One force is trustees, another force is the board itself, elements of the board, another force is administrators, another force is staff. So, there are a lot of people that are not happy about this work, and it is not exciting work for them because it makes them feel uncomfortable. (Priya, teacher)
Participants emphasized the importance of using political acumen to counter and contain internal and external forces and the need for social justice leaders to constantly listen and observe to determine their allies and enemies and work accordingly. Robert described the multilayered political dynamics involved in building allies and coalitions and mobilizing others at the principal level:
These leaders also built alliances with different groups at various levels to maximize use of time and impact. Farren illustrated how social justice leaders at the superintendent level positioned themselves within hierarchical power structures and selectively built powerful allies:So, just from the beginning I consider it to be very political. And then through the nuts and bolts type of way, when you’re trying to make things happen, you’re working in groups of people to form coalitions and alliances to help make things happen. (Robert, principal)
Yes. Authority matters. That is what I learned, especially if they are much more senior than you. So, you need to choose, you have to think about who is going to be your ally and who is not in terms of fighting for issues, otherwise you waste a lot of time doing unnecessary things. (Farren, superintendent)
While Farren discussed the need to fight for causes and choose allies judiciously to save time, Caleb focused on accessing fiscal and human resources to counteract social injustice. His political discourse focused on maneuvering around different groups’ interests to acquire resources and making decisions regarding how to maximize them to benefit students:
Once Caleb was involved in a senior role and was allocated resources, he then gained more decision-making autonomy to support social justice in his schools. In the next section, we discuss our findings and make recommendations regarding how our data inform theory, research, and practice.Each of the stakeholders has a continuum point of view. In some of the stakeholders’ groups, there may be alliances. I have to maneuver in and around and through that to get them done. Within the school community, social justice involves the application of funding resources…The first step for me is being involved politically with the district because that’s where my resources come from. Staffing comes from there, finances, and professional development comes from there. I have to be politically active and involved to make sure that all of those resources are directed to my school. (Caleb, principal)
Discussion
This article focused on the metaphors that 38 social justice leaders used to describe their work. The overall findings revealed that participants drew primarily on war-normalizing metaphors to describe how they achieved their social justice goals and that these discursive patterns played an important role in helping them communicate and make sense of their work and contexts. For the most part, participants painted a picture of contemporary social justice leadership as fraught with challenge, conflict, and subterfuge, and they reported feeling under assault in their attempts to challenge injustice. As a result, they emphasized the need for social justice leaders to be strategic, selective, and subversive when confronted with persistent and proliferative injustices. For the most part, participants’ discourses concur with emerging descriptions of the embattled nature of social justice work (Archambault & Garon, 2013; Armstrong & McMahon, 2014; Hwami, 2014; Ryan & Armstrong, 2016; Shields, 2014). However, their frequent use of war-normalizing metaphors and military strategies is a novel finding, confirming that for educational leaders, social injustice and resistance to equitable changes are complex, multilayered, and deeply ingrained in school and societal systems. Furthermore, participants’ reliance on war-normalizing discourses to describe their challenges, particularly their use of imagery related to battles, loss, and death, highlighted the risky and contested nature of doing social justice work in neoliberal contexts. Although this frequent use of military jargon and tactics appears to be a relatively new and burgeoning trend for social justice leaders, participants’ discursive patterns reflect broader political and historical discourses used by both the right and left that normalize war on social problems.
The participants’ discourse is also consistent with Marxist philosophy, particularly Gramsci’s (1971) use of military metaphors to illustrate how to challenge hegemonic forces in the West. Egan (2016) elaborates on these military metaphors:
Cammaerts (2015) explains that Gramsci’s war of maneuver was conceived as a form of offense, like a quick assault against dominant social forces, while his war of position was a prolonged defense that was consistent with trench or siege warfare and passive revolution by subordinate classes. Our study participants rarely used the kinds of direct frontal assaults associated with a war of maneuver. While one might assume that principals and superintendents would be better positioned in the organizational hierarchy to challenge injustice, we found that the only participants who openly challenged school authorities were two teachers, Barb and Shannon, suggesting that administrators may feel more visible and vulnerable to attack.In addition to these descriptive metaphors, Gramsci also used military metaphors in a more analytical manner, and it is in this context that his use of such metaphors is most well known. His concepts of war of maneuver and war of position are metaphors that are prescriptive in nature, emphasising a complex series of actions which, Gramsci argued, revolutionary forces must undertake in specific social formations. (p. 436)
Consistent with Gramsci’s war of position metaphor, all participants engaged in a passive revolution and employed quiet acts of social justice to minimize personal and professional risk and repercussions. While participants used multiple political strategies to counter injustice, their discourse coalesced around three interconnected military-like strategies that are consistent with Gramsci’s war of position and trench warfare: (1) learning the lay of the land and camouflaging action, (2) judiciously choosing their battles to minimize loss, and (3) selectively marshalling and mobilizing people and resources in order to maximize time, energy, reach, and impact. For the most part, these tactics were defensive and nonthreatening strategies. For example, they learned the lay of the land to acquire deep, broad, and up-to-date knowledge of their changing political landscape, while camouflaging their actions through constant and attentive listening and environmental monitoring to determine potential supporters and enemies. This knowledge allowed participants to work through, around, and with others to camouflage social justice work. Metaphors such as flying under the radar, lying in the weeds, and staying out of the light, which were used to describe how they minimized their exposure to scrutiny, also illustrated the importance participants placed on camouflaging social justice work to reduce risk and maximize time. In addition to using war of position defensive tactics, participants intentionally worked to avoid punitive fallout, and they used war-normalizing discourses such as “choosing battles” and “which hills to die on” to describe the need to be strategic when confronted with multiple and converging forces of injustice. Lumby and English (2010) note that “not a hill I would die on” means that assault on high ground exposes attackers to supreme risk and exposure and it infers that people should reflect seriously on which goals to pursue. Our participants expressed similar concerns because challenges to social injustice often carried serious repercussions that might lead to “career suicide” and they emphasized that social justice leaders should carefully select tactics that allowed them to reduce personal risk. Gill (2013) describes this tactic as “grasping careerism,” whereby social justice work becomes secondary to career advancement and maintaining a positive school image. While we agree in part with Gill’s observation, it is also possible that senior administrators adopted these evasive war of position tactics to better utilize time, space, energy, and resources in the long term.
Cammaerts (2015) agrees that Gramsci’s war of position called for coalitions because he believed that a passive revolution should take place on multiple fronts. This political strategy is consistent with participants’ discourses related to marshalling and mobilizing human and material resources and strategically building powerful alliances. Identifying factions and building a critical mass of supporters over time are also consistent with Gramsci’s conception of the war of position as a “strategic and organic…persistent counter-hegemonic struggle” (Egan, 2016, p. 439), where defense forces build reserves and reinforcements to resist attack and use resources strategically to identify structural weaknesses. Ryan and Armstrong (2016) and Ryan and Tuters (2014) describe these kinds of behaviors as quiet activism, whereby individuals work silently against the goals of an organization from within as opposed to loudly protesting or working against it from the outside. While less pronounced than loud activism, it is clear from the participants’ reports that quiet activism and subterfuge are effective defensive strategies when dealing with power and protecting one’s career. While we understand the practicality of these choices, we question how participants’ lack of direct challenges to powerful individuals and ideologies unintentionally colluded with district hegemonic practices and unintentionally reinforced social injustice. Further investigation into the connection between risk, fear, and school district conditions that encourage or discourage direct stands against injustice is required to determine how school leaders can successfully promote and sustain social justice praxis.
Our findings confirm previous observations that educators use metaphors to communicate complex theories, roles, and situations (Lumby & English, 2010). Additionally, they identified a burgeoning and paradoxical trend for social justice leaders to employ war-normalizing metaphors to communicate the strategies they use to achieve equitable schooling. Given that metaphors are tools for making sense of reality (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), it seems intuitive that this increasing use of war-normalizing metaphors is symptomatic of the debilitating effects of working in neoliberal contexts where increased accountability, scarce resources, and time constrains have become normative (Armstrong et al., 2013; Shields, 2014). Indeed, conceptualizing social justice work as war may seem beneficial to some educators due to the three political connotations of this concept: the urgency of social justice work, the call for extreme actions, and the hope of obtaining support and resources. However, if metaphors are ontological and epistemological and give us specific frames for seeing the world (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), war-normalizing discourse will impact thinking and action and consciously or unconsciously influence attitudes and behaviors toward those who may be perceived as the enemy (e.g., parents, students, or vulnerable communities), justifying immoral actions.
We hypothesize that this disturbing use of war imagery is also reflective of pervasive global discursive trends in powerful nations such as the United States, where terms such as the war on terror, drugs, and poverty have been normalized in everyday discourse. With respect to Canada, this discursive pattern is connected to recent attempts to make militarism an essential part of Canadian culture by eschewing our national identity as peace keepers and rebranding our country as more powerful by promoting a “romantic perspective of war” (McKay & Swift, 2012, p. 2). This cultural shift is also evident in recent moves by Canadian universities to embrace militarized neoliberalism and military achievements (Taber, 2014) by highlighting war rather than critical inquiry. Creeping militarism in education urges theorists, policy makers, and practitioners to interrogate how war is “intermeshed with formal education and learning in everyday life” (Taber, 2014, p. 113) and discursively constituted and reconstituted to support hegemonic power blocs. We acknowledge that this is a difficult task because many educational leaders are unaware of the irony of using war metaphors to describe an altruistic practice such as social justice leadership (Lumby & English, 2010). War-normalizing metaphors “make us forget what war basically implies: death, bereavement, anguish and physical and mental destruction” (Gavriely-Nuri, 2009, p. 157). We agree with these authors that there are deeply laden meanings in the frequency and acceptance of the military metaphors in education that require further scrutiny. According to LeBaron (2016), “effective negotiators know that they need to suggest alternative metaphors to foster change. To leave unmarked framing metaphors like war and battle undisturbed and unnamed is to invite conflict escalation” (p. 148). If our conceptual systems influence behavior (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), how can educators, policy makers, and researchers become critically aware of and alter linguistic patterns that normalize war?
Recommendations
Although metaphors are mental models that are firmly grounded in our leadership identity (Fairhurst, 2011), there is a paucity of research into their use with respect to educational leadership, social justice, and micropolitics. The results of this study highlight the need for more empirical research and critical dialogue regarding scholars’ and practitioners’ use of metaphorical discourse, along with a more robust cataloguing of the metaphors social justice leaders use to conceptualize their work. Studying and discussing leadership metaphors can illustrate how educational discourses in the field and the academy have evolved over time and how they impact research, policy, and practice. Engaging in this study allowed us to examine social justice leaders’ experiences and the discursive strategies they employed to negotiate unjust contexts. In the process of doing this research and writing this article, we became more aware of the metaphors embedded in our own writing and thinking and our use of war-normalizing discourses such as: attacking, strategizing, confronting, and targeting. Therefore, in addition to researching how study participants conceptualize and use metaphors, researchers and theorists should critically examine how they themselves use metaphors, particularly those metaphors that normalize war. This examination might include questions such as: Which metaphors are most often used by theorists and in which disciplines?; How does the use of metaphorical language consciously and unconsciously impact theory, research, and practice and what are the consequences?; and How can conceptual systems, discourses, and behaviors be altered to achieve sustainable social justice work?
Since metaphors are fundamental tools that shape thought and action (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lumby & English, 2010), they can be used by practitioners, researchers, and policy makers to illuminate the micropolitical challenges of social justice work, alerting policy makers and practitioners to the difficulties inherent in achieving equity for all groups. Kincheloe (2008) argues that the use of war metaphors is illustrative of a lack of leadership and leadership preparation for social justice. Our findings indicate that educators need to develop a complex repertoire of political and interpersonal skills to engage diverse, and sometimes conflicting, communities in social justice work. Armstrong et al. (2013) also recognize the importance of these skills and recommend that social justice leaders should be trained in political, relational, and communication skills. Educators should also be trained to recognize and deconstruct how metaphors reflect power dynamics, implicit values, and ethics and impact decision-making (Fairhurst, 2011). Fairhurst (2011) calls for the development of healthy leader–follower metaphors that can be used to model normative guidelines and paired to raise individual and collective awareness regarding the use of metaphor and discourse and the disciplinary effects of discourse. She also suggests discussing how metaphors reflect power relations, impact ethics, and influence decision-making. This is particularly important considering the reciprocal nature of educational leadership metaphors, their discursive implications and impacts.
Reimagining Metaphors
Morgan (1996) claims that “By changing our metaphors we can learn to ‘see’ and understand in different ways and gain different kinds of knowledge” (p. 229), reconceptualize practice, and change behavior. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) also suggest replacing war metaphors with less harmful metaphors such as dance, which requires balance, is aesthetically pleasing and requires no winners and losers. Moving from war-related metaphors to aesthetic metaphors (e.g., art, music, dance), communal metaphors (e.g., family and community), ecological metaphors (e.g., growth and cultivation), or transformative leadership metaphors (e.g., understanding power and privilege and reimagining social knowledge) might result in more effective and less emotionally and socially harmful approaches to social justice leadership and education. To imagine healthy leadership metaphors and new educational leadership theories, discourses, and practices, we recommend a shift to metaphors that are associated with transformative leadership discourses: dialogic relationships, having one foot in the dominant structures of power and authority, and building community, balancing critique and promise (Shields, 2014). Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) suggestions and transformative leadership theory (Shields, 2014), we suggest revisiting and rewriting military and war-normalizing metaphors identified in our study (Table 1).
| War-Normalizing Metaphor | Transformative Leadership Metaphor |
|---|---|
| Knowing the lay of the land | Understanding people, power, and privilege Researching context |
| Choosing battles | Balancing critique and promise Enacting/communicating core values |
| Building alliances | Developing dialogic relationships Constructing community Supporting collaboration |
| Challenging | Imagining, inviting possibilities |
| War | Activism, action, engagement |
Further study and dialogue are needed to explore whether references to fighting, choosing hills to die on, attacking, confronting, safeguarding democracy, and other contentious metaphorical references influence administrators and other school leaders in their decisions to adopt and sustain an equity stance when engaging in social justice work. What are the metaphors needed to evoke inclusion, equity, fairness, relationship building, acceptance, agreement, and safe and respectful learning environments? Lakoff and Johnson (1980) suggest that more attention must be paid to the notion that “metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language” (p. 3). Further research is needed to explore the extraordinary within academic and practitioner discourse and to discover or imagine the metaphors needed to encourage positive engagement with social justice leadership in education.
Conclusion
This article explored the war-normalizing metaphors educational leaders used when describing the micropolitical strategies they employed in their pursuit of social justice. These leaders described their experiences as embattled and fraught with challenges. For the most part, they employed defensive strategies consistent with Gramsci’s (1971) war of position, such as learning the lay of the land, camouflaging evasive action, choosing battles, and mobilizing troops to achieve social justice goals. Our literature review and our findings illustrate troubling, discourses that increasingly depict education as a war zone with winners, losers, and collateral damage. This pattern coincides with accountability movements and their associated stressors, which saw their debut in the late 1990s and have since been on the rise. We also connected our findings to the emerging militaristic culture in Canada and confirmed that war-normalizing discourse has gained prominence across university settings and K–12 schools. This pervasive discourse limits critical thought, social justice ideals, and social transformation. Perhaps the greatest utility of metaphors for educational leadership and social justice lies in their ability to help people conceptualize and reimagine their praxis. We recommend further comparative research on the strengths and weaknesses of metaphorical discourse and its potential to build educational leadership and social justice for all.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
ORCID iD
Denise Armstrong https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5687-790X
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Biographies
Denise Armstrong is a professor of Administration and Leadership at Brock University. Her research focuses on the intersection of individual and organizational dynamics, with particular emphasis on administrative leadership transitions, professional identity construction, micropolitics, and social justice and she publishes extensively in these areas.
Stephanie Tuters is an educator, writer, and researcher focusing on how leadership, teaching, and policy help and hinder equity and social justice.
Snežana Ratković is an award-winning scholar whose research interest lies in migration and indigeneity, transnational and transdisciplinary teacher education, social justice leadership, and decolonizing and arts-based research methodologies.
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Article first published online: May 16, 2019
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