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• Professor, Educational Leadership
• ��Ǵǰ��徱�Բ��ٴǰ�,���鶹��Ʒ��ƵEgypt Partnership
• Past President, 
• Associate Director for International Initiatives, 

Values

My professional values align with the stated core values of the Educational Leadership and Research Methodology department: Academic and professional excellence, commitment to social justice and inclusion, community engagement and international mindedness.

Teaching Philosophy

Education is a social process; education is growth; education is a process of living and not a preparation for future living (John Dewey, 1897). I am convinced that education is a social enterprise, which happens through reflection, collaboration, dialogue and exploration of ideas and concepts. I view myself as a facilitator and motivator for learning, and a lifelong learner myself. The learning of my students is at the heart of all my efforts and the ultimate objective of my instructional strategies. A teacher must be innovative, creative and has to integrate multiple instructional strategies and technology to accommodate the learning needs of each individual student. A teacher must ensure that he/she creates a positive non-threatening learning environment where every voice is heard and everyone is valuable.

The gap between theory and practice or the schism between researchers and practitioners has been a problem for the professoriate. I see teaching and research as two faces of the same coin; research informs my instruction which in turn drives research and so on, in an ongoing spiral of learning. I never lose sight of what is important; student learning is at the heart of educational leadership mission. Since faculty of educational leadership programs carry the great responsibility of preparing school leaders, we must ensure that our students not only gain the knowledge necessary, but that they also acquire the necessary skills of reflection, critical thinking, problem solving and that they develop an ethical compass to guide them in their quest to support and advocate for every individual student’s right to learn. The majority of graduate students in educational leadership programs are full- time professional educators. Pursuing further educational leadership degrees present an opportunity for graduate students to integrate their personal, professional and scholarly selves. Therefor their graduate work should present them with the opportunity to apply new learning (Mezirow, 2000) to their school-based practice. In all of my courses I will strive to model the application of theory to practice and to engage students in inquiry and reflection with the hope that they can apply relevant theories to respective professional situations.

I end with this quote: "Leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school" (Leithwood, Seashore-Louis, Anderson & Wahlstrom, 2004, p. 70). This adds a sense of urgency to the importance of developing effective school leaders for the current challenging and rapidly changing world (Friedman 2008).

Relevant Links

Reflections on my Teaching, Research and Service

Instruction. I believe that learning is primarily a social endeavor. Learning occurs when new ideas emerge through reflective, open conversation, exploration and through the free communication of experience (Dewy, 1916). This belief aligns with constructivists theories of learning where humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas (Dewey, 2016; Vygotsky, 2002). I am also inspired by adult learning theory (Mezirow, 2000), since the majority of graduate students in educational leadership programs are full- time professional educators, pursuing further educational leadership degrees present them an opportunity to integrate their personal, professional and scholarly selves. Therefor their graduate work should present them with the opportunity to apply new learning to their school-based practice (Mezirow, 2000). With the increased focus on student achievement, accountability and standard based educational leadership preparation programs, there is a fear that over emphasizing standards is “reductionist,” constraining and results in narrowing the focus of educational leaders, thus lowering the bar of professionalism as opposed to raising it (English, 2006). Within the school setting there is little or no room for discretion, judgment, or experimentation. School leaders are directed to handle many contexts with a multitude of different problems in a standardized (one size fits all) way that is dictated by policy makers who are far-removed from the problems (Elmore, 1979). Building school leaders’ capacity to manage change is a better strategy to prepare them to lead their ever changing school communities.

My responsibility as a facilitator is to create opportunities for capacity building in my classes by designing learning modules and creating learning environments in which the students will develop both leader (human capital) and leadership (social capital) capacities (Day, 2000). Tapping into my research on cultural competence, I support students’’ preparation for an increasingly interconnected and interdependent multicultural society through individual and collective learning experiences. As a lifelong learner myself, I seek additional instructional expertise by co-teaching with colleagues from my and other programs and departments.

Research. I see teaching and research as two sides of the same coin; research informs my instruction, which in turn drives research and so on, in an ongoing spiral of learning. To be able to provide my students with learning experiences to help them see beyond the barriers their own “culturally conditioned realities” (Howard, 2007, p.3) and to have the capacity of empathy towards their students’ different cultures and lived experiences. I focus my research on Cultural competence, issues of identity, advocacy and international education. I am also interested in studying the correlation between educational leadership preparation programs and the cultural competence of students and graduates, an identified gap in the literature.

Especially with a growing number of private, charter and public schools segregated along multiple lines (Orfield & Gordon, 2001). I find myself concerned with the phenomenon of student groups fleeing public schools, and a critical question about public school leaders understanding of the struggles of vulnerable students and the leaders’ readiness for the increasingly multicultural settings that they lead.

Following my research agenda, I started by developing a conceptual framework for cultural competence and developing and validating an instrument to measure cultural competence of educational leaders that resulted in two conference presentations (Barakat & Lakin, 2013; Barakat, 2015) and a manuscript submitted to the Journal of School Leadership (Barakat, Lakin & Reames, under review, (JSL MS #18-015). I then conducted a nationwide study on preparation programs and their correlation to graduates cultural competence that resulted in two conference presentations (Barakat, 2012; Barakat & Reames, 2015) and a publication in the Journal of Research in Leadership Education (Barakat, Reames, & Kensler, 2018). In an attempt to get an initial snapshot of the big-picture and the general condition of prospective educational leaders’ cultural competence. I then followed with a case study published in the Journal of Cases in Educational Leadership (Barakat, Brooks, 2016) and two autoethnographic studies (a book chapter and a journal article) to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges of students and implications for school leaders. In following this research agenda, and in spite of using both quantitative and qualitative methods, I maintain my constructivist/post positivist stance. As I agree with Reichardt and Cook (1979), there is no necessary logical connection between paradigm and method type. Moreover, Method-types are more collections of techniques that can be mixed and matched to provide different kinds of information (Firestone, 1986).

Service. Engaging in meaningful service requires a disposition for democracy and a commitment to participatory citizenship, going back to the bridge person analogy I engage in service to develop connections for my program, department (Graduate Program Committee), college (UCEA Plenum Representative) and university (Faculty Senate). By sustaining meaningful dialogue, engaging effectively across differences, and building capacity to escape narrow certainties (Howard, 2007). Even though I value all my service experiences however, I will focus on the �鶹��Ʒ��Ƶpartnership with Egypt for which I am the coordinator (See section 6).

By initiating and coordinating this international partnership, I have provided opportunities for the development of professional learning communities that has crossed department boundaries as well as international boundaries. The partnership has bridged the gap between many dichotomies (for example: East-West, training-professional development, leadership-curriculum). Through this partnership, quality PD opportunities were afforded to 10,000 Egyptian public school teachers, the exchange of learning was possible and I was able to connect my teaching, research and service as interdependent endeavors, were all three support my ongoing efforts to grow as an educational leader.

Research

My former career was in K-12 education as a school leader in Cairo, Egypt, where my discoveries about effective educational leadership were based on practice and trial and error, rather than on empirical evidence. My experience as a scholar has opened my eyes and my mind to the world of research, and to the positive contributions it could add to enhance school leadership. I believe that an effective school leader positively impacts school culture and consequently student engagement, learning, and achievement. This belief led me to focus my research on leadership preparation and specifically the preparation of socially just and culturally competent educational leaders. My research agenda can be viewed as part of the more encompassing endeavor of developing effective educational leaders (Figure 1).

Barakat, 2014; Building on Murphy’s framework for school administration, 2002

My main research focus is cultural competence within different contexts: cultural competence of educational leaders, elements predicting cultural competence and cultural competence measurement and evaluation. My research on “preparing culturally competent educational leaders” examines the correlation between the cultural competence of educational leaders and other personal and professional variables. An initial part of my research endeavor was the development and validation of the Cultural Competence for Educational Leaders [CCEL] Survey, an instrument which I specifically designed for the educational leadership context. My research agenda also includes examining elements of preparation programs which positively affect cultural competence of educational leaders. Other research interests include studying issues of “identity”, “marginalization” and self-perception.

Egypt partnership

�鶹��Ʒ��Ƶ & Balanced Education: A partnership for change

In 2015, the department of Educational Leadership and Research Methodology (ELRM), FAU, joined Balanced Education, Cairo Egypt, to form a partnership, bringing additional expertise in educational leadership and curriculum, as well as new perspectives to the design and delivery of professional development programs. The partnership began with a commitment to provide professional development for 10,000 public school teachers predicated on the belief that education is a lever for equity. The �鶹��Ʒ��Ƶteam rallied behind a vision to improve student learning by building teacher capacity using a teacher-of-teacher model. Feiman-Nesmer (2001) argued, “What students learn, is directly related to what and how teachers teach; and how teachers teach depends on the knowledge, skills and commitments they bring to their practice “(p.103). Faculty in the ELRM department, together with Faculty from the department of Curriculum Culture and Educational Inquiry (CCEI) were responsible for creating curriculum for a professional development program to prepare teacher leaders from private international school, who would then become the first two cohorts of PD facilitators to teachers in experimental public schools across Egypt. Teachers in experimental public schools were targeted as a first step because these schools were perceived as possible vehicles for quality education to advance social mobility opportunities for lower middle class families in Egypt.

Figure 1: Ripples for Creating Positive Change in Egyptian Experimental Public Schools