Dr. Charles Slater Receives Outstanding Faculty Award
Congratulations to Dr. Charles Slater, Professor, Educational Leadership, who was awarded the Outstanding Faculty Award in the area of Research, Creativity and Scholarly Activities! Below, Dr. Slater shares what this award means to him as a researcher and educator, as well as projects he's most proud of.
This award gave me the opportunity to reflect on the phases of my research agenda since coming to CSULB in 2006. The first phase was an international study of beginning principals. Later, I began to see that our approach was neglecting marginalized students and the inequities in society. This led to a second phase of research with another international network to study social justice. The third and most recent phase of my work pays increasing attention to the scholarship of doctoral students and the means by which they can publish and advance.
In the first phase of my research, I joined the International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP), a network of 15 countries that examined challenges of beginning principals and implications for administrator preparation. Our central argument was that principal preparation should be grounded in the experience of beginning principals and realities of their daily work.
In the second phase of my work, I helped found the International Study of Leadership Development Network (ISLDN) to identify socially just principals and examine their beliefs, how they developed, what obstacles they faced and the support they received. Representatives from 17 countries have been using a common framework to describe these leaders qualitatively. I have coordinated the work in Spain and Latin America.
In the third phase of my research, I have focused more on student scholarship. I supervised 17 dissertations between 2014-2019 and co-presented seven papers based on dissertations at the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA). Then, I co-authored with students two journal publications, and two book chapters. I nominated a doctoral student from Cohort I who won the prestigious UCEA Clark Seminar Award in 2009 and ten years later I nominated another student in Cohort XI who won the award in 2019.
In phase I of my research, I learned about the extraordinary challenges that new principals faced as managers. In the second phase I saw more mature principals begin to wrestle with inequity in their schools and the injustices in society. In this third phase, students are carrying me in new directions to challenge established practices and find new ways of seeing and doing.
