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This chapter traces the intersectional experiences of one Black woman through pre-Brown schooling, becoming a teacher under a post-Brown court order, hiring teachers as a school leader in a large metropolitan, southern city, to her current position as a leader-educator at a state university. Informed and contextualized by social, political, and historical events associated with the pre-Brown segregation, desegregation, and post-Brown eras, this chapter uses narrative autoethnographic reflectivity and storytelling to understand and analyze the nuances of educational hiring practices through the prism of one Black woman's educational journey. The story is significant because it not only provides evidence of the subtleties and nuances of racism but it also describes the changes in teaching, leadership, and hiring practices in southern public education over the last 60 years.

Directing schools of high complexity in disadvantaged social contexts with high rates of emigration requires skills for emotional leadership. Directors with self-managing capacities are needed to manage their own emotions. They also need to mobilise people (teachers, students and families) by focussing on their feelings of satisfaction, identification with the group, belonging, joy, success, unity and cohesion.

The content of this chapter presents the study of the emotional management of directors who perform their work in two highly complex schools in Catalonia, Spain. The views of these directors as well as teachers and families examine: (1) the construction of their professional identity, (2) their social and ethical commitment to the community, (3) the orientation towards the values of social justice and (4) their emotional leadership practices focussed on personal attention towards all of the actors in the school community.

The chapter concludes with 10 suggestions that can be useful to improve the professional practice of school directors. These should also be taken into account when designing and implementing initial and ongoing training programmes for school leaders and to inspire ideas for future research.

My main point is that the 1920s Chicago School got its scholastic or school-like quality primarily from its notion of what a human being is, from its social psychology, and only secondarily from its sociology. These sociologists developed the novel idea that humans are constituted by symbolic or cultural elements, not biological forces or instincts. They applied Franz Boas's discovery of culture to human nature and the self. In particular, they showed that ethnic groups and their subcultures are not biologically determined or driven by fixed instincts. In the 1910s and 1920s, the Americanization movement held that ethnic groups could be ranked on how intelligent, how criminal, and therefore how fit for democracy they were. This powerful movement, the extreme wing of which was lead by the Northern Ku Klux Klan, advocated different levels of citizenship for different ethnic groups. The Chicago sociologists spear-headed the idea that humans have a universal nature, are all the same ontologically, and therefore all the same morally and legally. In this way, they strengthened the foundations of civil liberties. The Chicago professors advanced their position in a quiet, low-keyed manner, the avoidance of open political controversy being the academic style of the time. Their position was nevertheless quite potent and effective. The actual sociology of the school, also quite important, was largely an expression of the democratic social psychology. In addition, the sociology was dignified and elevated by the moral capital of their theory of human nature.