Episode 77: Dignity-Affirming Leadership in Schools

With Jason Craige Harris

Available October 7, 2025

At a time when conflict and polarization feel like an unrelenting fact of life, how can we build stronger, kinder school communities where everyone feels seen, known, and valued? That’s one of the pervasive questions facing school leaders right now, and one that Jason Craige Harris is ready to help us answer. He joins Morva McDonald for a conversation about refocusing our leadership practices to center human dignity, and why he feels that reframe is so vital to our continued wellbeing.

Guest: Jason Craige Harris

Resources, Transcript, and Expanded Show Notes

In This Episode:

• “We have to engage in a bit of a listening tour to hear how people are experiencing their cultural reality.  And one of the reasons why is because our brains are storytelling factories. And in the absence of information given to us, whenever we detect gaps, we create, right? We fill it with our own sort of assumptions. And those assumptions, I'm not saying they're automatically wrong, but they're not automatically right most of the time.” (6:58)
• “For a long time in my work, I framed things in terms of what I was against. Like I had a really clear idea of like, I don't want exclusion. I don't want assimilation. I don't want violence. I'm not even sure I really want tolerance. And so my whole imagination was defined by being anti- forces that were debilitating and dehumanizing. And at some point I realized, gosh, like, I'm not sure I've spent much time trying to thickly describe the world that I want, like what I'm fighting for versus what I'm fighting against...Let's just say that if exclusion somehow disappears, if racism disappears, if whatever -ism it is disappears, then will we no longer have purpose?” (19:15)
• “I worry that some of our school communities, because of the desire to avoid controversy and division, and the complexities that come with grappling with challenging human issues, like the desire to avoid crisis, then leads some toward a kind of superficial peace, a sort of superficial consensus.” (25:16)

Related Episodes: 67; 66; 64; 37; 30; 15; 13

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