Katherine C. Rodela, Ph.D.

My research agenda centers around the concept of leadership for equity and justice. As third-generation Mexican American and first-generation college student, I am committed to being a community-engaged scholar, whose work advances educational equity and culturally responsive education for marginalized communities, particularly low-income communities of color across the educational PK-20 pipeline. My focus on leadership for equity and diversity inspires three lines of qualitative research: (1) diversifying the educational leadership pathways in PK-12 education, (2) developing equity-focused school and district leaders, and (3) uplifting and centering the leadership of marginalized families and communities.

I am a graduate of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. I received a BA in Philosophy and History at Seattle University. I am a former Fulbright Scholar and worked on research project studying the civic engagement and leadership impacts of a childhood nutrition program in Peru. Before earning my Ph.D., I taught Spanish and Service Learning at an urban high school in Oregon.

Currently, I am engaged in these two research projects:

Diversifying the educational leadership pathways in PK-12 education:  Using CRT and LatCrit counterstorytelling methods (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002), I study the experiences and pathways of leaders of color across work positions, regions, and cultures. My work in this area first began with research with Latinx leaders and preservice teachers of color, and resulted in several publications. I also received the first George Brain and Gay Selby Faculty Award in Educational Leadership from WSU. This award helped fund continued research on the experiences and administrative pathways of leaders of color across races and cultures in the Pacific Northwest, which began in Fall 2020 and continues to today.

Building from this research work, I co-founded the Leaders for Equity and Advancing Diversity (LEAD) Program with WSU college Dr. Sharon Kruse and district leaders from Vancouver Public Schools. The LEAD Program aims to prepare equity-focused future administrators of color to serve the growing and diversifying students and communities of Washington, with our first pilot focusing on SW Washington. Through the generous support of College Spark of Washington, the first LEAD Program Cohort completed their courses in May 2024. We are currently working to expand the program across the state. To learn more about our first pilot, please read this short executive summary.

Uplifting and centering the leadership of marginalized families and communities: In various publications, I explore the voices, advocacy, and expertise of parents, families, and communities of color as legitimate, powerful educational leaders who can address systemic injustices in schools and districts. My scholarship in this area includes ethnographic examinations of Latinx immigrant parents’ leadership development and Latinx community advocacy, and critical literature reviews and conceptual work on expanding the boundaries of who counts as “educational leadership” to include youth, parent, family, and community leaders. My research in this strand seeks to support educational administrators to work with (rather than simply for) youth, families and communities in authentic partnerships.

This work also inspired leadership and outreach in the local SW Washington community. In partnership with Diana Avalos Leos, Director and Founder of Latino Leadership Northwest (formerly the Clark County Latino Youth Conference), we established the SW Washington Latino Parent Leadership Institute. We worked with a diverse group of school and parent leaders to offer parent education and leadership workshops to Spanish-speaking parents in the SW Washington and Portland Metro Area. Together with Ms. Avalos Leos, I studied the impacts of this program on Latinx parent engagement and leadership for equity in schools. We successfully ran two sessions of our workshops in Vancouver Public Schools (Fall 2016) and Woodland Public Schools (Spring 2017). Recently we engaged former participants in a study of their families’ experiences and children’s schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic.

More recently, I have published an edited book with Dr. Melanie Bertrand, which aims to help aspiring and current school and district leaders learn how to work with diverse families and communities: Centering Youth, Family, and Community in School LeadershipCase Studies for Educational Equity and Justice (2023, Routledge).