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The importance of socially just leadership has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years as integral for tackling issues of disadvantage and inequality across education and schooling systems. However, there are still remaining questions about what these leadership practices look like in the everyday work of school leaders. This chapter draws on a research project to embed Indigenous perspectives in schools as an example of socially just leadership. The links between Indigenous communities and schools are a key focus area for improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students. This project sought to bring Indigenous community members into classrooms in six schools in New South Wales, Australia. Community members were recruited to work with teachers as co-constructors of learning activities that explicitly value and work with Indigenous perspectives. This chapter outlines the positive outcomes from this project as well as challenges faced by schools, teachers, principals, and community members as part of this culturally responsive work. The practices of community members, teachers, and principals are theorized using the notion of culturally responsive leadership. The chapter argues for an approach to leadership that is grounded in culturally responsive understandings to improve the educational outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous students and the cultural understanding and awareness of non-Indigenous students, to better promote reconciliation. This chapter provides a concrete example of powerful leadership practices that are working towards equity and social justice for their schools and communities. While the cases are specifically from the Australian context, they are relevant for a variety of schooling contexts and leadership practices.

Like most in education, I rarely take the opportunity to question and slow down enough to reflect on ideas and intentionally notice the subtle shifts in my thoughts. Life is hurried, and finding quiet reflective moments is difficult but not impossible. Encouraged to confront experiences of excessive entitlement in relation to the social, cultural, and political world, I learned that as with much in life there is a give and take, a negotiation of sorts, which if allowed leads to understanding. The interconnectedness of practitioners' varying experiences with administrators and educational policies raises the question of who affects whom and causes me to reflect on my research questions: 1. What is my relationship with excessive teacher entitlement? 2. Am I implicit in its production? If so, how and why?

In this chapter, I reflect on my cognitive and emotional relationship with excessive entitlement as an embodied experience through autoethnography methodology and phenomenology. By troubling or worrying the notion of excessive entitlement, I confront my beliefs through conversations with student teachers and veteran teachers, examining the interconnectedness of how people are implicit in its production. As a researcher and participant, the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology allow me to orient myself to my lived experiences as an art teacher, teacher leader, and faculty member and leader at a private university. Pulling from journal entries, emails, written “ponderings,” noted conversations, and memory, data support the notion that excessive entitlement occurs at all levels in education, and awareness is the first step toward understanding.