I recently watched a YouTube video where Dr Jean Lud Canter, psychiatrist at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and Kevin Williams, Director for the National Institute of Health’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, discussed the psychological impact of code switching (I’ll be writing a lot more on this topic over the coming months). During his presentation Dr Canter stated the following:
“The idea that you have to give up your authentic self in order to belong tells you that this is a toxic environment.”
His comment was related to the concept of professionalism in the work place and the way in which those of African American descent often felt the need to change their dialect, tones, mannerisms and overall appearance (known as social-linguistic code-switching) to fit in to a system which set the standard for what professionalism should look like. This resonated with me and caused me to reflect on the journey I have been on where this construct called professionalism is concerned.
One of the great things about being a headteacher is that you get to work alongside staff to build the culture of the school. When I first entered my first headship in 2019 I brought along with me some of the ideas that had been in place at the previous school where I had been a Head of School; ideas that were based on the leadership decisions of those above me. They weren’t bad ideas, we weren’t being asked to do weird things like pledge an allegiance to the Secretary of State for Education, but they were things which, when I thought about it, didn’t always make sense. One of those ideas related to dress codes and I remember in my first year as a headteacher copying and pasting a paragraph into our new Staff Handbook about the dress code that I thought should be in place. By the time I got to my second year of headship (when Covid was in full throttle and the rule book for how to deal with a pandemic had yet to be written), I had reconsidered my stance on the dress code. Some of this was because I had ditched my tough leather brogues that I had favoured for years and started wearing Vans footwear to school. My feet could not have thanked me enough! It was as that point that I began to wonder why we were so obsessed with dictating what professionalism and smart dress looked like. I often paired my Vans with a smart pair of trousers and sometimes I wore a shirt (Hawes and Curtis shirts are the best), and other times I wore a t-shirt or jumper underneath a suit jacket. At all points I was smart, I was presentable, there was still great teaching taking place (albeit remotely) and the school hadn’t disintegrated into a puff of smoke.
It was at this point that I changed the wording in the staff handbook. It now reads:
“Smart dress is encouraged and staff are expected to use their professional judgement where this is concerned.”
Staff are adults and therefore capable of defining for themselves what ‘smart dress’ looks like. We are setting a standard for children when it comes to looking smart and presentable and so long as it’s not going to cause a disturbance or distraction (at which point we’ll talk) and, in the case of footwear, enables you to safely run out of the building should there be an emergency situation, you do you boo.
We can spend too much time sweating the small stuff. Long gone are the days when using the excuse that we are preparing our young people for the corporate world is true. Have you seen how some of those in the corporate world are dressing these days? There’s an element of legalism and control that takes place when we continue to insist that those who work in schools dress a certain way, with no real justification for doing so.
If I wear Vans or Timberlands, they do not inhibit my ability to make sound judgements. If I wear a jumper instead of a formal shirt it does not make me any less of a headteacher. If I choose to wear my hair out in an afro, it does not impact on the way in which I fulfil my role. In fact, I lie. It does impact on the way in which I fulfil my role, because it reminds me that I’m not trying to fit into a mould and shows the Black students in my school that it’s ok to wear your 4b hair in an afro, in twists or in extensions and still have the capacity to focus on your learning. The impact of wearing my hair the way I choose or wearing the clothes that I have deemed to be smart by my own definition, means I am able to be my authentic self. Being my authentic self means not exerting mental energy worrying about what other people might be thinking, because that’s tiring and if I’m spending time worrying about that, I’m not focussing on the job of leading a school and that’s what I’m being paid to do.
NB This blog post is not (sadly) sponsored by Vans. Image Photo by Phiraya Vlog from Pexels