TEL Alumni Spotlight, Shannon Wanless
Winter 2023
For this season’s TEL Alumni Spotlight, Meena spoke with Shannon Wanless, a beloved TEL Alum from the 2020 - 2021 Fellowship Cohort.
Current Roles and Context
At the University of Pittsburgh, Shannon serves in two distinct leadership roles. As an Associate Professor in the School of Education, her responsibilities encompass research, advising doctoral students, and teaching future educators. As the Director of the Office of Child Development, Shannon oversees a center that reaches over 7000 children and families each year through family and community partnerships, early childhood education, and evaluation and research activities.
How Higher Education Leaders Transform Educational Systems
In her role as a professor, Shannon explained that she prepares future educators by “pushing the envelope with them to think beyond what exists right now.” This “often means telling them to disrupt what they’re going to see when they arrive in their placement,” and spending a lot of time envisioning the future. She asks them to consider, “What do you wish school was like for the next three, four, five generations from now? That's what we're working toward every day in our classroom.” As an academic, Shannon asks the same questions of her colleagues, and pushes towards new visions for the future. In her own research and writing, she says she is “trying to talk about things that I hope are far beyond where we are right now, and spark some ideas that can nudge us in the direction we hope to go toward.”
Living the Beloved Community That We Dream Of
Shannon shared that one of the biggest impacts of her TEL experience was in helping her see that in order to create a ‘Beloved Community’ with the communities she works with, “we have to live the reality that we are dreaming of.” This idea deepened what she had been learning from fellow TEL Alum, Michelle King, in her consultation with the University of Pittsburgh. Shannon expressed, "That's what TEL modeled and what I felt, that we can't just make a plan for it and go implement it somewhere. We need to look at every decision we make, every meeting we have, every way we interact with each other." TEL was an experience of profound “changes in your way of being” and “transforming every minute… every moment with consistency and with our values.” With her students and colleagues, she reflected, “That's what I hope we do at the end of every day, to say, did we make every minute more humanizing and equitable and loving?”
Letting Go of Perfectionism and Trusting Your Inner Voice
While a typical leadership path would be to set a vision and create a strategic five year plan, Shannon explained that through TEL, she learned to focus more on letting go of her “perfectionism” which got in the way of allowing the path to unfold. Shannon said she learned to “normalize discomfort and a certain level of conflict,” which was not in her background growing up. As Shannon shared, TEL helped her to see that “this is what it looks like when human beings interact. We're going to disagree or have big emotions come up… It means that we are trying to be real together.” As a result, she noticed how she began to see herself in others, and her compassion grew for them as well as herself. “To be able to see how much effort and love and energy they were pouring into their practice and still making mistakes, or still having moments that felt less than ideal made me have a lot more grace for myself.” Shannon and Meena agreed that compassion and grace were an important part of being a transformative leader. As Shannon noted, “the more compassion and grace we can give each other, the more likely we are to succeed together.”
For Shannon, letting go of perfectionism has given her a lot more confidence in her own voice and wisdom to know when to step back or when to speak up. As she stated, "My experience from TEL made me believe in my inner voice a lot more." This confidence has led her to take on new actions and shifts in her leadership approach. For example, she recently worked with her center colleagues to develop a new mission and vision more clearly centered on equity and justice, and has found that this new statement “changes who we partner with, how we partner with them, how strongly we can come into all of our research and programming saying, this is what we're here to do, unapologetically.” Further, Shannon has noticed a lot less judgment in her supervision and a much bigger pause before she reacts to staff. With letting go of perfectionism, it has been easier to give space to others, and “let their voices get more firmly grounded and heard and valued, because we all have the truth inside of ourselves.”
Navigating White Identity in Educational Spaces
Shannon reflected on how her leadership journey involved “realizing very quickly that white women, and a white way of being, is just taking up a lot of space in every room.” Initially, Shannon embraced a stance of active listening, stating she “felt the need to listen a lot more and talk a lot less." However, she acknowledged the need to find a balance and figure out, "where is my role to speak?" Shannon highlighted how “TEL provided such good practice with being in a community, and practicing and seeing others practice (with learning), ‘What do equitable spaces look like’?” She noted that “when you're in a community, a racially mixed community, over time, it's easier to see yourself” and know better when it is your turn to speak. As she reflected, “Sometimes it's actually even more important to speak. That silence can be just as harmful in certain moments." She still grapples with the complexities of leading as a White woman, and continues to ask, "what does it look like to be a leader and to be a white woman that's not trying to center your own identity?"
Trust and Allowing the Beloved Community to Emerge
The TEL Fellowship involves small group cohorts within the larger cohort as an opportunity to go deeper into learning what co-creating a beloved community of diverse educational leaders looks and feels like. Shannon spoke about her small group cohort as a kind of living lab, and the transformative impact of experiencing how the group’s facilitator, Hector Montenegro, led the group. There were many incredible members in the group who sometimes knew that the assigned tasks were not the work the group felt called to do. Shannon said her “biggest learning was from watching Hector” let go of the agenda in those moments and place trust in the group to find their way. She reflected, “He just let it happen, the trust in us. And then we really took up that trust, and it was so magnetic, that feeling of building a beloved community together.” Shannon then powerfully transferred that vision of beloved community to education:
“It was so magical and free to just let it happen. And you think about in schools, even in higher education, how often do you just trust the space to do what it needs to do? And how often are the people in the room free enough in their minds and in their hearts to be able to see where they need to go next and articulate?”
How to Stay Resilient and Compassionate as a Leader
Shannon has found it helpful to spend a lot of time journaling, and creating a very clear picture of a better world. She also keeps cards with messages around, such as one from the artist and activist, Tricia Hersey, that says, “I am not a machine. I am a divine human being.” This card helps her to remember that “being a divine human being, being a member of a beloved community is the actual goal of the day, not the ‘To Do’ list.” She also acknowledged that this necessitates a shift to taking care of herself, “so that I can be the best member of a beloved community that I can be.” For Shannon, this means “listening to your own body when it is saying, ‘You are so tired, go home and rest!’” She also acknowledges that it's a privilege to be in a job where she can “listen when those signals come, but it's a new compass. It's a new compass to believe that being a member of the beloved community is the goal of the day.” In other words, staying resilient and compassionate is made possible by seeing oneself as inextricably linked to the well-being of all members of the beloved community.