Learning Gendered Leadership in the United Kingdom: A Discursive Struggle

• In Event: Women Leading Education Across the Continents: Overcoming the Barriers

Abstract

Purpose
Women secondary school principals (known in the United Kingdom as headteachers) remain underrepresented globally, which perpetuates inequitable modeling of leadership for students. This study examined a senior leadership team (SLT) from a mixed urban comprehensive school in England and its views of the principal’s coaching and mentoring.

Perspective
In her re/theorization of gender, Francis (2010) enables the discussion of women’s experiences within the post¬structural gender discourse. Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) concepts of monoglossia and heteroglossia are used to explain our engagement in multiple and competing discourses in the construction of gender. For this study, the investigator used feminist discourses of equality and dif¬ference alongside poststructural gender theory and the discourse of gender monoglossia and heteroglossia to consider the discursive struggles of women and men pre¬paring for headship with a woman headteacher.

Methods
This case study took place among the senior leadership team (SLT) at Alan Road School, a mixed comprehensive school for chil¬dren aged 11 to 16 in an area of multiple deprivations. It investigated the coaching and mentoring practices of the headteacher (teaching-leader) described by the SLT (learning-leaders). Semi-structured interviews were digitally recorded with the teaching-leader and learning-leaders who worked directly with her. The sample included two additional headteachers (HT); four deputy headteachers (DHT); and two assistant head¬teachers (AHT).

Findings
The findings focused on the removal or reproduction of barriers to women’s leadership—theory of equality; the notion of women’s leadership—theory of differ¬ence; the feminist construction of leadership that uses power to work with to empower; and leadership het¬eroglossia as a conception of engagement with multiple gendered leadership discourses.

Results
The findings pro¬mote leadership heteroglossia, which recognizes that school leaders can engage in values-based leadership that draws on critical leadership scholarship and permits the negotiation of meaning in the gendered leadership discourse. Women aspiring to headship were portrayed as a homogenous group with an aversion to providing childcare and keen to return to work following maternity leave. While some women benefitted from additional leadership development opportunities that enabled them to imagine themselves into promoted posts (Wenger, 1998), barriers were created for others.

Significance
Gender monoglossia and heteroglossia have opened up a new way to consider educational leadership. Engage¬ment with the dominant neoliberal educational policy discourse and its emphasis on managerialist processes of inspection and performance management constitutes leadership monoglossia. Such leadership reduces people to numbers or grades. Noncompliance may have serious consequences, while collusion might secure some auton¬omy (in England “outstanding” schools may be inspected less frequently; post-2010 academies will be freed from the constraints of the National Curriculum). By contrast, leadership heteroglossia recognizes that school lead¬ers might also engage in values-based leadership that draws on critical leadership scholarship. They might negotiate multiple leadership discourses.

Author

• Kay Fuller, University of Birmingham