Not for Women Only: How Feminist Frameworks Will Alter Leadership

• In Event: 18.059 - MTCC Roundtable Session Three
  In Roundtable Session: 18.059-7 - Examination of Women Leaders: Frameworks and Experiences

Abstract

Feminist insights offer ways to rethink and restructure schooling to fit with realities faced by educators, students, and families. This paper shows how those insights would be seen as “looking awry” and would be assessed as inadequate and inappropriate for leaders. It also shows how dominant managerial policy discourses are undermining leaders who would raise such issues and for women ascending into leadership. Efficiency and effectiveness justifications have overpowered equity discourses, along with discourses raising feminist issues. After presenting the range of feminisms, the paper charts their implications for school leaders who will be able, then, to identify the values, structures, and power arrangements to be questioned and altered.

Authors

• Catherine Marshall, University of North Carolina

• Torrie Kincaid Edwards, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill