Shifting Leadership: Feminist Distributed Leadership Model

• In Event: 35.020 - Women in Academia: Alternative Narratives and Methodologies Creating Space for Diverse Gendered Perspectives

Abstract

This paper builds on leadership work of Canadian academic and intellectual leaders over the past 25 years, showing ways in which leadership has shifted – or not – as a result of including women’s perspectives and voices. This paper draws on a sustainable distributed leadership model that had been demonstrated in an ongoing Professional Learning Network (Link2Practice project) developed over the last 3 years in a partnership between a school district British Columbia and the local university teacher education program. Using case study methodology, narrative and autoethnography, this paper will collectively share perceptions of the team as project leaders in order to examine our conceptions of sustainable leadership that have supported our own PLN membership and ongoing educational transformation work for ourselves as well as our preservice and inservice teachers. We elucidate the characteristics of sustainable leadership utilizing a feminist, socially just theoretical framework to inform the concept of ‘sustainable leadership’ and draw on complexity theory to describe and provide examples of sustainable leadership through our Link2Practice PLN project that enables the ongoing substantial educational transformation in BC, leadership that continues to support new directions in education.

Drawing on distributed (Bennett, Wise, Woods, & Harvey, 2003) and transformative feminist leadership (Wakefield, 2017), we believe that leadership should demonstrate shared vision through reflecting, learning, and unlearning; empowering and enabling others to act; challenging oppressive norms and power; and encouraging integration of heart, mind, and body. Wakefield (2017) notes that feminist leaders come to understand the needs of their communities and prioritize their needs, engaging them fully for mutual benefit. Distributed leadership aligns with Wakefield’s feminist leadership notions; as Bennett et al. (2003) describe, there are three distinctive elements of distributed leadership: 1) leadership is highlighted as an emergent property of a group or network of interacting individuals, where people work together and pool their initiative and expertise; 2) there is an openness of the boundaries of leadership suggested, widening the conventional net of leaders to include teachers and students; and 3) expertise is varied and distributed across the many, not the few and that numerous distinct germane perspectives and capabilities are found in individuals spread through the organization (p. 6-7).

Author

• Katherine J. Sanford, University of Victoria