Gleaning Truth From Intersectional Leadership: A Composite Counterstory of Black Women Educational Leaders' Resilience Work

• In Event: Beyond the White Gaze: Centering Black Perspectives on Social Justice in Education

Abstract

In this paper presentation, the researcher analyzes the work of Black women higher education administrators who center their identity as they further the cause of securing and sustaining equitable access to education through their leadership of Colleges/Schools of Education (CSE) and higher education institutions. Examining through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991), which is inclusively "a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool" (Carbado, Crenshaw, Mays, & Tomlinson, 2013, p. 303), the researcher uses the resultant analysis of Black women’s leadership in the teaching and training of aspirant educational professionals to proffer practices that demonstrate the operationalization of intersectional leadership (Author, 2020). Findings from interviews in this study, which center the leadership of four Black women Deans of CSEs, and a President of a higher education institution, reveal and uphold that Black women: (a) prioritize equity in their leadership and scholarship; (b) engage in peer mentorship and networking with Black women as a form of care, liberation, and resistance; and (c) extend their practices as models of leadership that genuinely mirror the brilliance and marginalization of students and communities of color. Findings collectively corroborate the definition of intersectional leadership: the operationalization of visionary strategies that privilege the experiences of followers who live the realities of more than one historically oppressive identifier. Findings also have implications for theoretical and practical understanding of the ways that Black women's leadership is a model for moving beyond the "White gaze" (Morrison, 1998) through their purposeful development of support and resources for communities of color.
As Black women are only 4%, 3%, and 2% of assistant, associate, and full professors, respectively, this investigation privileges the strategies that those in educational leadership positions use to empathetically align their scholarship, administration, and teaching with the racialized and gendered realities they know their students, and the students they will teach and lead, face. Black women’s ongoing intention to invent themselves from a place of intersectionality that academic spaces never intended to accept, acknowledge, or embolden (Horsford & Tillman, 2012) is a commitment that beckons the historicity of their resilience, activism, and advocacy. Through their leadership in professional educator preparation spaces, Black women are able to expand the understanding of future teachers, administrator aspirants, and those who research them, beyond one-sided perspectives, to acknowledge the multiplicative and nuanced aspects affecting communities of color.

Author

• Angel Miles Nash, Chapman University