Listening as Methodological Resistance: Hearing Stories at the Margins of Educational Leadership

• In Event: The Mess of Educational Leadership: Embracing Transdisciplinary Approaches to Gender, Sexuality, Race, and Class in Educational Leadership

Abstract

In her groundbreaking 1982 book, In a Different Voice, feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan charted a new course for where women were placed within the psychological landscape. She recognized that the socialization process that girls went through in adolescence disconnected their minds from their bodies in order to preserve intimate relationships (Gilligan, 1982). Her work continued to build from her studies on adolescent girls, as well as women in crisis, all along, her ear still attuned to the ways that women articulated moral decisions and their responsibilities to those who they were in relationship with. Gilligan’s work went against the foundational work in her field of psychology, where the basis through which everything was studied was centered on men’s experiences. The Listening Guide also acknowledges that multiplicity of self is authentic. Individuals tend to speak in more than one voice at a given time, depending on their context and the culture in which they exist. One can think of this as being like a borderland (Anzaldua, 1987) where different pieces of our identity converge, some taking on greater importance based on context. Gender, race, and sexual identities exist in relationship to one another within everyone, and the contextual nature of how these identities cause us to behave or influence how we are perceived can be heard using this method. The messiness of identity (Manalansan, 2014) is allowed to come to the surface, resisting binaries and hierarchy in categorization (Gilligan, 2015). Listening meets at the intersection of method and praxis, and voice enables researchers to hear the stories at the margins of educational leadership.

Author

• Sarah Odell, The Hewitt School
  Presenting Author