Lens 1: Research Specific to Race and Gender Equity

• In Event: Whose Truth Is Heard? Women School Leaders Across Continents

Abstract

The four scholars in this group have concentrated their work specifically on race and gender equity issues and leadership experiences for women of color. Their research, methodology, and socio-cultural perspectives inform their responses in this symposium.

Black Women Headteachers of the Windrush Generation. Black British Feminism and Black Feminist Thought are used as theoretical frameworks to analyze the lived experiences and leadership practices of three UK Black women leaders -- Yvonne Conolly Betty Campbell, and Gertrude Paul —who were the first Black headteachers in their respective cities and members of the Windrush generation, a significant wave of African Caribbean immigrants who arrived in Britain between the 1940s to the late 1960s. Biographical portraits were developed through a variety of archival sources as well as oral history accounts (from the women themselves or their family and colleagues) that explore their self-defined leadership stance and everyday acts of resistance in their schools and the wider community. Positioned as “outsiders within” an often-hostile British educational environment, these women leaders had to contend with the White gaze of the British media and White male colleagues who often questioned their educational qualifications and leadership competency.

Splitting Open the World: Women Educational Leaders in Service of Antiracism, This study explores what we can learn from women who combine their female ontologies and epistemologies with lived experiences (of themselves and others) toward improving racial equity outcomes in their educational communities. Women’s ways of knowing share similarities with antiracist pedagogies as they focus on transformative, collectivist, and collaborative approaches. Five American women educational leaders, who identify as being or becoming antiracist leaders, engaged in three cycles of participatory action research and critical ethnography. As they investigate their ways of knowing and leading, the study is designed to protect and amplify women’s voices in the conversation about how to transform schools and districts for racial equity. The findings inform how we can support, validate, and learn from women educational antiracist leaders who draw on their lived experiences with equity to promote positive, antiracist social change.

Women in Educational Leadership Across Three Countries and Contexts: Reifying Socio-cultural Capital. Across many time zones, three continents, and three countries, by engaging with many languages, religions, classes, and cultural contexts in an active war zone, a post-genocidal society, and a nation struggling to support the human rights of asylum-seekers and indigenous persons amidst an undercurrent of xenophobia, this researcher used multiple methods to conduct investigations, beginning in 2007, that seek to interrogate the progress, successes, and challenges that women in educational leadership face in the 21st century. This presentation offers three, principal lenses for viewing the work. First, an examination of the similarities and differences that women leaders of Afghanistan, Costa Rica, and Rwanda confront. Second, the development of an emerging theoretical perspective that seeks to understand the intersection of gender and its impact on leading in educational settings internationally. Third, a model for leaders and policymakers of civil society and education to authentically reify women’s ways of leading.

Authors

• Laurie Joy Johnson, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Elizabeth C. Reilly, California State University - Channel Islands
  Presenting Author

• Nicole A. Pierce-Davis, East Carolina University
  Presenting Author