A systematic review of literature of women in educational leadership in South Africa

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday VI)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Women's educational narratives as students, parents, teachers and leaders

Proposal

Despite education being a female-dominated profession, political, cultural and social arrangements have routinely excluded women from assuming leadership roles. This has resulted in the under-representation of women in educational leadership positions. The indictment against the field of educational leadership as being masculinist is evident in the proliferation of academic publications that capture the experiences and accomplishments of male leaders. Women's participation in educational leadership is conspicuous by its absence. Where women have managed to break the glass ceiling of educational leadership - their narratives tend to shed light on Western women's experiences. The political, cultural and structural experiences as they relate to African women remains un/under-researched. In the current climate of redress in South Africa, and given the wider calls for decolonization and Pan Africanism, the need to explore women in educational leadership from an African perspective is ripe.
Against this background, there is a need to re-distribute the educational leadership narrative to ensure that the experiences, expertise and sensibilities of South African female educational leaders are not mapped on the blind spots of the discourse. Their perceptions, experiences and leadership styles and strategies need ventilation, recognition, and critical analyses to formulate a distinctly critical African educational leadership praxis.
Given the un/under-representation of women in educational leadership, and the urgency to distribute the educational leadership narrative field from an African feminist perspective - this study reports on a Systematic Review of Literature (SRL) of women in educational leadership in South Africa. To the best of our knowledge, a systematic review of literature into women in educational leadership in South Africa does not exist. Using a topographical review, the study maps the ‘dominant features of the terrain’ with respect to a specific corpus of literature (Hallinger and Bryant, 2013). According to Hallinger (2017) topographical reviews are appropriate for emerging literatures that do not have the critical mass of substantive findings necessary to conduct meta-analytic research syntheses. Such reviews aim at highlighting patterns of knowledge production, summarizing conceptual and methodological trends, and laying the foundation for future research. Thus, the SRL attempts to guide scholars about prospective future research and highlight areas where capacity development is needed. The SRL describes trends with respect to the volume of journal publications, national sources, research designs, methods, topics, authors and citation impact. These reviews will assist in the codification of the current state of the field (what we know); an assessment of our existing knowledge about the field (what we think we know); and gaps, silences, erasures, blind spots (what we do not yet know) about the practice of women in educational leadership and management in South Africa. The review describes salient and recurrent features of the knowledge base about South African women in educational leadership. The SRL was guided by following research questions (ibid, 2017); as well as the 2009 Preferred Exporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA):
1. what is the volume of the knowledge base of women in educational leadership in South Africa that have been published in English-language journals and how has the pattern of publication volume changed over time?

2. how is the knowledge production distributed across scholarly journals and authors?

3. what is the nature of the literature on women in educational leadership when analyzed by research topics, methods, and citation patterns?
The Systematic Review of Literature (SRL) on women leading education in South Africa will contribute towards excavating and synthesizing the corpus of literature in a field of study that has rendered invisible women's participation in educational leadership. The SRL heeds the call to decolonize the educational leadership discourse from masculinist, patriarchal, colonial and apartheid sensibilities, and re-distribute the field to showcase the educational leadership contributions of women - in South Africa.

Authors

• Juliet Christine Perumal, University of Johannesburg

• Graeme Edwards, University of Johannesburg