Female educational leadership: the politics of working and leading in disadvantaged communities

• In Event: Gender and social transformation

Proposal

South Africa’s struggle against racial discrimination has received international exposure. Focus on gender disenfranchisement was, however, eclipsed by the struggle for racial redress. In the current climate of redress, post-Apartheid South Africa has pledged an unequivocal commitment to the promotion of a unitary, non-sexist, non-racist education system. Several enabling national policies have been legislated to promote equity and access to those previously excluded by virtue of race and gender from participating and assuming leadership roles in key public domains. Despite women’s exclusion from other areas of public social engagement, teaching has remained a women-dominated profession. The affirmative action move, in South Africa, to appoint women to school leadership posts necessitates educating women to unlearn the myths about their lack of abilities and capabilities to ensure that they assume school leadership roles confidently and competently. Assuming leadership in educational contexts ravaged by the scourge of HIV/AIDS, poverty, gender violence, and other social maladies calls for extraordinary leadership skills among women educators. This article is based on a larger project conducted under the auspices of South African Netherlands Partnership for Alternative Development (SANPAD) study. The project focusses on women leading in disadvantaged school communities. The article explores the following research questions:
1. What are some of the theories, images and metaphors of leadership that have defined the field of educational leadership?
2. How has critical feminist scholarship reconfigured the field of educational leadership studies?
3. How can female leadership be harnessed to intervene in curriculum leadership that responds to the social challenges of evaded curricular such as HIV/AIDS, sexual health, transactional sex, etc. among students and staff.

Authors

• Janine Joan Le Roux, University of Johannesburg

• Juliet Christine Perumal, University of Johannesburg