Leadership Educator Professional Identity: The Influence and Impact of Competing Discourses

• In Event: Leadership Educator Identities: Exploring the Complexity of Becoming and Being a Leadership Educator

Short Description

What are the dominant discourses in the field of leadership studies that shape leadership educators’ professional identity development? The presenter will raise questions about the influence these identities may have on educators’ capacity to create conditions that support students’ attainment of learning and development outcomes necessary to exercise leadership in challenging moments.

Detailed Abstract

This presentation seeks to illuminate dominant (and competing) discourses of leadership and of learning within the field of leadership studies that shape the professional identity development of leadership educators. I will raise questions about the influence these identities may have on both educators’ capacity to create conditions that support students’ attainment of learning and development outcomes necessary to exercise leadership in turbulent times.

Seemiller and Priest (2015) proposed that expertise and communities of practice are significant influences of leadership educator professional identity development. Wenger (1998) describes membership in a community of practice as participation in shared experiences, shared purposes, and shared discourses that provide a set of relationships and standards of practice that define competence or expertise. The construction of professional identities are an embodiment and enactment of dominant discourses of teacher professionalism, negotiated with social contexts, experience, and relationships (Sachs, 2005; Shultz & Ravich, 2013). Sachs (2005) suggests that identity “provides a framework for teachers to construct their own ideas of “how to be,”, “how to act,” and “how to understand their work and their place in society” (p. 15).

What are the dominant discourses shaping the field? The answer to this is largely contextual – contingent on the dominant theories and practices taught and reinforced within our communities of practice - professional programs in which we were trained, colleges and departments in which we work, and professional experiences and group/relationships to which we belong. What we do know from Jenkins (2014) survey data of leadership educators is that leadership courses were offered primarily through colleges of business or management (18.8%) or academic affairs, college-wide, general education or no affiliated college (12.2% ). Academic departments included leadership, organizational leadership or leadership studies departments (19.6%), or management departments (7.3%). Owen (2012) also reported that the most popular theories in use of participants in the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) were the Social Change Model and Relational Leadership, while the least popular were Adaptive/Chaos Theory and Influence/Charisma.

This is a helpful starting point in terms of understanding the diversity of perspectives our field represents. And, it surfaces deeper questions – such as how do institutional, departmental, and community discourses shape how we see ourselves as educators and our approaches to teaching and learning practice? In a larger sense, where do these discourses come from? How are they reproduced and by who within communities of practice (e.g., associations, experts in the field)? And How might my fit (or mis-fit) impact my professional identity beliefs and journey/development, including access to opportunities and movement through spaces of identity towards “confirmation” and “validation” (Seemiller & Priest, 2015)?

To explore these questions requires a discursive, social constructivist lens. The exploration of leadership educator identity formation through a discursive lens draws attention away from only the acquisition of knowledge and skills, to include the impact of socialization within the profession, with special attention to the ways knowledge produces power. An exploration of leadership educator professional identity through a social constructionist lens offers a critical view of how educators make meaning of theories of leadership and learning, and also how the engagement in leadership learning practices are developed over time and in specific contexts. To the extent that that their meanings and practices reflect intended (or unintended) discourse (including beliefs, values, and knowledge) and increased competence as defined by professional, institutional, and local communities illuminates implications for recruitment into the professional, professional development pathways, and evolution of leadership education practice.

Participant

• Kerry L. Priest, Kansas State University