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Leading the Way: An Introduction

This chapter explores the intersection between our experience of leadership as women in the academy and our work supporting female university students in becoming leaders in early childhood education (ECE). We are two academics working in educational leadership as both a daily practice and as a curriculum that we teach. Inspired by the call for chapters we began a conversation together about leadership in the academy and in early childhood education. We quickly realized how closely these two sectors of education can inform each other and how aligned we were in our leadership philosophy. Situating our work within a narrative method of inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) we coauthored the following conversation. The embodiedness of this kind of methodology also sits within a postfeminist theoretical position (Richardson, 2000). In terms of process, we met up over a series of half days—working in the same room—talking and writing. Once we had formed a coherent narrative, we took turns at critiquing ourselves and crafting the conversation further via email.

Here, we examine the gendered nature of leadership in the academy and in the early childhood sector, exploring our personal and collective narratives of resistance in relation to dominant discourses of leadership. Our conversations reveal some tensions between these discourses, our personal values and experiences of leadership, and contemporary leadership theory. Throughout, we identify a stark contrast between the patriarchy of the academy and the matriarchy of the early childhood education sector, disrupting the received wisdom about what constitutes good leadership.

We begin by exploring our experiences of leadership, and then move to our work in re(cognizing) leadership in ways that make more visible the leadership work of women. In the first part of the chapter, we share two different stories about women being invisible in leadership, both from our own perspectives and with reference to women more generally. In the following part of the chapter, we explore the relationship between contemporary leadership theory and traditional models of leadership. In the third part of the chapter, we explore the importance of re(cognizing) and en(couraging) practices of leadership by women within the academy and in ECE, again sharing edited communications about how we teach and develop leadership with our students. We then draw on the idea of “tempered radicalism” (Meyerson, 2001) to explore how we work as leaders in the academy, while en(couraging) others to be educational leaders in early childhood contexts. Our overall intention is to provoke thinking about ways to re(cognize) and en(courage) women exercising leadership within the organizations they work in.

Twenty-Seven Photos and a Women’s Room

Deidre: I’m walking down the hallway, I can’t say it’s musty, there’s new carpet, bright, freshly whitewashed walls, and other graduate students rushing by, their animated voices discussing educational theories and problems of practice. They are excited to be part of the university, or the “academy” as we sometimes refer to it. Past the photos they and I walk, 27 photos in all, photos of past university presidents—all white men. I walk around the corner to the School of Education seminar room, sit down for the graduate student seminar, and I am surrounded by a further 16 photos—of past and recent Department Chairs. The last one in this series is a woman, a woman in a suit. I experience clear and everpresent messages about leadership in the academy.

Twenty years later, I’m in a different university, still receiving many of the same messages about leadership, but something has changed. The numbers of men in senior positions has changed (though only a little), but mostly it is I who have changed—in how I think about leadership, how I enact it, and how I support others to enact it.

Sandy: When I look back at my time as an early childhood teacher I recall feeling like an imposter: I had teaching qualifications and enjoyed teaching, but I couldn’t find an authentic way to belong. I wish I’d read the literature that is available now about imposters (Fletcher, 2004)—it would have made a difference. There I was, a qualified early childhood teacher at a time when working in child care was generally perceived as a low status occupation. At the same time, most of the workers (as we were called then) were battling for status recognition and the right to become qualified, but I would have been seen in a position of privilege. I obviously didn’t belong–I was an imposter.

But early childhood education went through some major changes during the 1980s and 1990s. What is relevant to our conversation is the significant role played by women in driving that change. Child care had always been very much aligned with an agenda of women and work. At that point, feminist politics came to the fore, as a vocal collective drew attention to women’s rights: the right to affordable quality child care, the right to work and the associated right to financial independence. Early childhood education in New Zealand is built on this strong, collective, women’s voice. The New Zealand early years curriculum is now celebrated throughout the world and I believe credit is largely due to these women in 1980s and 1990s. They focused public attention and exercised strong leadership, capitalizing on a very small window of political opportunity to raise the status of early childhood education in the public eye. We now recognize early childhood as a “sector,” and refer to early childhood teaching as a “profession,” both of which I see clearly stem from the shared voice and collective action of these women.

These days, early childhood teacher education features in major universities throughout New Zealand, 1 but I wonder how well the principles of collaboration, shared voice, and collectivity are manifest in the academy today. As early childhood educators, we didn’t belong in the academy for a long time. We’ve muscled our way in, earned the credentials, and played the game in the belief that we could belong. But it seems to me we have to play the game by white male rules, a game in which women’s voices are easily silenced. Sad irony.

Deidre: Hearing you talk about women in early childhood reminds me of how I often feel like a fraud (McIntosh, 1985). Maybe I am a leader, but at the same time I don’t feel like I fit with much of the public and dominant discourse of what it means to be leader. Fletcher (2004) refers to women feeling like “imposters” in public spaces wherein competitive vertical functions are overvalued and lateral collaborative functions of leadership are undervalued.

I see similar patterns across women’s experience of leadership in the academy and their experience of leadership within the early childhood sector. I find this interesting because these are contrasting workplaces in many ways—the academy, traditionally filled with men; early childhood education, traditionally filled with women. However, challenges for women in leadership continue to exist in both these places. So the issue is more than who fills these spaces, and who works in these areas. The patterns I see are of the invisibility of much of women’s leadership work, of leadership as male positional authority when in fact much of the life of these organizations is considerably influenced by women.

Sandy: I sometimes see myself not quite invisible, but somewhat furtive—surreptitious even—keeping up the appearance of complying with hardened patriarchal limits while promoting emergent and organic models of leadership. That is, I pretty much work within a top-down leadership model, but I espouse a ground-up approach. In EC, Carmen Dalli (2008) talks about the importance of a ground-up approach that reflects teachers’ experiences. This suggests ideas of distributed leadership, collaboration, reflection, and acknowledgment of the emotional work that teachers are involved in. Both Fletcher (2004) and Myerson (2001) write about women being the social glue who frequently do the relational work involved in effective leadership, but in such a way that it remains invisible. I often wonder how we can make spaces for women’s leadership work to be recognized and to flourish.

…I am counting up the faces in the photos you describe, Deidre. 27 university presidents… 16 Department Chairs… only one woman!

Deidre: Indeed, as women, we face leadership challenges in these different contexts, both in terms of our own leadership roles and in our work developing the leadership capability of other women. While data vary between countries, the overall picture across universities worldwide is that women hold less than 50 % of academic positions. On top of this they hold only around 15–20 % of the senior academic positions (Grove, 2013). Interestingly, here at the University of Auckland women hold close to half (45 %) of academic positions, which is encouraging to see; however, women still remain at 29 % of senior positions (Te Ara Tautika, 2014).

Challenges also exist for women’s leadership in the early childhood sector: “Many early childhood teachers fear or avoid discussions about leadership due to misconceptions about what leadership entails. These misconceptions challenge teachers’ ability to recognize, understand and engage in leadership as part of their everyday practice” (Cooper, 2014). Traditionally, leadership has been associated with one particular person in a position of formal authority, a model of leadership described by Fletcher (2003) and others as “heroic.” It seems that dominant narratives of leadership often view it this way, with the model of positional leader/s “in charge” purporting to represent leadership in its entirety. Yet the reality is that leadership takes different forms, a multiplicity explicit in postheroic notions of leadership, but not often evident in the way people talk about their own leadership practices. Postheroic leadership “re-envisions the what of leadership by articulating leadership as a social process that occurs in and through human interactions and it articulates the how of leadership by focusing on the more mutual, less hierarchical leadership practices and skills needed to engage in collaborative, collective learning” (Fletcher, 2004, p. 6).

Sandy: Yes, that’s the kind of leadership we need in early childhood, but the situation has become more complex than that. It is a new profession heavily enframed in a managerial and audit culture. Christine Woodrow (2008) suggests that early childhood is increasingly controlled through a regime of auditing, and this, along with the commodification of early childhood services, works against the realization of a strong professional identity. Seen in this way, professional issues and concerns that face emerging teachers make it difficult for teachers to recognize that they are leaders, let alone practice leadership. Put these complexities together with the politics of gender and you have a potent disablement.

Our roles in the academy are not immune either. Ulrika Haake (2009) talks about the way men tend to express leadership as restricted, nonpersonal, positive, and easy to handle; whereas women tend to talk about leadership as extensive, personal, problematic and gender-related (p. 300). Haake’s longitudinal study of identity and new leaders in the academy didn’t set out to look at gender; that is, no questions were asked about gender and there was no expectation that gender would be part of the identity development of academic leaders. At the beginning of the study, novice leaders didn’t consider gender. However, as the study progressed, an explicit gendered discourse emerged. Of further concern is Haake’s argument that the New Public Management “wave of academia may be reinforcing a leadership agenda that is suited to and made explicitly for men” (ibid, p. 301). As Fletcher points out “gender schema are powerful filters that influence how behavior is understood and interpreted” (Fletcher, 2004, p. 658).

Deidre: Given these gendered norms of leadership that pervade the academy, early childhood education and other spheres of life, it is not surprising that as women we question our roles in leadership, and that I and other women I talk with sometimes have difficulty recognizing ourselves as a leaders.

I flick through the top shelf of the scores of books in the airport bookshelf

“Leading from the top”

“How to win conversations and convince others”

“The seven, twelve, fourteen (however many) definitive steps to successful leadership”

But these titles do not fit easily with me

Do not fit at all

They are men (and women) in business suits

Straight teeth, shining eyes

Highly visible positional leaders

I leave the books on the shelf

These long-established norms disturb my sense of identity as a woman, an academic, and a teacher of leaders.

From Heroic to Postheroic Leadership

Sandy: It seems to me that gender and leadership in both the academy and in the early childhood sector share some common concerns. Over the last few decades, there has been a steady flow of development in research and literature on women in leadership. So, although there is some movement in the discourse, it is not yet clear how we might ensure these new understandings of leadership become more visible on the airport bookshops and in the photos displayed.

Deidre: Yes, there has been a shift in the rhetoric and theory describing leadership and organizations, away from a single person appointed to a position of formal authority, toward an increased understanding that leadership transcends formal positions. We now tend to have an image of organizations as living, dynamic systems made up of interconnected hubs of influence. However, while heroic theories of leadership have been replaced by understandings of organizations as complex webs of influence with collective responsibility for leadership (Spillane, Halverson, & Diamond, 2004), the 27 photos on the wall have not been replaced. Our personal sense, and the ways our students tend to view and define leadership, seems to have been lagging behind, perhaps reinforced by the way these and other images of heroic leadership confront us on a daily basis. However, the heroic leader is not an accurate representation. Rather, a great deal of leadership in organizations is done by those without a formal leadership designation.

Sandy: In early childhood, a number of us espouse a critical ecological approach to leadership. I mentioned before Dalli’s “ground up” model of leadership that recognizes the everyday realities of teachers as they reflect on their work in the community. The approach recognizes the contribution made by all teachers, and by children and families, so it is, I believe, a postheroic model. It is also inspiring in that it draws on dialogical communication and an ethic of care, and emphasizes putting others first. I have argued elsewhere (Farquhar, 2008) that it seems the early childhood sector has distanced itself from its historical role of advocacy and has become subsumed within a culture of regulatory requirements. We have moved away from the second-wave feminist politics—the strong collective of early childhood sector/curriculum pioneers. We have lost something, but I am heartened by Carmen Dalli’s call to bring about a “new critical ecology” to deal with “vulnerabilities” of our conditions (Dalli, 2010, p. 67). She argues that “Strength is also required to turn visions into organised strategies; learning from the history of the sector in the 1990s, collaboration and coordination are both essential requirements of a critical ecology, and advocacy and leadership go hand in hand” (ibid, p, 71). Although she was talking about the lives and work of teachers in centers, there is some resonance here for us in higher education too. Models like these are more inclusive of women in leadership, especially those who prefer to work as what I call quiet leaders—the leaders that Myerson talks about, who “pave alternative roads just by quietly speaking up for their personal truths or by refusing to silence aspects of themselves” (p. 5).

Deidre: Thinking about the quiet leader in a more inclusive model of leadership is an important shift. Over the past decade, scholars have drawn attention to the problems of power and privilege being reproduced through traditional models of leadership that are biased toward individualism and universalism. Many have observed that leaders rarely act alone, that leadership work is collaborative and that leaders often proceed in ambiguity, “in circumstances of ‘not knowing’” (Sinclair, 2014, p. 29).

Sandy: I wonder how long it will take for the books at the airport bookstore to better reflect these more nuanced understandings of the complexity of organizations and leadership?

Deidre: I wonder also, because current heroic images of leadership hide an important aspect of the leadership activities of others (Fletcher, 2004). Leadership typically involves many people. I like the image Peggy McIntosh (1985) uses of an iceberg—the individual achievement of a positional leader is the visible part of the iceberg. However, understanding what happens beneath the waterline is essential to understanding the complex network of leadership and influence in an organization. Heroic concepts of leadership represent the tip of the iceberg. In contrast, postheroic concepts of leadership provide a significant focus on the relationships, practices, and skills that lie beneath the water enabling the iceberg to exist. This perspective acknowledges and takes account of the work of all the individuals who contribute to leadership practice (Harris, 2011). As Fletcher (2004) suggests, post heroic leadership recognizes a social process that is dynamic, multi-directional, and a collective activity. Fletcher maintains that human interaction is key and that leadership occurs through relationships and networks of influence. I think the dominant narrative of leadership in the academy is very much framed as the tip of the iceberg, with what lies beneath remaining somewhat invisible.

Sandy: … when I went to school, science books would inform us that 90 % of the iceberg remains hidden underwater, so within this metaphor the visible bits of leadership are a mere 10 % of what really goes on. If it wasn’t for us—the invisibles, perhaps the heroes would be skating on thin ice … But, back to more serious matters…there is considerable dissonance around leadership in higher education with differing expectations between management and academics, contradictions between policies and practices, and poor delineation of responsibilities (Saltmarsh, Sutherland-Smith, & Randell-Moon, 2011). Although there may be some new thinking around leadership, the old rhetoric still remains. As Fletcher (2004) points out: “the everyday narrative about leadership and leadership practices—the stories people tell about leadership, the mythical legends that get passed on as exemplars of leadership behavior—remains stuck in old images of heroic individualism”(p. 652).

Re(cognizing) Leadership with Early Childhood Educators

Deidre: I think this is why we need to re(cognize) leadership. We’ve discussed the challenges inherent in trying to recognize the leadership practice of early childhood educators within the constraints of dominant narratives of heroic leadership. The challenges point us toward postheroic theories of leadership as potentially helpful. However, this requires intentionally interrupting (Katz & Dack, 2012) many of the understandings we currently hold of leadership. One way of thinking about interrupting or changing problematic theories and beliefs is re(cognizing) them. We use the term re(cognize) to represent the work of identifying and evaluating one’s currently held theories and beliefs and to change these. In this context, to change them to be more aligned with current leadership theories and to be less dominated by the dominant narratives of heroic leadership that still lurk.

In my work with early childhood educators, I prioritize re(cognizing) leadership to a model beyond dominant narratives of the heroic model. This is not to dismiss in any way the importance of positional leaders or the significance of many hierarchical positional leadership roles; but rather, to provide a more complete picture of leadership that more accurately represents the reality of webs of leadership influence within and across organizations. In other words, to recognize that postheroic leadership perhaps better describes the nature of leadership in many organizations. There is a complex interplay between distributed leadership practices and positional leadership that provides direction and influence.

Sandy: I find it frustrating to hear the same public misconceptions about being an early childhood teacher that I heard when I was a student teacher in the early 1980s. Students report comments made to them, such as: “Do you really need a degree to change a diaper?” and “how come you don’t want to be a real teacher?” It is important to me that early childhood educators leave university with a strong sense of themselves and their profession, in particular, the confidence to lead change in public attitudes. So even at this early stage in their careers—before they have even begun their first year as qualified teachers—they have to become part of a movement to change social perception.

Advocacy is an important part of a teacher’s role and something that can be en(couraged) (Kolb, 1992). In the university courses I teach, through various strategies (e.g., small-group and one-to-one conversations, reflective writing tasks), I ask students to examine their own histories, to identify why they wanted to become an early childhood teacher, and to reflect on their years of study—this is self-inquiry and reflective practice work. Then they work in pairs and/or small groups to explore experiences and emotions—a more dialogical mode of inquiry. Students bring their own resources and I present various resources and publications for them to respond to. We then move on to role plays in which students create scenarios based on experiences. They also have to answer like: “How do you respond (and how would you like to respond) when someone puts down your profession?” Students provide concrete examples, share strategies together and then write them down or rehearse them. This sometimes elicits emotional responses and triggers reactions stimulated by power and gender issues. I wonder to what degree these issues are overlooked in the day-to-day practices when they start teaching. Nevertheless, I hope students can convert their personal experiences of this academic environment into wider personal and political activism. Leadership can and should involve addressing issues of gender and power. In fact, it is in dealing with power and gender issues that leaders often face their strongest challenges. Further, early childhood educators are intimately involved with the lives of young children/families, which suggests to me that as leaders, they also need to include in their repertoire an engagement with the intimate and emotional content of their lives.

Deidre: One way I have worked with early childhood educators in seeking to bring about change in the way they view and enact leadership is through the use of autobiography as a pedagogical tool. Autobiography involves the telling of stories of oneself (Rossiter & Clark, 2007). Autobiography is understood to function as a universal narrative structure through which people make meaning of their own and others’ lives and actions (Bruner, 1987). Re(cognizing) the dominant personal narratives about what leadership means is therefore crucial if we want to bring about change in educational leadership. Engaging early childhood educators in creating and analyzing their personal leadership autobiographies involves them in telling the stories of themselves as a leader in life within and beyond responsibilities as an early childhood educator. I ask for example: Who are you as a leader? How do you see yourself as a leader in other parts of your life? What is it that makes you a leader? What do you do? What impact does this have on others? What are the challenges for you? The autobiographical stories that this generates are the stories we choose to tell ourselves about what leadership means. These are significant because the stories we tell ourselves are the stories we often become: “to be a person is to have a story. More than that, it is to be a story” (Kenyon & Randall, 1997, p. 1). Thus, the stories we tell ourselves of leadership have a significant role in shaping the leadership we engage in.

After creating their own autobiographies, the early childhood educators analyze their autobiographies in an effort to identify underlying values and beliefs about leadership practice. I have found this approach to be effective in bringing about change for these educators because “people tend to stick with particular narratives that can unintentionally function to constrain their choice of future actions” (Le Fevre, 2011, p. 780). Engaging in autobiographical work makes visible some of these stories and provides opportunity for critique and change.

My work engaging the early childhood educators in re(cognizing) leadership practice in their work contexts requires explicitly critiquing current narratives of leadership (such as 27 photos and the women’s room) and drawing on their own experiences (autobiographies) to reconceptualize what leadership means. This also involves conversations focused on questions such as: Who does leadership in your organization? This tends to lead to conversations about what is regarded as leadership and what is not, identifying the invisible work such as the relational work in organizations (Fletcher, 1999).

Re(cognizing) leadership demands valuing the invisible. For example, what has been labeled a caring and relational voice and often remains the important but invisible work in organizations (Fletcher, 1999), and has been labeled the work of those who lack status and position (MacKinnon, 1982). Kolb maintains that “internal peacemaking is an informal activity that is part of the daily workings of the organization” (p. 66) but one that is essential to its work. Despite the importance of relational work to effective leadership in organizations, women who are the main protagonists of this work often tend to remain invisible (Fletcher, 1999).

En(couraging) Leadership: The Tempered Radical

Sandy: I see that part of our role in supporting early childhood educators to be effective leaders is helping them to re(cognize) what leadership means and to be aware of and engaged with different leadership practices within their organization. Another important part of this is en(couraging) them to engage in actual leadership in an effort to bring about change for improvement. This demands understanding both the skills and the attributes they currently have in leadership and the places they need further development for them to be effective. Obviously, this is not as simple as it sounds; after all, leadership takes courage.

Deidre: This reminds me of Debra Myerson’s idea of “tempered radicals” (Meyerson, 2001) as this provides a way for us to explore some of the leadership tensions we navigate. Myerson describes tempered radicals as “people who operate on a fault line. They are organizational insiders who contribute and succeed in their jobs. At the same time, they are treated as outsiders because they represent ideals or agendas that are somehow at odds with the dominant culture” (p. 5).

Sandy: Aah, the imposter again! Yes, tempered radical does sound a lot like us: torn between conformity and rebellion, not extremists, working within systems rather than against them, and at a crucial point feeling ambivalent toward our organization (Meyerson, 2001). When I hear the word “tempered,” a few images come to mind: temper may refer to one’s disposition (i.e., sweet tempered/bad tempered); “to temper something” is to dilute or moderate a situation in some way. But the temper that appeals most in our discussion of leadership is the reference to a particular mode of tuning keyboards (Bach’s well-tempered clavier) to facilitate more pleasant harmonics throughout various key changes—a metaphor for resonance and flexibility.

Deidre: Being a tempered radical is challenging. It demands both being able to work within the existing workplace organizational values and structures while also working to change these. The result of this is that women who are tempered radicals “face two primary sets of challenges: those related to the preservation of their ‘selves’ and those that involve advancing an agenda for change from within” (Meyerson, 2001, p. 11).

Sandy: Yes, as part of that agenda for change from within we need to be emphasizing the importance of facilitating and encouraging our colleagues as leaders. I am hopeful that it is a particularly useful counternarrative to that of the managerial (heroic) narrative that dominates both university and early childhood education. Tempered radicalism would promote acts of collegiality rather than competition and is a helpful way of en(couraging) leadership to work for change. It resonates with wider ideals of social justice in education, and in the context of ECE leadership the importance of a strong sense of identity and advocacy for children and families. Becoming a teacher and a leader necessarily involves developing an understanding of one’s self as a leader.

Deidre and Sandy Concluding Reflection

The kind of dialogical teaching methods we use in our work as leaders relies on the idea of conversation as a powerful resource for teachers and leaders alike. Conversation is the form that this chapter has taken: numerous and various ways of talking with each other, revising and reviewing as we go. It seems that much of the leadership work of women currently remains invisible and women are not recognizing themselves as leaders within their organizations. Invoking Dalli’s ground-up approach and critical ecologies, along with Meyerson’s idea of the tempered radical, provides a springboard for what we consider to be a more creative ethic of leadership practice (Gibbons & Farquhar, 2013). We are interested in how we, as tempered radicals, can facilitate a ground-up approach within our own organizations.

We are hopeful that our work in re(cognizing) and broadening concepts of leadership in early childhood education can make important practices of leadership visible. Meyerson (2001) captures the possible nature of this change in her comment “organizations are always changing, continually adapting in response to an ongoing flow of inputs and activities. Since most changes are small, with incremental adaptation scattered throughout organizations, it may be difficult to recognize this movement as change, except retrospectively as effects accumulate. In addition, because this process is diffuse, specific causes of change are often difficult to pinpoint” (Meyerson, 2001, pp. 11–12). Because much of the leadership practice operates below the tip of the iceberg, much leadership practice remains invisible as long as we are distracted by the highly visible signs of heroic leadership. Our conversation and the work we do with early childhood educators, however, indicate to us that intentionally interrupting the dominant narrative of leadership that focuses on the tip of the iceberg can lead to new understandings and practices of leadership, in both the academy and the early childhood education sector.

Leadership for change is not just about “those characterized by bold visions and strategic savvy,” but is “also characterized by patience, persistence, and resourcefulness” (Meyerson, 2001, p. 13). Engaging in this work has revealed to us that our personal narratives of leadership in the academy and the early childhood education sector contrast with popular notions of what it means to be a leader. As we explore our joint narratives of resistance, we are left anticipating possibilities for the idea of “tempered radicals” in supporting us to both re(cognize) leadership and to en(courage) those we work with to be educational leaders.

Note

  1. 1.

    As in many other first world countries, early childhood education has experienced rapid change and development with the NZ government recognizing the importance of professionalizing the sector as part of a wider economic plan. Now an increasingly important part of the education sector, early childhood education still struggles with low status in public perception although there is increasing positive recognition.