Shaping Social Justice Leadership: Insights of Women Educators Worldwide

A highly informative, accessible collection of narratives describing the work, challenges, and satisfactions of women academics — provides both inspiration and sound advice.

Drawn from the voices and experiences of female leaders across different cultures, Shaping Social Justice Leadership is a must read for anyone interested in leadership and education for social justice. Hearing the personal stories of resilient, courageous women provides opportunity for all of us to reflect on past experiences as well as renew the energy and commitment necessary to overcome injustice in both personal and global settings. Read it and you will be inspired!

Shaping Social Justice Leadership wonderfully depicts the realities — triumphs and struggles — of women educational leaders in their pursuits of equity and justice. The powerful and moving use of narrative provides an important resource for educational leaders. Readers will come away with a better understanding of essential aspects to advancing issues of justice.

Socially just leadership as everyday practice is at the heart of these twenty-three narratives of women researchers and leaders in Shaping Social Justice Leadership: Insights of Women Educators Worldwide. These stories from fourteen countries illustrate how cultural context intersects with gender, race, ethnicity, and class to frame personal leadership possibilities, while exemplifying how social justice values can be embedded in everyday actions and relationships. This text, the work of the Women Leading Education network, takes up the cause of trans-national feminism, with all its differences, to necessarily focus again on the uses and abuses of power, promote human rights, and condemn violence and discrimination against women and girls. Educational leadership, enacted with a moral purpose, remains central. It is a text that provides hope as well as ways of leading for more equitable social, economic and political change within a globalized context of intensified insecurity.

Stories have always been important. Through stories we learn about the experience of others, but also about ourselves and our society. We draw meaning and inspiration from them. The individual stories in this volume speak to us across nations, across race and culture of the struggles and achievements of women who serve education. This book will be a long-term resource from which we can draw ideas and moral courage to continue the fight for equality for women. The book is a testament both to how far we have yet to go and how much possibility there is to move along the road.

This book breaks new ground in studies on education and social justice by bringing together an unprecedented conceptual richness and innovation combined with real-life narrations on the practice of leadership by leading women drawn from across continents and countries. The fact that these stories of leadership are drawn from a deliberate cross-national sample of education leaders breaks the ethnocentrism so evident in the major books and journal articles on leaders, leadership and social justice emanating from the West.

But these are not ‘mere stories;’ each narrative is deeply grounded within theory and data that emerge naturally from the life-experiences of those who lead in difficult contexts and, quite often, against the grain of an androcentrism afflicting scholarship and practice on education leadership that remains susceptible to corporate models of how to lead. The book’s additional value lies in its valuing of complexity; gone are those simplistic and formulaic accounts of ‘ten steps to leadership’ or ‘leadership in thirty minutes.’ You are drawn as reader into the many layers of leadership, its contradictions and contestations, its emotions and politics, its spirituality and the resilience of its women practitioners.