1st Edition
Intersectionality and Leading Social Change in Education Professional Learning to Transform Self, Others, and the Field
This book explores a social change and transformational approach to leadership. As educational leaders are increasingly serving a changing demographic of students and also address persistent challenges and heightened tension around race and equity, it is becoming necessary for educators to approach leadership in new and radical ways.
Designed for aspiring and current leaders, this book highlights stories of courageous educational leaders with intersectional identities who interrogate and reflect on how their intersectionality shaped their leadership. In turn, these stories help readers explore how lived experiences and deeply held values can shape and inform their own leadership. Chapters conclude with a reader’s guide, prompting reflection upon the nuances of each leader’s journey, and thus, facilitating the discourse of marginalized experiences in educational leadership.
This new approach to professional learning helps today’s aspiring principals, aspiring superintendents, and practicing administrators learn how intersectional leadership can help them navigate multiple marginalized spaces and codify new notions of power and success. This volume generates a collection of compelling counter narratives that the field needs to hear.
1. Introduction: Leading Social Change from the Lived Experience of Intersectionality 2. The Warrior Within: A Journey Towards True Self 3. Intersectional Encounters 4. Second Chance 5. Compassionate Leadership as a Biracial Superintendent 6. Latina: Leading While Silencing Imposter Syndrome 7. Leading in the Shadows: Serving the Invisible 8. Getting Out of My Own Way 9. A Critically Self-Reflexive Model for Leader Professional Development: Centering Intersectionality
Biography
Aubrey H. Wang is an award-winning Professor of Education Leadership at Saint Joseph’s University, USA.
Margaret Grogan is Professor Emerita of Education Leadership at Chapman University, USA.
“Wang and Grogan’s book is both vibrant and much needed. With a rich theoretical grounding, the seven leaders highlighted provide a thoughtful, textured, and intersectional view who they are and how they lead. Wang, Grogan, and their seven leaders address a key and persistent need, illuminating what diverse leadership driven by social change looks like and feels like. In the current political context that positions school leaders as either martyrs for their school or incompetent managers, this book is nuanced, authentic, and provides an essential counter-narrative. Wang and Grogan clearly show us how critical leadership praxis is transformative for schools as locations of social change.”
George Theoharis, Professor of Educational Leadership and Inclusive Elementary/Early Childhood Education, Syracuse University, USA
“In Intersectionality and Leadership for Social Change, Wang and Grogan have eloquently curated space for seven dynamic and eloquent educational leaders to share their experiences of intersectional marginality. The result is a novel, innovative resource for the professional development of educational leaders advancing equity in schools and districts. Approached through a Critical Leadership Praxis lens, these powerful stories of 'resilience and the power of identity forged through adversity' (Nguyen) provide readers both sources of inspiration and models for emulation, showing transformation of self and of others as two sides of one coin.”
Martin Scanlan, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Higher Education, Boston College, USA
