Changing the deafening silence of indigenous women's voices in educational leadership
| Date | 01 February 2003 |
| Pages | 9-23 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578230310457402 |
| Published date | 01 February 2003 |
| Author | Tanya Fitzgerald |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Changing the deafening silence
of indigenous women’s voices
in educational leadership
Tanya Fitzgerald
School of Education, UNITEC Institute of Technology,
Auckland, New Zealand
Keywords Gender, Education, Leadership, Women
Abstract The critique of western ethnocentric notions of leadership presented in this paper is
informed by debates on issues such as gender and educational leadership that have produced meta-
narratives that explore and explain women and men’s ways of leading. One of the troubling aspects
of western leadership theories is the claim that the functions and features of leadership can be
transported and legitimated across homogenous educational systems. Despite changes that have
been made in definitions and descriptions of educational leadership to provide a focus on gender,
there is the implicit assumption that while educational leadership might be practised differently
according to gender, there is a failure to consider the values and practices of indigenous
educational leaders. Thus, the construct of educational leadership needs to be more broadly
theorised in order for knowledge of indigenous ways of leading to emerge.
Introduction
There are now considerable theoretical and empirical studies on women and
educational leadership that have emerged predominantly from the USA (Chase,
1995; Grogan, 1996; Shakeshaft 1987), Britain (Adler et al., 1993; Coleman, 2001;
Ozga, 1993), Australia (Blackmore, 1999; Limerick and Lingard, 1995) and New
Zealand (Court, 1995, 1998; Strachan, 1999). These studies have fundamentally
contested claims such as those expounded by two of the “fathers” of
educational administration theory, Hodgkinson (1991) and Sergiovanni (1992)
that top-down “visionary” leadership is possible and permissible and that
issues of social class, gender, race and ethnicity are unproblematic. In their
critique, feminist authors have argued that the primacy of positional and
proprietorial leadership is a contested domain and that there can be no unitary
explanation of what it means to exercise educational leadership. While the
literature on educational leadership is expansive, conclusions that theorists
posit pinpoint their concern with determining and defining the nature of
educational leadership. Just who might be leaders and how circumstances of
social class, location, ethnicity and cultural world view might underpin their
work and identity is not fully discussed and disclosed. Essentially while these
discourses of “masculinity, rationality and leadership” (Blackmore, 1999, p. 4)
and the search for a normative theory of leadership (Duke, 1998) remain
gendered, they also remain raced. That is, considerations of race and ethnicity
The Emerald Research Register for this journal is available at The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/researchregister http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-8234.htm
Indigenous
women’s voices
9
Received January 2002
Revised June 2002
Accepted August 2002
Journal of Educational
Administration
Vol. 41 No. 1, 2003
pp. 9-23
qMCB UP Limited
0957-8234
DOI 10.1108/09578230310457402
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