‘The voice inside herself’: transforming gendered academic identities in educational administration

Abstract

This paper traces the academic identity formation(s) of 10 Canadian female academics whose disciplinary knowledge is in the field of educational administration. We trace the ways in which discourses of gender, institutional power, and other cultural and social influences shaped their sense of themselves as academics in the highly patriarchal domain of the academy as an institution as well as within the discourse(s) of educational administration in faculties of education. In doing so, we discuss the ways in which these women's entry into academia transformed identity possibilities for themselves and others. We conclude that these women share a commitment to rigorous scholarship and to the values of equity and social justice. The way in which they engage with those values in their work and lives has been taken up in the particular institutional and personal circumstances of their academic lives and has been shaped by the effects of normative discourses of gender. The result, individually and cumulatively, has been transformative on the individuals, within the institutions in which they have worked, and on the scholarship of Canadian educational administration.

Keywords:

• identities
• leadership
• social theory
• qualitative interviews
• focus groups
• higher education
• North America

Notes

1. The language of this text references the Canadian context, and may be analogous to the following UK terminology: ‘administration’ is analogous to ‘management’ ‘faculty’ is analogous to ‘academic staff’ ‘graduate school/graduate work’ is analogous to ‘postgraduate studies'.

2. Tenure is granted to academic staff, generally after a period of 5–6 years, upon a successful extensive internal and external review of a candidate's research productivity, teaching, and service record.

3. These women cannot easily be attached to a particular geographical location, in that over the life span of their careers, most have lived, studied and been faculty members in various locations and institutions in Canada.

4. While most participants would name themselves as feminist, not all would or did during the study.

5. The Quiet Revolution was a period of intense social change in Quebec, Canada during the 1960s characterised by political realignment into federalist and sovereignist factions, secularisation and the creation of a welfare state.

6. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the first Department of Educational Administration in Canada (which is now a specialisation in the amalgamated Department of Educational Policy Studies) at the University of Alberta, the walls of the Banquet Hall were festooned with academic family trees showing the names of early professors and their students and where doctoral students ended up following graduation. If they went on to academic positions, their ‘family’ was outlined as well. Many of the women, who appeared much later on the ‘family trees’, generally went back to teaching or more senior administration. Proportionally, the number of women who went on to academic careers was negligible in comparison to the men who did so.

7. For an interesting analysis of the tension between the ‘practical’ and the ‘theoretical’ in Educational Administration, see Brooks (2011) and Jansen (2008), both of which are referenced in Wilkinson and Eacott's useful consideration of critical scholarship in Educational Administration (2013).