Shaping Social Justice Leadership

Linda L. Lyman is a professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations at Illinois State University. Her scholarship and publications, including three previous books, focus on educational leadership with an emphasis on issues of gender, caring, poverty, women, and social justice.Jane Strachan recently retired from her position as an associate professor at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand. She has published widely on the subjects of educational leadership, social justice, gender, women, policy development, and Pacific education.Angeliki Lazaridou is a lecturer on tenure track at the University of Thessaly, in Volos, Greece. Her teaching and research interests focus on school administration and leadership, particularly on issues of effectiveness, ethics and values, gender, women, and learning communities.

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.

• List of TablesForeword by Ira BogotchForeword by Marianne ColemanAcknowledgmentsChapter One – Exploring Meaning through Personal NarrativesChapter Two – Passages into PathwaysChapter Three – ImperativesChapter Four – Values Create a Larger CircleChapter Five – Skillful Authentic LeadershipChapter Six – ResilienceChapter Seven – Multiple Paths Toward Advancing Social Justice OutcomesChapter Eight – Actions Define Social Justice LeadershipChapter Nine – An InvitationAfterword by Helen C. SobehartReferencesIndexAbout the Authors