Reflections based on my doctoral dissertation, Strength, Beauty, & Resilience: The Impact of Self-Reflection & Exploration of Memory on Postmodern, Feminist Educators, Inside and Outside the Classroom (March 2022)
Following this description, I included resources for educators to enable them to build their leadership capacities and rethink the way they see themselves as leaders. Contact me for any further information.
My education research study was rooted in autoethnographic methodology and informed by narrative inquiry. Initially, one of my goals was to explore the impact of memories on feminist leaders/educators based on the definition of a feminist leader/educator with which I identified. Another goal was to examine the relationships between myself and the study participants, each chosen based on their feminist leadership/educator traits and our professional relationship. I intended to highlight how our shared and individual memories impacted us as educators. I rooted the study in a few defining terms, including feminist leadership and authenticity, and asked the participants to help to define these terms.
I collected qualitative data through interviews, personal journals, timelining, and an epistolary writing exercise to help define authenticity and explore the characteristics of feminist and postmodern educators. The data highlighted the most important traits these educators and I possessed to examine how they developed through a lifetime of educational experiences. Rooted in a feminist leadership theoretical framework and framed by postmodernism and educator critical reflection, the study highlights how relationships and critical reflection on memories are significant for educators and enable them to make deeper connections with students and colleagues.
What I Learned
Our experiences and stories create us. Every individual has impactful and defining stories from their time in school because we all experience education in one way or another. Two students can be in the same class, with the same teacher and course content, and have entirely different experiences. When a person decides to enter the education field as a teacher or eventually school leader, their experiences inevitably shape how they approach the job and their relationships with students and colleagues. The participants reflected on their experiences through writing prompts, including a written interview, journal entries, a timeline exercise, and an epistolary (letter writing) writing exercise.
When analyzing the data, I considered the research questions and some sub-questions to dive further into the data.
My research questions included:
How does a feminist educator's school trajectory, including experiences inside and outside school, contribute to their authentic and feminist leadership style?
Are there specific moments and memories that influenced the future?
How do past experiences in education create more authentic teachers or leaders?
What is the effect of critical reflection on the past? How does that shape the current reality for educators?
What is the role of intuition in the daily practice of feminist, postmodern educators?
How does being an authentic educator affect who we are in our personal and professional lives?
What is authenticity in an educator, and how does feminist leadership inform or affect the authenticity or vice versa?
How does an authentic educator make an impact on those around them?
I looked for patterns in the data and derived themes from this in vivo coding process. I also coded the data using a set of a priori codes developed based on descriptors of postmodernism (Slattery, 2013) and descriptors of a feminist leader (Kark et al., 2007) and postmodernism to ultimately answer the proposed research questions. When exploring the research questions, I sought to understand how specific moments and memories influenced each participant's future behaviors and beliefs as an educator. The experiences may be positive or negative, but the importance lies in their impact on the educator.
Overall, when looking at the descriptors, one can say that postmodern educators can see the multiplicity in their lives and are not only comfortable with uncertainty but are willing to embrace it, engage in the experience, examine assumptions, and be transformed by removing boundaries. These traits are aligned with those of a feminist leader/educator; one can say that a feminist leader and educator models the behaviors they appreciate in stakeholders. They are collaborative, creative, and enthusiastic and enjoy collaborative problem-solving.
As a researcher, I attempted to quantify the qualitative data by performing a content analysis based on all inductive and deductive codes for each data sample: questionnaire, journal, timeline, letter, and interviews. The content analysis was performed by taking a frequency count for each set of codes for all five pieces of data.
Some of the most interesting surprises came from timelining the data. I asked the participants to create a timeline to help them to organize their experiences before writing their letters to themselves. I then transferred the participant's timeline data to an interactive timeline to visualize the events and overlaps in our trajectories. I created this interactive timeline using the Northwestern University, McCormick School of Engineering, Knightlab Timeline JS interactive timeline generator. I used this strategy to visualize the overlaps in my and the participant’s experiences and to visualize the events as they transpired over our lifetimes. Through timeline creation, I could see a lifetime and the similarities and differences between the two generations included in the study based on when they started school.
The qualitative data, and the stories my participants told, were defining and powerful. Each educator had stories that described relationships and creativity as vital to their authenticity as educators/leaders. I also focused on Thomas Armstrong's work to examine crystallizing or paralyzing experiences and how my participants processed and applied these memories, basically how they impacted the individual professionally or personally. My dissertation is filled with poignant quotes from my participants that exemplify these concepts. At this point in the presentation, I will share some quotes that define authenticity, show how they looked at both positive and negative experiences as opportunities, and communicate this in the research. This diagram became an important visual for the research findings:
I will also address the common themes in writing. I intend to highlight the themes of Belonging, Positive Reappraisal, and Resilience through quotes from my research participants.
Frustration
Belonging & appreciation (or lack of)
Positive reappraisal
Changed view of education/ teachers/leaders (Loss of respect for authority figure - or opposite)
Formation and communication of true self (authentic self) - or loss of true self
Emotional intelligence/resilience
Flexibility/ open-mindedness
Continued learning & growth
The Arts
De-siloing education/education outside of school
The Value of the Interactive Timeline
To make a visual comparison, I created an interactive timeline of my and the participants' educational experiences to examine the timespan of the experiences in relationship to each other. The timeline is included in Appendix H. Timelining is considered useful because it can “...look beyond aggregated views of their data to see specific events, how they unfolded, and how they were connected” (Disney, 2020). By timelining the data, I could see where we entered each other's lives and how many influential events happened before we set foot in a classroom or decided to become educators. Although this is a small sample, it indicates our experiences' significant role in our interactions with students and colleagues.
The act of timelining became one of the most significant and surprising aspects of the research:
Most striking was seeing, in this format, the number of years between when Wendy and I started school and when Dorothy and Alice started school. The age difference does not seem as significant until you see it in the timeline format. Wendy and I are from a generation that experienced education before the internet and social media. The timeline format demonstrates the generational differences that may have affected our school experiences. Alice, the youngest of the participants, displayed high levels of emotional resiliency and open-mindedness. Although she is younger, she seemed to understand the impact teachers make on students much earlier and more easily. Dorothy demonstrated the most consistently high levels of the four characteristics of a feminist leader. Her mother was a school leader, and as she reported in the data, a big influence on her career path. The timeline also demonstrates how the instability participants experienced growing up influenced their school memories and contributed to their desire to be authentic in all aspects of life, including their careers.
Practical Applications (how it can be applied to our real lives)
This research brought some important things to light for me as a school leader and educator for which I did not give enough credit. Most importantly, it highlighted the importance of Positive Reappraisal for these educators, whom I see as feminist & authentic. I also realized this trait in myself and how undervalued this was in my self-reflection. In this presentation, I will define Positive Reappraisal and explain how our instinct may be to shy away from negative experiences when engaging in self-reflection. Creating an experience timeline or composing a letter to self may be emotionally challenging, but in fact, reflecting on all experiences can be valuable. Through this reflection, we realize our resilience and what we ultimately learned from them. We are constantly shaping our identity through interactions and relationships, no matter how brief or extended. If we can look critically at each interaction and its impact on our feelings of authenticity, we can start to gain the most from each experience. I will show quotes from my participants that demonstrate the importance of positive reappraisal and how it defines them as educators and leaders.