Black Female Education Leaders and Intersectionality: Leadership, Race, Gender, Power, and Social Justice

Background

Blalock & Akehi (2018) observed that “sharing stories, particularly when stories contain shared experiences, can further connect individuals around a commonality” (p. 90). Collaborative critical autoethnography invites personal and cultural critique (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Denzin, 2014) We used collaborative autoethnography to mingle our stories with those of our participants in an attempt to offer deep understanding into the lived experiences of school leaders. Collaborative autoethnography “invites the community to investigate shared stores and balances the individual narrative with the greater collective experiences” (Blalock & Akehi, 2018, p. 94). We provide autoethnographic reflections on our data following the discussion of our results.

The shared space of storytelling provided an infrastructure that empowered our participants to talk out loud in an environment of peers who could relate to their experience. Each participant was asked to share how leadership, race, gender, power, and social justice shaped her identity as a Black female education leader. They also were asked to describe how these intersections shaped their professional actions as Black female education leaders during the BLM movement and COVID-19 pandemic.

Black females make up approximately 13% of all public school principals (NCES, 2018) and 5% of all college presidents (Gray, Howard, & Chessman, 2018). These comprised the population of our study. We used purposive sampling to choose participants who could help us gain a deeper understanding of how Black female education leaders were influenced by the intersections of these roles. The sample population consisted of seven Black female education leaders who held a variety of leadership positions, including principals, college deans, and college presidents.