Research on Black women superintendents has focused largely on their racial and gendered identities and the challenges associated with negotiating the politics of race and gender while leading complex school systems. Regarding the underrepresentation of Black female superintendents, an examination of Black women’s experiences of preparing for, pursuing, attaining, and serving in the superintendency may provide insights regarding their unique ways of knowing and, leading that, inform their leadership praxis. Informed by research on K-12 school superintendency, race and gender in education leadership, and the lived experiences and knowledge claims of Black women superintendents, important implications for future research on the superintendency will be hold. There exists a small but growing body of scholarly research on Black women education leaders, even less on the Black woman school superintendent, who remains largely underrepresented in education leadership research and the field. Although key studies have played an important role in establishing historical records documenting the service and contributions of Black women educational leaders in the United States, the bulk of the research on Black women superintendents can be found in dissertation studies grounded largely in the works of Black women education leadership scholars and practitioners. As a growing number of aspiring and practicing leaders who identify as Black women enter graduate-level leadership preparation programs and join the ranks of educational administration, questions concerning race and gender in leadership are almost always present as the theories presented in leadership preparation programs often conflict with or represent set of perspectives, realities, and strategies that may not align with those experienced by leaders who identify as Black women. For these reasons, their leadership perspectives, epistemologies, and contributions are essential to our understanding of the superintendency and field of educational leadership.
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Black Women Superintendents
Sonya Douglass Horsford, Dessynie D. Edwards, and Judy A. Alston
Article
Girls’ Schools and Empire (1800−1950)
Hayarpi Papikyan and Rebecca Rogers
The growth of empire in the 19th century went hand in hand with a concern to address girls’ education. Girls’ schools developed within the British, French, Dutch, Ottoman, and Russian empires and, despite the variety of spatial boundaries and the differing nature of core-periphery relations, girls’ schools were the object of ideological pronouncements centered around visions of femininity. The ostensible goals for this education often shared a similar commitment to the training of good wives and mothers in order to improve the familial morals of colonized territories. In reality, the nature of girls’ schooling was far more complex and played in particular into broader political debates about the role of education in the development of enlightened female subjects and later citizens. National movements in colonized areas generated discourses about women as “mothers of the nation,” with an emphasis on domesticity, not dissimilar from earlier colonial rhetoric, while the development of girls’ schooling led a minority of women into skilled professions that challenged without upsetting existing gender relations.
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Homeschooling in the United States
Kyle Greenwalt
The number of homeschooling families in the United States has been growing at a steady rate since the early 1990s. Attempts to make sense of homeschooling—including research—are inherently political. These attempts are, therefore, highly contested. It is impossible to provide an agreed-upon definition of homeschooling, much less a precise number of families that homeschool, why they homeschool, or what the learning outcomes of that homeschooling might entail. Instead, homeschooling is best understood as a set of educative practices that exists in and between institutional schooling and family life. As families and schools evolve and change, so will the meaning and significance of homeschooling.
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Navigating Change: Pacific Islanders, Race, Sport, and Pipelines to Higher Education
Keali'I Kukahiko
Tagata Pasifika (Pacific People) is a transnational affiliation whose collective colonial experiences provide island nations of Oceania a means for contestation over local discourses of power and race. Employing the principle of Tagata Pasifika within higher education necessitates recognition of how postsecondary institutions are significant sites of conflict that engender the collective resistance among Pasifika communities for the following reasons: (a) to close the educational opportunity gap between Pasifika communities and spheres of influence—positions of power that dictate policies, social circumstances, and human living conditions; (b) to affirm Pasifika participation in the knowledge production process by developing ontological self-efficacy and decolonizing spaces in higher education that erase and marginalize Pasifika ontologies; and (c) to engage action research as opportunities that enact various forms of sovereignty, such as the ability to participate in cultural practices as authentic and legitimate ways of knowing and being or recognizing Pasifika intellectual participation as a process of action, or inaction, informed by cultural and experiential values. A salient college access point for Pasifika communities is the phenomena of college athletics because Pasifika college football players are 56 times more likely to matriculate to the National Football League. However, low graduation rates—only 11% of Pasifika college football players graduated from the Football Championship Series college division in 2015—have made this “untraditional” pathway an extractive pipeline that provides the National Collegiate Athletic Association membership institutions with athletic labor. Although college athletes continue to have the conditions of their admissions leveraged against them to prevent student resistance/activism, student-athletes have an unprecedented potential for influence in the “post-COVID” landscape of college athletics.
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Negotiating Transnational Mobility and Gender Definitions in the Context of Migration
Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot
The rise of mobility and transnationalism perspectives in the social sciences has contributed to a burgeoning literature on the cross-border movements of people. Gender as a conceptual lens has increasingly taken a central stage in the analyses, unveiling unequal power relations as well as unmasking the often-hidden macro-social processes and structures that shape them. As a category of difference, gender influences individuals’ attitudes and behavior, including their decision to migrate or not across borders of nation-states. This raises the question of how transnational mobility and gender intersect in the lives of individuals. To shed light on this issue, this article takes stock of the literature on transnational migrations associated with social reproduction: labor, marriage, and reproductive migrations. Such research reveals individuals’ tactics to negotiate their transnational mobility and gender definitions: using the dominant gender scripts in the country of origin, reconciling the gender ideologies in their countries of origin and destination, or aligning their narratives to specific moral values. Transnational mobility acquires different social meanings at certain points in time and in varying contexts, whereas gender remains at large anchored to its heteronormative foundation. Finally, based on the analysis of existing studies, a more holistic approach to transnational mobility through a sexuality-inclusive, process-oriented, subjectivity- and agency-focused, and time-sensitive framework is called for.
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Public and Private Dimensions of Food Education in Early-20th-Century Argentina
Angela Aisenstein and María Liliana Gómez Bidondo
Eating is a conscious activity, not just a biological necessity, and as such, eating habits and tastes can be guided. When individual issues, such as those around food, coincide with the economic, demographic, and health problems of society, they become public issues, then state concerns, and ultimately part of public policy. In Argentina, the education system was founded simultaneously with the nation-state and became a crucial tool in the process of modernization. Feeding and food education were part of that process. This issue was of essential importance in a country structured from the beginning as a dependent agricultural-export economy. Food education is defined as a set of means, methods, and social relationships related to the production, transmission, distribution, and acquisition of knowledge and expertise. The purpose of food education is to influence the kind of food the population eats, to shape their nutritional habits and tastes; to produce enough food and set the conditions, techniques, and technologies to achieve it; to convey people’s rights and obligations to access food; and to establish the roles the state, community, family, and the market must play in order to reproduce the biological, economic, and cultural order of society.
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Queer Studies in Education
Jennifer C. Ingrey
A survey of key contributors and theoretical tensions in the applications of queer studies in education is purposefully partial namely because of the impartiality embedded in the nature of ‘queer’, a verb whose action unsettles, dismantles and interrogates systems of normalization, beginning with heteronormativity and heterosexism. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s before influencing education, including both elementary and secondary schooling; however, queer is complex in that it involves the signifier or signified term: it is both the integration of queer content in curriculum as well as the practice of queering educational practices (i.e., curriculum, pedagogy and practice). The queering of pedagogy involves the queering of the educational subject, both teachers and students. In such a survey of queer in education, the ontological groundings for queer are important to consider given the paradoxical nature of queer to unpack and unsettle whilst maintaining its hold on an identity category in order to do its unsettling work. Indeed, the consequent recognition of the subjecthood of queer in educational contexts is a significant note in this attention to queer’s application in education. Queer also moves beyond not only an inclusion of queer content, but also exceeds queer sexualities to cohere and contrast with trans-infused approaches. Queer theory considers that the future of queer may well exceed beyond sexuality and gender altogether to become a practice of unsettling or critique more generally. Its continuity in education studies as well as its potentially impending expiration are concerns of scholars in the field.
