This presentation will report on a qualitative, narrative-based autoethnography exploring the development of leadership identities of women leaders, including the author, working in various educational settings. The researcher has conducted a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with seven-ten women leaders in disparate contexts: K-12 administration, university administration, university center leadership, community leadership, state politics, and university coaching. She layers key findings from these case studies with her own experiences documented in journal narratives and through previous publications, as well as with scholarly research, theory, and dominant US cultural ideologies about leadership, to capture the lived experiences of participants. The researcher’s goal is to better understand the leadership trajectories of women leaders in educational settings and, by extension, create a series of layered narratives to inspire and transform young women thinking about leadership. This study has been approved by Purdue’s IRB, #2021-1377.

Research questions:
- How do educational leaders narrate their development of a leadership identity?
- What can emerging educational leaders learn from these leadership narratives?
- How can mentors best prepare emerging educational leaders?
- How has leadership changed in the 21st century?
- How does my own leadership story complicate, extend, and inform the participant data?
- How can dominant cultural narratives about leadership contextualize the project?

This study is grounded in theories of identity development, authentic leadership, narratology, agency, empathy, emotion and vulnerability, shame, and feminist discourse.

The methodology is a combination of case study, feminist interviewing (focusing on close listening, attention to language, and a goal of participant empowerment), and historical/archival scholarship, all under the umbrella of autoethnography. Autoethnography arises from the ethnographic tradition and is an autobiographical genre of academic writing. Autoethnographers also often engage in data collection using qualitative approaches and tools, such as interviews and journaling, to create vivid and evocative hybrid narratives exploring particular phenomena.

This work is an extension of the author’s much-cited work on teacher identity, as well as her work on narrative, literary identification, and empathy. This presentation will be of interest to those in teacher education or education writ large who see the need for a new generation of educational leaders to grow our schools and support teachers. It also has the potential for a wider audience of leaders/potential leaders in other disciplines.

Keywords: Narrative, leadership, education, auto-ethnography, identity.