Dr. Heather Shea discusses women and leadership development in college with Dr. Julie Owen, Dr. Jennifer Pigza, Dr. Aoi Yamanaka, and Sharrell Hassell-Goodman. Panelists are authors of the new book and facilitation guide to “We Are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For.”

Shea, H. (Host). (2020, Dec. 16). We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for: Women and leadership development in college (No. 15) [Audio podcast episode]. In Student Affairs NOW. https://studentaffairsnow.com/we-are-the-leaders/

Heather Shea:
Hello and welcome to Student Affairs NOW I’m your host, Heather Shea. Today, we are talking about women and leadership development in college, and I’m thrilled to be joined by authors and contributors to a new book and facilitation guide on the topic. Student Affairs NOW is the premier podcast and learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs. We hope you’ll find these conversations, make a contribution to the field and are restorative to the profession. We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays, and you can find us at studentaffairsnow.com on Twitter, Instagram, all the social medias. Stylus is one of our corporate sponsors. Stylus is proud to be a sponsor for Student Affairs NOW podcast. Browse their student affairs, diversity and professional development titles at stylus.pub. And you can use promo code SANOW for 30% off all books, including the text that we are discussing today.

Heather Shea:
We Are The Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For plus free shipping. So find Stylus on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter @StylusPub. So, as I mentioned, I’m your host, Heather Shea. My pronouns. Are she her and hers? And I am broadcasting from East Lansing, Michigan near the campus of Michigan State University, MSU occupies the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabeg – Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi peoples. So now let’s get onto the conversation. First, let’s meet our guests today. As each of you introduce yourselves. What would you like to share about the ways in which you have worked with women in college contexts to develop leadership skills, knowledge and competencies? Julie Owen, I’m going to start with you. Welcome.

Julie Owen:
Thank you so much. And what a honor to be here with this amazing team of people. And Heather, I’m gonna embarrass you later and talk about your role with this book, but I’ll save that for a moment, but yes, my name is Julie Owen and I’m a faculty member in leadership studies at George Mason University in Virginia. And the way I mostly work with women, student leaders is through classes. I teach a course and helped develop a course on women and leadership that I’ve been teaching for teaching now for about 10 years. So have actually a wide variety of alumni that have graduated from that and watching them sort of bless them in different ways and also come back and talk to the current students as well. And we have people of all gender identities in that class. So it’s open for men and women and folks who identify as non-binary or gender fluid. So it’s a really inclusive space and I’ve learned so much from those populations.

Heather Shea:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Julie, for your book and for, for all the contributions over the years we’ve known each other for a really, really long time. So it’s also really great to see you. Jennifer, welcome.

Jennifer Pigza:
Hi there, I’m Jennifer Pigza, she, her hers. And I am the director of the center for civic engagement and community engagement at St. Mary’s College of California in the San Francisco Bay area. I’m coming to you from Oakland, California, a home of the Ohlone people. I have primarily been spending my professional life in the field of community engagement and social justice education. So that is such a space where so many female students and women identified students participate that I feel like even though I never really chose or was called to specifically work in that area, that, that is in fact so much of what I’m doing in terms of student leadership. And then the other piece for me is that I was part of developing our master’s in leadership for social justice at the college. And our first two cohorts were all women. And teaching in that program in that context was just really rich because of the different kinds of experiences and stories and kind of ways of being in the world that we could explore as a group like that. So that was, that’s another piece of kind of what I brought to this project and hopefully to this conversation too. So thank you.

New Speaker:
Thank you so much for being here. Aoi?

Aoi Yamanaka:
Hi my name is Aoi Yamanaka. She, her hers. I’m associate director of academic services and interim assistant professor in the school of integrative studies at George Mason University where I teach social justice course and leadership being a global interest in national context. So like Julie, I mainly work with women and student leader in my classes. So for example, in my global leadership course they created some global leadership models and read articles related to women as a global leaders. So my goal in this course is usually tackle down the dominant ideologies of leadership in a transnational context.

New Speaker:
Wow. I love it. Thank you so much for being here, too. Sharrell. Welcome.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Hi. Hello everyone. I’m Sharrell Hassell Goodman. My pronouns are she her and hers? I’m currently a full-time PhD candidate now in the… Thank you for the, it’s exciting to be at this space. I see your hands, like giving me the cheerleading sign for that. But so at this point I am actually doing my own data collection and engaging in research full time. But prior to that, I was teaching within the school of integrative studies and a lot of my courses primarily focused on diversity equity inclusion. I taught a narrative of identity class and introduction to social science research, but we explored all sorts of topics within those courses, but particularly thinking about our own identities, whether it’s race, gender, socioeconomic status, ability status that was part of the coursework. And then also my work with women in leadership really started in sorority and fraternity life. So I was an advisor for a sorority for about six years, and then I worked in sorority and fraternity life for about seven or eight years where I was responsible… part of my job responsibility was to create leadership curriculum for sorority women.

Heather Shea:
Excellent. Well, I love how all of you come from all of these different backgrounds and also approach this work from both a practitioner lens and as a faculty member lens. And so this I think is going to be a fascinating conversation today. How did all of you end up working on this project together, writing this book? Maybe Julie, you talk about the book book and then Jennifer talked about the facilitation guide. And everybody share with how they got involved?

Julie Owen:
All right. Well, absolutely. You know, I never, I don’t think I had the sort of sense of that. I could just go and write a book, right? So I’ve been doing some scholarship for years, but I felt this was sort of like something that called to me in the fact that I was using textbooks for this class, I was teaching some people know the amazing books Eagly and Carli’s Through the Labyrinth or Kellerman and Rhode’s Women and Leadership, both from 2007. And these were such foundational texts. They’re thorough and empirically grounded, but they primarily focused on women’s achievement in corporate America. And the university where I am George Mason University is one of the most diverse structurally in the country. And so many of my students had no desire to sort of break the glass ceiling in a Fortune 500 company.

Julie Owen:
They had a wide variety of aspirations and career goals like social activism. They wanted to work in policy NGOs, you know, wanting to be entrepreneurs themselves and not be part of corporate America. So those texts didn’t really speak to them. And then also with this amount of structural diversity of my classroom, I realized that books were written by white women and mostly for white women, they didn’t really speak to other dimensions of identity. Especially the intersectionality I was seeing the space that I was in. So those books again, while groundbreaking, and discussed like structural under-representation of women, but they really didn’t talk about how to tackle like the larger patriarchal systems of oppression or the role of power and privilege in leadership. And none of them were really developmental in nature. They didn’t sort of say, this is how you can improve in the way of thinking more complexity about leadership and about gender.

Julie Owen:
So I sort of, and they didn’t have new editions either. That was the real reason, right. Waiting for the new editions to come out. So I was getting increasingly frustrated. And so instead of using the books for a couple of years, I use the world’s biggest stack of PDF, right. You know, 10,000 PDFs of all my favorite authors and the students were getting frustrated because it wasn’t a through line. They were like, what’s the story here? And they said, “you should just write this book, professor!” And I went, Oh, you know, whether you felt that moment, like the universe puts an idea on you. And so I knew it was something I had to try to do. But I’m really bad at working independently. So I was so fortunate to be surrounded by brilliance and I also knew that I’m another white woman writing a book about, you know, women’s leadership.

Julie Owen:
So I really sought out the, some of the wisest people I know, which were doc students at the time Sharrell and Aoi, as well as an undergraduate team. And we worked on with researching what books were out there. We worked on, we did an autoethnographic process collective autoethnography where we shared stories together. And so those stories and narratives are written throughout, woven throughout the books. And so to me it was a community kind of effort. And then Jennifer and I are friends from graduate school. So I’ll let her tell you that story. But we were, I was like, you know, how are we going to teach this? Or who’s going to help teach that? And Jennifer was like, I’ve got an idea. So I’m going to pass it over to you, Jennifer, and talk about the origins of facilitation guide.

Jennifer Pigza:
Yeah, well, I think that as busy professionals and as people with full lives, like we often have, we certainly have the capacity to come up with beautiful activities and modules that we might do. You know, in our classes or in our programs, but isn’t it nice when you can have some resources on a shelf to be able to turn to specifically kind of topically related. And in this case, what we decided to do was what we started off thinking that the facilitation guide really would kind of follow through chapter by chapter with the texts that Julie was writing with the assistance of her student researchers. And then we realized actually in talking with Stylus, that they could imagine a group of people who might be interested in a facilitation guide who actually aren’t using the text, but otherwise are running programs, teaching other kinds of classes or working in community settings where these kinds of modules could be really useful.

Jennifer Pigza:
So, so, right. So that’s where we started. And Julie had, you know, we generated this cast of characters on giant white paper you know, big post-it paper, you know, and, and put out the invitations and it felt like a really long process in some ways. But I think at this point I feel, I feel really good about the ability of the facilitation guide to truly be helpful to people. And also to Julie’s point about representation among the contributors. There’s a really strong mix, I think, of people who are kind of newer to the field and early say in their scholarly scholarly lives, as well as people who have a lot of depth of experience. So that, that was really important to us, as well as other types of voices to make sure we’re presenting dimensions of identity,

Julie Owen:
And Sharrell and Aoi, I’m curious how you all got sucked in, you know, why didn’t you say yes when I had this crazy, you know, I am, you know, how I roll? So what, when you saw me coming, what part of this interested you… I’m curious?

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Well, I think for me, I took I think one of the first classes I took at George Mason was a leadership course, but specifically thinking about students in the higher ed program. And when I took that course, like you and I had a couple of nerd out moments where I was like really invested in the literature, thinking about leadership theory and kind of geeked out about that together. But because, you know, as someone who had been a practitioner, but had the chance to totally pause and think about the ways in which theory, particularly as it related to leadership impacted me or related to my experience or where it fell short, that was really powerful. And even thinking about my own journey, doing leadership work right as a student affairs professional you know, and in my last position, I was a director, like even thinking about how I navigate the Academy as a black woman.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Right. And so when we are engaging in that conversation, like you joked that there was like the skin that I shared in the class, but it was really an opportunity for me to really think about myself. And so by, you know, you ask the opportunity… Like, Hey, would I be interested in being a part of the autoethnographical process by engaging with the research team? It was such an amazing opportunity and such a rich experience for me, particularly not only because I’m thinking about my multiple marginalized identities, right. And how, how that’s centered, particularly within a leadership context, like how I made meaning of it, but also just the, the opportunity for those experiences to finally be centered. Right. And I knew that that was going to be centered within the literature is something that was invaluable, particularly as we think about the intersectional identities that, you know, people with multiple marginalized identities for me, a black woman with a disability you know, but also thinking about what that does for students, as we think about leadership, to be able to open their perspective was so valuable for me. And I know Aoi, wanted to add, you know, or feel free to add your thoughts about what that was like to participate. And then, you know, maybe we can talk also about what it was like for us to participate in the facilitation guide as well. So Aoi, what would you add?

Aoi Yamanaka:
Sure. So similar to what Sharrell say I’ve been struggling as a women of color, especially international women color and navigating spacies in academia as a leaders in as well as a leadership educators. So that’s why I actually ended up writing my dissertation. So when a faculty of color experience microaggressions and how’s that influences self-efficacy. So while I was struggling, Julie asked us like, if we are interested in part of this research team and writing our own narratives. So that’s why I jumped into yes, because this was a great opportunity to, for me to reflect on my actual experiences and then put my self process on there in that, in my narratives. So in that sense, writing narratives… Wasn’t more my feeling process healing process and the, it had to allow me to be nice to myself. And then my experiences, because in the past I was more like a harsh to myself and blaming myself or my experiences.

Aoi Yamanaka:
Like I’m not good enough. And because of my skill, because of my knowledge you know, experience microaggression and stuff like that. But reflecting on my experiences to write narratives and like Sharrell experience, the group dynamics. So the just the research team many people like my mentors or like our students and the group members acknowledge my experiences and these experiences allow me to confront with myself and my experiences and learn to be my own nice to myself, and to change my perspective of my experiences. And also my narratives became my advocacy tool and sharing my narrative in class or in other contexts become part of my advocacy for women faculty and faculty of color. So that’s a part of more like a narrative. And then in the research team experience and in terms of the modules or facilitators guide what we wanted to focus when we create this is more like interpersonal awareness of efficacy and capacities of students of marginalized populations of students, of color and women students, because marginalized populations tend to have a lower efficacy. So we wanted them to reflect on why they engage, why they engage in leadership and reflect on their experiences and engaging in self more like a discovery through like what is known by others and or by the person about themselves. And then what is unknown by others and or the person about themselves. So it was a great experience.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
And I think Aoi and I, I totally agree with you Aoi, like what an opportunity that was for us to do you know, to engage in healing. The thing that I also appreciated that I realized now after the fact is how simple stories that, you know, Aoi, you and I shared about our day-to-day experiences were really how we navigate things daily, that we’re putting into paper where we’re putting on paper, letting people read and find that it’s connecting with students, right. And it’s connecting with those that are reading it and saying, wow, those are my experiences too. And I too share that. So even though it just was us sharing, you know, in a very simple way, what we experienced from time to time, we didn’t realize how much it really has started to resonate with people until like the book has come out and to hear people engage in a conversation about the impact of it. And to me, that that really speaks volumes to how valuable this experience is. Not only for us, but also for those people that have been able to engage in the work with us through reading the book and talking about and experiencing it together.

Heather Shea:
Oh my gosh, I love it. That is so great. Well, I have to agree. I think that there are so many needs for a book like this and it’s really powerful to be a part of a collaborative project. So I love that you all saw it that way from the beginning. One of the things I want to step back though, too, is we’ve been talking about these concepts of women and leadership. So Julie, when you talk about women, who do you mean? And then when you talk about leadership, what do you mean?

Julie Owen:
Sure, Well, I think leadership educators have we have a history of doing sort of exclusionary research. I think we have not been as inclusive partly because of this notion of excellence that we’ve had to sort of trouble a lot and rethink or related to leadership. And so a lot of the literature really conflated sex and gender identity and gender expression, it, wasn’t sort of clear about those kinds of things, even sex and gender you know, using them alternatively or interchangeably. And so in the book, we’re really intentional the gender as far more than one’s just manliness or womanliness and that we need to take gender expression, fluidity and intersectionality into account. And then also think beyond binary kinds of notions of gender. And you know, we really feel like when people use those on campus the inclusive feminist practice, I mean, whoever comes in my classroom space is welcome, however they identify and it’s been amazing journeys to have people see people being so sort of cognizant of troubling the notions of gender in the classroom space.

Julie Owen:
I’ll say that about gender. And then leadership itself also has the same problems of definitial un-clarity , right? And so many people use the dominant hegemonic default narrative, that leadership is people with positional power. It’s people doing to others instead of with, or for others. And so we choose the Komives, Lucas, and McMahon, “Exploring Leadership.” Leadership is a relational process between and among people who seek to make a positive difference in the world. So if people come and they want to learn how to command and control other people, I’m like, that is not what our program is teaching you. That is not what you will find in this book. There’s plenty of other books I can point you to that will do that. Right. And then I just would add that we also took a really intentionally feminist lens, which I didn’t really realize it was controversial, but I’m doing more speaking about the book.

Julie Owen:
And I’ve been challenged in several spaces about why I would link this writing with feminism. And we use bell hooks’ definition of feminism as a struggle to end the sexist oppression, which doesn’t really privilege one gender over the other, but invites everybody to interrogate the sexist structures in the world around us. And to me, the answer I gave to that, that, especially this one person who called me out and said, well, how would you link this to feminism? And why would you make that a political stance? And I said, well, you, I don’t think we’re in a post-patriarchal society, right? Or, a post-racial society. So I feel like there’s still work to do so. I’m just like, we have to be explicitly anti-racist. We need to be explicitly anti-patriarchy in how we approach things. And so to me, I’m talking about the struggle to end sexist oppression is really, really central to the book. So I hope that everybody has to buy it that justification, but that’s where we landed as we wrote these different pieces.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. I really, I appreciate that broad definition. I didn’t mention this in the opening, but I direct a women’s student services office at Michigan State University is one of my roles. And in addition to being faculty and we have defined women… so our title of our office is Women*s Student Services, but we’ve replaced the apostrophe with an asterisk to denote that there is more to the word women than just the binary and that all women, cisgender, transgender, non-binary, gender nonconforming, folks are welcome in our space and all who want to work to end sexist oppression. So I like the broader definition for sure. And it’s so funny that you mentioned the Komives, Lucas, McMahon definition, because I think that one of the challenges is that the way that leadership has been largely written about and taught on our campuses even is through this lens of hierarchy and positional leadership positions, people think they have to get into a position and then learn to be a leader. So I think it’s a fascinating approach and I, I really appreciate that you all brought that together with feminism because so critical. And I also have, have received a fair amount of pushback as to why I would link a women’s student services office with a feminist and intersectional feminist agenda, right. Is what they call it. And I’m like, well, why, why not? Right? Tell me the reasons why not! So..

Julie Owen:
Well, it’s, it’s so nice to that. I think finally leadership educators and leadership researchers are, are there’s an emerging critical sort of scholarship approach to leadership finally. Predicated some of the work of John Dugan for sure. But it’s like, how do we deconstruct those dominant narratives? So both gender and leadership are socially constructed, right? So we get all these messages about what’s the right way. Leadership leaders must be confident extroverts who are bossy and, you know you know, we have this list of things that, whether we know it or not sort of inform how we see the world, just like we have around what it means to be woman or man. And so how do we sort of dismantle those dominant narratives and start to rebuild and reconstruct more inclusive definitions, to me, is really, really important.

Heather Shea:
Yeah. Any other thoughts on definitions out there that anybody else would like to share comments around?

Jennifer Pigza:
I guess I just want to point out that I think both Aoi and Sharrell’s, like they’re telling of their experience of being part of the book is one of self-learning and that all of us in this process of both for Julie and the main text and the facilitation resource that like, we’re all in a learning process ourselves. And so these are not perfect texts, right. There are, there is language where might say, Oh, shoot, I wish I would have like, noticed that before, or so I want to just be honest, I guess, and transparent. And in fact about the fact that we as writers and contributors and people, frankly, are also learners. Right. and I, and for me, I think that’s part of my own identity as a, as a leader. My own exercise of leadership is to be transparent about like, when it doesn’t always work, the way that I have imagined, or when there is a gap, perhaps between my theory and my practice. Right. Like I don’t think that’s a feeling. I think that’s just real. And so I, I think that, that shows up in some of what people might encounter, you know, in these two texts as well.

Julie Owen:
Yeah. And I have a great story about that is another group of people I should just honor. So we have Heather and Kris Renn who did the forward and we have all these amazing student research team did the collaborative auto-ethnography, but there was a third group out there that I invited that were my critical friends. And if you don’t have any critical friends, I suggest people get some critical friends, right. People aren’t scared to tell you their truths. And these were emerging scholars around women and leadership who really gave me some hard truths as Jennifer was speaking around. You know, you say you’re intersectional, but you’re still sort of centering white women’s stories when you tell the history of feminism in the U.S. You know, and so that kind of feedback was so important. So if, if the book is good and inclusive, it’s because of all these voices and if there’s errors and it is solely Julie’s myopathy, you know, like not seeing it.

Julie Owen:
So I just wanted to thank that group who … the text is certainly better and more inclusive because of people who took time and energy to read these working drafts and to help help me make it speak to where people, we really help people use it in student affairs spaces as well. It could be a shared reading for a group where people who live on living, learning communities. I work with our lead office, our co-curricular leadership development office and they’ve made use of it. So, so I think some of it’s not, not thinking it’s written, you know, people are surprised there is, you know, references and scholarship in there. But also some jokes I hope and some you know, these reflective pieces. So hopefully people can find ways to use it. Maybe if it’s not a linear read through, one of my friends was like, I take it to the beach this weekend. I’m like, I’m not sure it’s a beach read. Right. it’s a little more, it’s like taking a textbook at the beach, but hopefully people would find it valuable in those different kinds of things.

Jennifer Pigza:
I really appreciate how the, the text, as you said, Julie, it has, references. It’s a real book. It’s a real piece of scholarship. And it engages the reader and predominantly students as readers, you know, in a really personal way. So the reflection prompts that are throughout are not just the ones that, you know, your student research team are offering in the book, but also questions then that the student reader can engage in themselves. Right. And apply that and kind of elicit their own story. So I just, I really like how that thread of autoethnography and narrative really is throughout. I think it helps the text be useful in a lot of different ways and appealing to people. Right. Cause it’s like, Oh yeah, my story. And my experience is going to matter. And as a perfect point of entry for me to understand this content, which perhaps could seem dense otherwise. Right?

Julie Owen:
Yeah. Jennifer, I think it was a conversation with you. Or I got that idea of you’d have a chapter called who am I to lead, you know, just really addressing students’ own sort of the ways we might hold ourselves back from leadership or not. I’m not a leader. I just lived this activism. And I really care about these things and what these social changes in the world. I’m like, Oh, that’s a friend that’s leadership, right? Like how do we help people sort of find their own belief in themselves that they’re capable of doing this work is really important.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
I would also say because of the diverse constituency of contributors to the book, I think it really helps ground conversations where there’s not this expectation for the marginalized identity person in the room to have to share their experiences and do the labor for other people’s learning. Right. And so it takes that pressure off and it also provides an opportunity for people to grow if folks are not even in the room, right. As much as we do leadership programming, I know you try to pan pick a diverse group so everyone can learn from each other. And sometimes that just doesn’t work out. And so how the book kind of takes some of that pressure off, I think is also really important to add to any learning environment.

Heather Shea:
So Jennifer, tell us a little bit about this facilitators guide that’s coming out soon. What kinds of activities and how, how do you foresee it complementing the book? I know you had some stylistic choices about making decoupling it in some ways, but tell us a little bit about what’s in there.

Jennifer Pigza:
Yeah, sure. So the facilitation resource has about 35. I should have counted in the table of contents last week, but has about 35 different modules. That really are very much you know, a full lesson plan, if you will, you know, here’s how long it takes, here’s your material, you know, here’s the step-by-step kind of follow along instruction. So I think it’s really user friendly in that way. It does in fact, follow along the chapter headings of Julie’s text so that if you are using that text, it’s really easy to find, you know, an activity that could be utilized. But you could also just think about those as, as topical buckets and use those modules, any place, any time, you know, even build in some of those conversations starters in a dinner table with some, some family, friends or students.

Jennifer Pigza:
So I think I think one of the things that’s great about the way that the facilitation resource has kind of developed over time is that there are resources there for folks who are both themselves perhaps early in their profession and feeling like I’m more of a fledgling facilitator. And so I want to tackle this kind of a module as well as someone who has been doing this a long time. And then there’s maybe some more complex, both in process that might be happening in that module, but as well as kind of content that might be being delivered and explored in a certain module. So I think there’s a mix there for kind of facilitation expertise, if you will. And then also kind of for where students are in the particular program or course that you are working with. Right.

Jennifer Pigza:
So so I think that’s really nice about the resource. It doesn’t kind of hit everybody only at one space or one level of understanding or expertise. I’ve been really pleased with the way that there’s a bunch of different ways that the authors of the modules have decided to approach their topics. So there’s some that are highly interactive and like all about person to person talking, interacting, you know, moving around a room, you know, and then there’s a number that are, you know, over a period of time, write a complex piece about yourself in relation to some questions around leadership and identity and, and feminism or, or women and gender. So I really liked that kind of spread as well. It’s really fun to see what kinds of things people do in a classroom, right. Or in a, in a workshop, right.

Jennifer Pigza:
Like I think most people who would pick up this resource are pretty talented people themselves, but it’s just really awesome to be able to call upon the like creativity and thoughts of other people. Right. So it doesn’t either all fall on us or all sound the same all the time. Right. In terms of whoever our audience is. So it does come out in February, so it’s a little lagged from Julie’s text, but I think that’s okay. It still be there. It’ll still be great. And I, you know, I think, yeah, I’m just, I am excited. It was fun. We, I went through the red lines right before Thanksgiving, we’re recording this the first week of December. And it was just really great to be reminded of the work, both Aoi and Sharrell we’re contributors as well as Julie. And you Heather. So I’m wondering maybe Aoi, if you could just talk about how you utilized your module, you talked about earlier wanting to get into kind of where you in Sharrell’s module talks about kind of using the concept of the Johari window and thinking about women in leadership. So maybe that one or one of the other ones that you authored, you could talk about.

Aoi Yamanaka:
Sure. Actually I use the cross-cultural leadership ad gender and we’ll do the, I develop in my global leadership course this semester. And then I always tell others that I live in two different cultures and two different ideology because I’m from Japan. I still follow some perspectives that I develop by living in Japan, right? So that’s why I often think that we need to, as a leadership educator, we need to be mindful that not every critical perspective or arguments about social justice or social justice issues are not applicable to other cultures. Since our history, their history is a different economy and governments are different and the power structures different. So this cross culture leadership and gender module allows students to analyze how systemic power privilege and oppression in transnational context, you know, shape the way people view both gender and leadership. So student basically needed to analyze one news article in a transnational context using the macro level and micro level and the meso level, and then so that they can develop like a, how you rest perspectives on not necessarily applicable to other cultural contexts.

Aoi Yamanaka:
And I’m going to share one quote from students that they basically stated in the discussions or the, in the paper. This journal said, I realized the importance of multiple identities and intersectionality. There are no true qualities that should box a leader in this leadership, carve their own path and be the best version of themselves that they can be not worrying about qualities, that those before them or those of the same gender over them possesses. And I used to think global leadership was reserved for the people at the top of the pyramid. But now I know that anyone who is given the chance to follow as a person has the ability to impact the world. So I was in global leadership and global models. Some of them still focused on the dominant ideology. So by doing this module, students basically deconstruct the dominant ideologies of the global leadership in global leadership perspectives.

Julie Owen:
Aoi, that was one of your students’ reflections?

Aoi Yamanaka:
Yeah.

Julie Owen:
Well, I wish I’d had that in my, I wish I could get my students there. That’s amazing. I got to use your module.

Jennifer Pigza:
That’s one of the win that Aoi, you should put like you know, on your bulletin board there, right behind you periodically on a low day, just check it out and say like, okay, it can work, you know, in the right moments, in the right conditions. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Heather Shea:
Sharrell and Aoi, I want you to talk a little bit about educators and thinking about overlaying intersectional feminism onto concepts of leadership and, and how as leadership educators, should we be thinking about those two concepts is interrelated and the kind of work that you’ve done and the teaching that you’ve done. Sharrell do you want to start, then we’ll go to Aoi.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Sure. So I think that’s such a good question. Cause I think the complex, like nature of leadership and how it impacts people and systems as a result of like these interlocking systems of power and privilege, privilege, and oppression is really hard for students to understand like, let’s first start off with that. I think so by understanding, like taking the time to number one, break those concepts down, which I do think the book does a great job of giving a quick definition that students can understand and unpack. Right. that’s the first thing, but the other thing is when they understand those concepts in the context of leadership, it helps them to see the larger social inequities that occur. Right? So we’re talking about systematic oppression. Well, that looks very complicated for students, but when you’re giving them something that’s very tangible and they start to see it play out within leadership, they start to realize like, Oh, wait a second.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
It’s interesting that these positions are primarily for this demographic. It’s interesting that these policies really impact this demographic differently. So they’re starting to see the ways in which, right. This has played out. And I think that’s what is so important. I think the other thing is that when you’re doing this work, it can be very uncomfortable for students, right. Students can feel disenfranchised, they can feel completely overwhelmed. Like where do I even start? They feel guilty, right. There’s instances where even you’re trying to manage both of those feelings at the same time. And I think that gets really complicated, but I feel like the, the book and like having these resources and starting to engage in these conversations allows us to begin. Right. And it gives us the tools to think about how do we talk about social inequities, particularly within the context of leadership.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
And I think that’s the part that makes it so fruitful and worthwhile because when students start to understand it and you see them enacting leadership in different ways, I think it’s very powerful. And even thinking about the process of creating this book, right, the fact that all of us are here as contributors, right. You know, that just shows you how leadership can be enacted even through the process of creating a book. But I know Aoi has really interesting experiences to share because she’s been doing the work now with her current course. So Aoi, do you want to add to that?

Aoi Yamanaka:
Yeah. I should just mentioned, like, you know, if you do not address intersectionality as identity, we overlook systemic oppression. But at the same time, if we focus on specific marginalized populations and students who do not have a multiple oppressed identity may feel like they are not marginalized enough. So then leadership and leadership education more like a become competitions of oppressions. So the reason I’m saying this, like Sharrell mentioned, I have this specific experience this semester in my class. So in my class this semester, students who had never been centered or whose voice had never been heard felt comfortable, you know, speaking up or experiences. And then in turn, as she basically took so much space in classrooms. So as a result, other students felt uncomfortable with sharing their experiences because they thought their experiences were not good enough and because they were not marginalized enough. So that this kind of experience made me wander that leadership educator need to think about, you know, the group dynamics in a, what we need to do with these students when they are stuck. And I think that Julie’s book since Julie’s book share the, by your scenario, there’s of the students whose identities are, you know, share various identities. So in that sense, you know, that narratives encourage this students who felt the they are not marginalized enough, encourage them to share their experiences in class.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
And I, I would just add to that Aoi actually has a student in her class that I had in my class last semester and I participated in a session. She invited people to come speak and then students selected to interview people. And the students selected me to interview for a project, which is also amazing assignment that Aoi has that I highly recommend. But in that moment, the student was sharing their growth and even able to talk about how she at first right last semester was not like as a white woman doing service learning or engaging in nonprofit work. What if I’m working with marginalized communities that I don’t identify, can I still do the work? And I’m like, well, what do you think? And she’s like, well, I think I can, but I just have to be strategic about what that looks like and listen. And so I was thinking like, yes. So I think if you’re willing to give it time, right. Students will develop and figure out how to do it. And if they’re stuck and confused, that’s okay, give it time. Right. And the next semester, right, they’ll start to get clarity and we just have to kind of stick with it. And so that’s the other thing that’s very promising about these resources is it gives us mechanisms to use for students at different points in their journey.

Heather Shea:
Oh, this is fantastic. I’m loving this conversation and I hope I hope we can have maybe have a part two of this dialogue when the facilitation guide comes out. Cause this is great. One of the foundational principles I know Julie you talk about in the book is this idea that leadership has often women’s leadership books have often portrayed like more feminine characteristics as primary versus feminist leadership. Can you talk about how you define those two terms? Like what is the difference between feminine leadership and feminist leadership?

Julie Owen:
Yes. Well, in some of this, I still thought you, and I’ll get to that in a second, but I think most of the, again, historically the leadership research has been to like early studies of women and talk about how women lead differently than men, right? So it’s very binary and comparative. So every study is framed in this binary and comparative way.

Julie Owen:
And then they come up with the similar conclusions. Feminine leaders are caring and collaborative while male leaders are assertive, lone wolves. Right. And so whenever people talk about feminine leadership styles, it sort of is like nails on a chalkboard for me. Cause I think they’re reinforcing this hetero centralist and heteronormative kind of way of being. So how do we think differently about that? One of my biggest pet peeves is people keep reading with, Julie’s talking about women’s leadership. I’m like, no, I’m not know, right? It’s really hard to call it women and leadership to talk about all the different ways that could look because it becomes a precarious pedestal with some of the language that I use about feminine leadership must look like this. What if I’m a woman who leaves in an assertive or agentic way? Am I not doing leadership?

Julie Owen:
Or if I’m a man, I lead the caring, should men not be caring and collaborative? Oh my gosh. You know, we want men who exhibit those kinds of qualities. So we don’t want to say that women’s leadership has to be one way. So rather than this feminine binary, exclusionary, comparative ways, we’d much rather focus on feminist leadership. And I quote a lot, the book is really centered on Shea and Renn’s amazing article about how we ship them feminine, feminist ways of leading that’s in a Paige Haber-Curran and Dan Tillapaugh’s new directions on student leadership. So I wanted to give them a shout out as well for pioneering, so much of this work. And Heather will get embarrassed. I’ll just read. She says “feminist leadership is both a philosophical in a way of leading that could be applied by any gender, including cis-gender men.” So it’s an inclusive approach. But that doesn’t talk about, it must look one way, but rather strategies to leverage and surface power within leadership. So Heather, just thank you for that work. I’ve got to have a public opportunity. Thank you for that work that you and Kris Renn did and really, really powerful.

Heather Shea:
Well, thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that. And I will say it’s based on many people who have written on feminist leadership including one of the people I’ve cited quite a bit Kowalski-Braun, who says, if feminists are going to be acknowledged, they have to feminist leaders have to have that leadership named as such. Right. And so I, I really appreciate the pairing of the two because I do think that it provides a way to look at leadership through the lens of social change. So yeah, I, one of the ways, one of the things that came up for me when early on I had leadership development leadership educator roles at previous institutions actually worked with Paige at the University of Arizona. It’s such a small world that we live in. But you know, I arrived as a director of a women’s center at a different campus before I came to Michigan State.

Heather Shea:
And I realized that a lot of students were coming in with these like models of leadership and like women’s ways of knowing kind of models of leadership that that’s the way they wanted to be a leader. And not only were we not talking about that, but we weren’t pairing that concept of feminism with it. So yeah, it’s been fun to kind of pull that apart a little bit more so, as you’ve, you’ve mentioned one great resource as far as the the Haber-Curran and Tillapaugh monograph, but I’m curious if there’s other key resources and we’re going to post in the show notes for this episode. Some of the things that you all share so Aoi, we do want to start share, share some of the resources that you would encourage folks to look at to develop their knowledge.

Aoi Yamanaka:
Sure. one resource that I recommend is changing the narrative socially, just leadership educations. And then in addition to Julie’s book, I often refer to this book because this book talks about social identities and then the leadership educations. And then this book talks about the black female student leadership development, or lucky now leaders, identity development, and stuff like that. And at the same time, this book talks about the curriculum development co-curricular development perspective. So this book is a highly recommended as well.

Heather Shea:
Great. Sharrell, what would you like to share? I think you’re on mute.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Sorry about that. Beyond respectability the intellectual thought of race women. I love this book because it features, you know, Black women particularly like Anna Julia Cooper, Pauli Murray, Mary Church Terrell. And I think they give you a blueprint of seeing, you know, women in action, particularly Black women in action, engaging in leadership. And so it’s almost like a case study of different women, and you could be thinking about Black women, how they’re engaging in leadership doing right, what they’re meant to do. Right. And so what they chose to do. So I think it’s just so great to see that in context, and it also gives you historical perspective, which I appreciate.

Heather Shea:
Oh, thank you for that. That’s great. Jennifer.

Jennifer Pigza:
Yeah, I think maybe connected to that, Sharrell’s, I’m really interested in Stacy Abrams, new book and haven’t looked at that at all, but right now what I’m reading. So I think one of the things that’s been really striking me lately, as I also work on some things related to combating white supremacy culture is just more and more and more realizing that the way our organizations work, we call it a bri-ocracy, or we call it traditional leadership, but that’s really a white supremacist frame. And so I am currently reading Just Us an American Conversation by Claudia Rankin. So I really like her narrative approach to what it means to look at race in in the United States. And she also talks about her relationships with various people as she’s understanding race. And as she thinks about what it means to both transform personally, as well as kind of structurally. So I’m not exactly straight on topic on women, in leadership, but for me it’s a very strong thread from one to the other, so,

Heather Shea:
Awesome. So good. I’ll put that on my list also. I haven’t read it yet. Julie, I am familiar with this book.

Jennifer Pigza:
Yes. Well, I’ve been you know, those memes all summer about when things get rough white women join book clubs, you know what I mean? And I was like, Oh, that’s so true. It’s hitting closer to home. I was in like five different anti-racist book clubs this summer. And you know, I wonder about the invite that, and then people not stop there about just reading stuff, right. We also need to change things and use our – or spend our privilege in ways to make more equitable places and spaces. But if you’re going to do some reading first of all, just say anything by Roxanne Gay. And I loved bringing Gay into the classroom. My students just – Bad Feminist still speaks to them in ways that no other text does. And it’s like, yeah, another way to do multifocality in the classrooms. That’s not just my voice as the educator who they’re hearing. And so it connects with students that I, you know, that I maybe don’t speak to you in the same way,

Julie Owen:
But right now I’m reading Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that the Movement Forgot, which is really powerful about sort of how we rethink mainstream feminism and how we can move forward in different ways. But she’s, I know it’s a good book because it’s made me uncomfortable in lots of spaces. You know, when I read it, I’m like, Oh, I need to do more work. And I need to do more thinking about that. So I haven’t finished it yet, so anyway, but it’s, it’s powerful and provocative.

Heather Shea:
So I, we are nearly out of time and this has been such a fabulous conversation. I’m so grateful for your time today. We always end our podcasts though with the question because this podcast is called Student Affairs NOW really quickly. What are you pondering questioning or troubling right now? Julie, I’ll start with you this time.

Julie Owen:
I’m still troubling what the digital divide is doing for my students, right? Like when I’m in the middle of grading finals and I’m looking at who hasn’t been served by online education. So I’m just trying to think about ways to fix that and how to do more personalization and individualization in online learning. So that’s what I’m thinking about.

Heather Shea:
Great. Sharrell.

Sharrell Hassell-Goodman:
Sure. I think what I’ve been thinking about is the impact of all of our new interest on doing education in the area of racial injustice and what it does to people with multiple marginalized identities, particularly I’m thinking about black women, black trans women, and what this period of being interested in their stories does with them personally and their own personal wellness.

Heather Shea:
Good point. Great. Aoi.

Aoi Yamanaka:
Yeah, so based on my experience in my class this semester, I’m pondering, what are the dynamics group dynamics online educations, both asynchronous and synchronous courses and how I can create those great space online education. That’s what I’ve been pondering.

Heather Shea:
A great example of that too. Jennifer.

Jennifer Pigza:
Yeah. I’m, I’m really pondering how our, how we respond as institutions. So I work at a small liberal arts institution, you know, how are our institutions responding in this moment and how can we use this moment to embrace a different way of being organizations and a different way of serving students? I think there’s amazing opportunity. And I think that that opportunity is pretty scary to a lot of people because it involves change, but I’m really pondering. Yeah. How do we become a different kind of organization that serves students better?

Heather Shea:
Yeah, that is a, I think that is a question at the top of mind for many. And why will higher education look like when we’re, when we’re through, you know, at least the next hurdle. Thank you all so much for your time today as guests on Student Affairs NOW also shout out again to our sponsor and publisher of the book and guide Stylus.

Heather Shea:
For those who are watching or listening, you can re receive reminders about this and other episodes of the podcast by subscribing to our Student Affairs NOW, newsletter, which comes out every Wednesday. You can also browse our archives at StudentAffairsNow.com our growing archives, I should say. Please subscribe to our podcasts, invite others, to subscribe on social leave a five star review. It really helps conversations like this, reach more folks and build a community for learning. Again, I’m Heather Shea, thanks to the fabulous guests and to everybody who’s watching and listening, make it a great week and be well, everyone.

Books: 

https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/9781642670097/We-are-the-Leaders-We-ve-Been-Waiting-For

https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/9781642670134/Women-and-Leadership-Development-in-College

Podcasts: 

Phronesis Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/979897

NASPA Leadership Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/user-606900324-709612745   (episodes #73-75) 

Leadership Educator Podcast:  https://theleadershipeducator.podbean.com/e/julie-owen/

Videos: 

ACPA webinar recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kh_t08wIvWdGv6lXae6mdVZF_tEHW4Fh/view?usp=sharing  

Fall for the Book recording:

Julie E. Owen

Article/Book citations: 

Irwin, L. (November 22, 2020). Book review: We are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For: Women and Leadership Development in College. Journal of Leadership Studies, 14 (3), 3-4.    DOI: 10.1002/jls  

Owen, J. E. (2020). We are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For: Women and Leadership Development in College. Sterling, VA: Stylus.

 Pigza, J., Owen, J. E., & Associates (2021).  Women and Leadership in College: A Facilitation Resource. Sterling, VA: Stylus.