"Thank goodness you are a man!": Troubling Gender and Principal Leadership in Elementary Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study identifies and critically examines gendered discourses of leadership amongst elementary school principals. Interviews with 15 female and male elementary school principals in the Greater Toronto Area were carried out as a means of discovering and revealing these gendered discourses. A discourse analysis of their responses is conducted. A feminist post- structuralist approach to analysis gives rise to a series of gendered discourses of principal leadership, revealing the manner in which these discourses act upon elementary principals. These discourses are divided into three areas: discourses of female principal leadership, discourses of male principal leadership and finally, discourses of reluctance and denial. The work of Michel Foucault is used to understand how dominant discourses work upon the subject through disciplinary power and governmentality. The revelation of these discourses provides opportunities to challenge them. This study illustrates the way these discourses work to both limit and, in some cases, legitimize the elementary principal depending on each principal’s gender. A process by which principals deny the influence of gender on their leadership, then accept and recognize its influence, is analyzed. Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence is used to explore the workings of masculine domination upon both men and women, revealing the suffering experienced by principals as a result of this domination. The wider implications of these gendered discourses on the role of elementary principal are discussed. Moments of resistance to the dominant discourses and agency are also discussed when they are revealed through dialogue with the principals. The work of Judith Butler is used to explore the presence of agency amongst these principals and the implications it has for principals as they navigate these gendered discourses. This study positions principalship as a place where resistance and agency can be explored and realized. Implications for theory and further research are considered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".