A yearlong interview series presented by Esteem: Conversations Between Educators

This year, Esteem will publish a series of interviews that connect two compelling areas of interest. One is the AERA 2016 Conference theme of public scholarship for diverse democracies. The other is women’s leadership in education. Recently, these two areas have converged on Twitter as conversations have developed around #WomenEd and #satchatOC. These conversations have helped to build an international network of women in education leadership—a network that allows them to share their knowledge as they learn from each other and identify problems that need to be addressed both in the field and in research.

Since 2012, contributors to Esteem have engaged in conversations that aim to build community by making talk and inquiry visible to a broad audience. With this series, Esteem will connect with several of the individuals involved in these online conversations focused on women in education leadership in order to develop a deeper understanding of what it means to be a public intellectual, and how participation in this public dialogue has influenced the ways in which they think about their own work. We hope that these conversations will also inform how we define leadership, mentoring, and women’s voices, as well as the ways in which such public dialogue can support and promote the development of more diverse democracies.

Dr. Jeannie Oakes, AERA President. Click on image to watch AERA video

As Oakes argues in her discussion of the 2016 AERA conference theme, “There are basic understandings and applied learnings that should be affecting the way people think about our work.” Oakes’s suggestion of developing partnerships between practitioners and researchers in order to identify problems and come up with tools to address them is apparent in the Twitter chats that have emerged on the topic of women in education leadership. For example, these conversations have developed relationships between teachers, such as Andrea Stringer of Australia, and researchers, such as Alma Harris, Director of the Institute of Educational Leadership at the University of Malaya. They have led to the identification of topics of concern, such the lack of women presenters at educational conferences, and they have led to the development of new conferences, such as the upcoming #WomenEd “unconference” on October 3^rd.

There is a strong connection between the upcoming AERA conference theme, the grassroots movement emerging on Twitter, and the mission of Esteem: Conversations Between Educators—one that we hope to build upon with this interview series. This series will also connect with current research, such as a series of soon to be published articles from the Young Global City Leaders Project.

Some of the upcoming interviews include…

ANDREA STRINGER * ALMA HARRIS * LOUISA RENNIE * KAREN EDGE * HELEN JANC MALONE * GILLIAN HAMILTON * CAROL CAMPBELL * LYN SHARRATT

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.