Life/ography as Storytelling: Using Letters,Diaries,Journals,and Poetry to Understand the Work of Female Leaders

Introduction

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

—Philip Pullman

Several of my students, audience members at conferences, and colleagues have asked why I am interested in the life stories of individuals, rather than in doing survey research or opinion research. Especially in this present moment of email communications and other social media platforms, why put all that time into interviewing, transcribing interviews, traveling to interviews, getting site documents, and then writing someone’s Life/ography or life story? To this, I usually say, “for the story, of course, and for the historical record.” But the historical record includes more than one story does it not? When a life historian writes up research as stories, the stories are really three stories meeting together: the individual participant’s story, the researcher’s story, and the product of these two—the story they make together. It is the essence of qualitative work. Now, after doing this work in the qualitative arena for nearly four decades, I have accepted that there will always be tensions between qualitative studies using life history, oral history, biography (which I call Life/ography), and that which is viewed as academic research. I moved way beyond the debates of the 1980s, then the next two decades of discussion on rigor and ways to assess qualitative work—and decided to just go ahead and do the research. Quite frankly, doing this work requires one to be rigorous, and, if not, you are certainly out of a job as a researcher. The entire enterprise falls apart without spending significant time with and for the participants in any given research project.

When I was asked if I would be interested in writing a piece for this special issue, I agreed immediately. There was one request: to write the piece with some data from a recent study and unpack the meaning and the value of the study. This article, then, will focus on a study I began a few years ago on female leaders. For this article, I will focus on two female superintendents. These two individuals were part of a group of five female leaders. I am planning to do a book on the entire project. Here, I selected these two exemplars due to their ability to articulate their beliefs, their passion for their work, and their advocacy for students, families, their community, and their faculty.

I became interested in female leaders in education since almost every student in my qualitative methods classes were female, working full-time in schools, and were raising children. Many of them were single mothers and working on their doctorates full-time or part-time. They were amazing in many ways, and most were teachers or aspiring to become some type of leader such as a principal, a special education director, an English as a second language (ESL) director, a curriculum director, or any other director in a school district. None of them wanted to be a school superintendent. This got me interested in the literature on female leaders, on women in the role of principal, women superintendents, and women directors in school districts in one of the areas mentioned earlier. It seemed that women stopped at either the principal-as-leader or a director-as-leader of an area critical for that district. I was influenced by many writers in the area of educational leadership, particularly the work of C. C. Brunner (1999) beginning with her edited book, Sacred Dreams: Women and the Superintendency. Likewise, Educational Administration Quarterly, particularly since the 2000s, has regularly published articles on female superintendents. This made me curious about those few women who do indeed become superintendents. How did they do it? Demographic data indicate that the number of women in the superintendent’s office is indeed growing, certainly since the 1990s. However, of the nation’s 13,728 superintendents, only 1,984 are women, as reported by the American Association of School Administrators (AASA). Males especially outnumber females in the role of superintendent in major cities and large metropolitan areas. Put simply, 87% of superintendents in the United States are male.

Gender has always been an issue in education and for me as an educator. One only has to look at pay scale data to see that females earn less than male counterparts in the same job. In fact, in my home state of Florida, females are below the national average of 76 cents to the dollar. This is the regional context and data from which I raised two questions: What makes female superintendents apply for the job and become successful? What makes the female superintendent inspired and committed to the job?

As for the methodological context, it has been my experience that dealing with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) can result in epistemological tensions. Depending on how individuals describe their research projects, the IRB may refuse to recognize oral history, life history, or biography as research. The reason usually given has been, “This is not generalizable.” To such a statement, I usually reply, “Thank goodness.” These types of exchanges inspired me to undertake a career-long quest to educate IRB members about what I term Life/ography. I advise my students who have had their life history, oral history, or biography projects rejected, as I have, to add the word “interviewing” and a sentence stating that “this is research.” So far, that has been a successful strategy. In other words, we have been calling our various projects “life history interviewing,” “oral history interviewing,” “biographical interviewing projects,” or “life story interviewing.” We have learned the hard way that the term life stories gets rejected since “that is not research.” I have written elsewhere (Janesick, 2007, 2010, 2013) about shades of difference in these three approaches, depending on the discipline to which the researcher adheres. The point is that, whatever researchers name their project, they should be specific and precise about how they define the selected method. (See Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Cole & Knowels 2001; Denzin, 1989; Ellis & Flaherty, 1992; Hess-Biber & Leavy 2008; Yow, 1994) Let us now turn to the two participants in the study.

The Participants

To identify participants, I asked colleagues who worked with superintendents if they knew anyone who might be interested in participating in a study on women leaders. There were two criteria: They had to have an earned doctorate in the field of educational leadership or equivalent, and they had to be willing to be in the study. Once colleagues gave me a handful of names, I started calling them on the phone and simply asked them whether they would be interested in the study. Next, we met personally over coffee or lunch, and the study began. All studies have a life of their own, and I name this moment of agreement verbally as the beginning of the research project.

I began with five superintendents for the study, and one dropped out after the first interview due to time constraints and “fear of saying too much.” I apprised all participants of ethical procedures and IRB requirements, and they signed informed consent statements, which offer a way out of the study at any time. After two interviews, another dropped out of the study almost for the same reason. She was an assistant superintendent at the time and feared she may not be able to move up to the role of superintendent. As a result, three participants remained and were interviewed twice. Two of the remaining participants had such thoughtful and deep responses to questions that I continued to interview them an additional third time. All this took place over a nearly three-year period. In this article, the names of the two superintendents have been changed for reporting purposes. I selected two participants to focus on here simply because they were amazingly articulate, had an ability to get to the heart of the matter, and remained committed to their role with a strong sense of hope. While the participants read over transcripts as a part of member checking, they ended up writing poetry to capture key elements of the three-year timeframe of the research process. Hence, I named the participants after female poets.

There is a movement among superintendents to become professionalized by earning a doctorate degree, so it seemed natural to require this achievement. The two participants selected here have earned doctorates; both began their respective careers in the field of special education, and both serve in districts with a diverse population. Both are of the Baby Boomer generation. Each noted, over the course of the interviews, that they paid their dues in terms of being a teacher, a principal, assistant superintendent, and then superintendent. Both continue to be leaders in their district and among fellow superintendents. Both are from states with a long history, until recently, of a commitment to education. One participant is from Illinois, the other from Michigan. Both had witnessed, in their respective settings, changes in public education when budget cuts from newly elected governors, threats and insults in local media, and orchestrated attacks on public schools became fashionable. The underlying attempts by market place commandos to replace public education with for-profit schools have regularly and systematically failed. To give just one example, here in the state of Florida, well over 85% of charter schools have failed to live up to their “charter” and have closed. These, of course, are replaced as the movement to eliminate public schools is repeatedly promoted by individuals who may not understand the history or importance of public education in the United States. The charter school game is to be one step ahead of getting caught for not living up to the stated charter. Nonetheless, both leaders are watchful for all signs of continuing tensions and threats. Three major interview prompts began what became the life stories of both women: (a) Describe your typical workday or any day of your choice. (b) How do you describe your leadership approaches? (c) Describe a recent critical incident of your choice. These three prompts accounted for nearly two hours of interview transcripts per participant. Other sidebar questions were posed that were applicable to the context of the individual participants. Let us now turn to the participants themselves.

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop

Above all, be the heroine of your own life, not the victim.

—Nora Ephron

Dr. Elizabeth Bishop ¹ is active in her professional field of educational leadership. She earned her doctorate of education (EdD) in the spring of 2004. Previously, she earned her bachelor of science in elementary and special education in 1978, as well as two master’s degrees in the 1990s in curriculum and instruction and in educational administration. She is a firm believer in education and its value. She has one college graduate son. During the time period of this study, her husband died in an accident. She is active in professional development and attends regular meetings of her professional organizations. In addition, she has served and continues to serve on various advisory boards and community groups, and she is active in writing grants. Furthermore, she has a passion for technology and spends time mentoring potential leaders for her district. She sees herself as a lifelong educator who happens to be in a school leadership role at the time of the study. When asked about her work on any given day, she responded this way:

Well you know that I was in a district . . . with a demographic shift. At one time, it was primarily white and now is predominantly integrated. Many of the suburbs . . . are either Hispanic or Black for the most part. We seem to have a balance in the past four years (of Hispanic, Black, White students), and my responsibilities are really in the arenas of curriculum technology, ELL, and Bilingual issues . . . Everything except special education . . . The big umbrella is helping people deal with change: the changing demographics, the changing expectations for students, the changing regulations. So, it was a very staid community. People were here for 30 years and then retired. You know, it was their first job and their last job. I came in on the third year of a wave of retirements . . . So now there are a handful of veterans (teachers), a good chunk of mid-career people in teaching 10-15 years. And lots of “newbies.” So—a lot of focus on curriculum, creating district level curriculum . . . When I got there, we had maybe seven different math curricula being used in elementary schools and feeding into junior high. So creating a sense of community has been my biggest focus.

In response to the question, “how do you describe yourself as a leader?” Dr. Bishop immediately jumped in with the following:

(Laughter) I laugh because I was just talking about this with someone . . . a former colleague who thinks in terms of transforming things. For me, I think situational leadership and servant leadership . . . that’s me. I work in teams as a member, and I lead teams, sometimes more than others . . . I like to think I made a difference in my district . . . our entire leadership team is struggling to create what I like to see as a supportive, collaborative team. I am not sure that’s possible . . . but you also understand the big picture, not taking things personally. The whole issue with a recent community controversy over a book, the “Fat Kids” book about a boy who considers suicide but then decides not to do so, was a first big controversy for this district. They have not had parents that have been in your face. That’s something I have always dealt with in my career.

Dr. Bishop then explained in detail about the controversy of a book assigned for reading over the summer about a young boy who was obese, who was bullied, and who was depressed:

He has had a tough time. He thought about suicide and decided against it when a friend listened to his tale and urged him to play music his passion. This got him active, engaged and out of depression. The book is titled Fat Kid Rules the World by Kale Going. The themes are really about friendship and perseverance. His mom’s died of cancer. His dad is an alcoholic. He is in an abusive home situation. He is befriended by a homeless teen that is a gifted guitarist and asks this kid to join his band and play drums. It is a great story of acceptance.

Dr. Bishop then goes on to describe the controversy about Fat Kid Rules the World that began with an email campaign against the teacher, the school, and the district. The groups objecting to the book apparently did not approve of a teen thinking of suicide or a homeless teen suggesting a solution. No matter what is thrown at Dr. Bishop in terms of problems or controversies, she “just goes on.”

Dr. Louise Bogan

Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you will be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Dr. Louise Bogan ² sees herself as a leader, speaks of vision as critical to leadership, and remains an activist among her fellow superintendents. She earned a PhD in administration after realizing that the degree might be helpful in advancing from an assistant-level superintendent to a full-fledged superintendent. She has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, plus additional business courses beyond her training in speech pathology and curriculum studies. She has three children, all grown; at the time of the study, they each had either completed graduate school or were close to completion. During the time she was working on her doctorate, Dr. Bogan was also raising her children. This is the case for many of my students presently. When asked to describe herself as a leader, she replied with this statement:

I am hard working. Lots of time, effort, responsibility. I like to work with people, though, and people tend to work with me. Pretty easy going, but demanding . . . People tend to be pleasant . . . I am a sort of benevolent autocrat when needed . . . somewhere between those two. You have to lead. That is your role. Some of this is your vision, where you want to go, and what your vision is in accordance with the (School) Board—with where the Board sees the district going. But you have to provide some of that vision for them . . . You know, it’s often said that the primary responsibility of the superintendent is to keep seven people happy. If you can do that, you will continue to have a job. I do a weekly newsletter to the board members, describing virtually everything in detail that’s gone on in a week. This week’s, for example, was seven single spaced pages . . . The point is to lead. I take my work seriously.

Dr. Bogan goes on to describe how she has to be proactive, for there are issues that spring up and compel decision making further on in the year or the near future:

Part of my job is to anticipate questions that come to me or a board member. I field a lot of questions for them, a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails during the week. For example, this week a board member asked if it is true that coaches get a raise every year. He had heard a rumor to that effect. So that’s a pretty simple answer. It goes to the contract. If the contract had built in raises, there is a raise. But if you have a contact . . . say you are on a freeze . . . the coaches are not going to get that raise . . . this was in an email by the way. That’s ok. That is public information. That’s fine.

Dr. Bogan spends time planning for mentoring new teachers and new leaders. She described how she initiated a way for experienced teachers to work with beginning teachers for the science curriculum. However, the entire faculty was involved, rather than just one grade level to grade level event. She wanted everyone to have a stake in the science curriculum.

Her biggest challenges are those where faculty are accused of inappropriate behavior, and she is inadvertently put in a situation to fix it. She described a case where the entire administrative team was accused by a parent of “hiding information.” The district did an investigation, and the police did an investigation.

So there were a lot of hard feelings . . . my office was searched by the state police. They came in with guns . . . went through every single piece of paper in my office . . . to see if I was withholding information, which I was not. They took my hard drive. I was called to testify. They cited English Common Law, which requires no statute, no ordinance, no proof . . . to interrogate you . . . It turned out that it (the case) went through criminal proceedings, and the teacher was vindicated after losing his job.

When asked about the aftermath of the incident, Dr. Brogan responded with the following:

Life went on. The student finished, graduated . . . so at least she was saved from ramifications. She was a kid. She was proven to be a liar. The whole process there’s (long pause in thinking) . . . no respect. It was total disrespect. I had local and state police told to have their guns loaded, and I am thinking . . . “You were my DARE (drug enforcement) officer . . . what is this?” It was like there was no prior relationship . . . They thought I was a terrible person. How could they think that of me?

Dr. Bogan went on to explain that she learned from this incident and, to this day, has never forgotten the disrespect exhibited by law enforcement for the role of superintendent. She mentioned that her worries for the students, the faculty, and administrative team were ameliorated by the strength they showed through the bogus incident. On reflection months later, she realized how fragile, yet how strong, the system is in the end.

Lessons Learned About Life/ography and Storytelling

While these two exemplars are part of a larger study, there are lessons learned that are worthy of mention. What was most thought provoking for me from these talented and prepared female leaders were the following six similarities:

What struck me, as I went through the interview transcripts, notes, letters, and poetry from this study, is the beauty of finding two leaders with imagination, curiosity, and belief in their work. They could never settle for halfway in terms of coming to solutions. They persisted. If a problem came up, as it does daily, they attempted to solve the problem and were careful about including team members in decision making and problem solving. They both had, as I have, a strong work ethic that may have something to do with living in North-Central states that traditionally have invested in education. It may have to do with growing up in families who believed education was the most important factor in success in life. Both stressed that they loved their jobs and looked forward to each day, “no matter what was coming.”

What also stood out for me was the irony of politicians and educational policy makers who avoid consulting with key leaders who could easily help them understand the complexity of educational funding and policies. Instead, they select business imposters and poseurs to head agencies and make changes to policies that work well! More recently, they have selected individuals who give large campaign contributions when they have perfectly capable and knowledgeable individuals who have a lifetime of experience and training in education. These individuals could help them more than any campaign contribution. The strength and determination of the two leaders described here could certainly be an asset, if they were consulted on any educational policy. For all of us who do some version of Life/ography, we realize that whatever is going on during the course of the study, it all began many years before we arrived in that particular social context. That is the value of understanding the historical and demographic qualities of the context.

About Method: Using Letters, Reflective Journals, and Poetry

To be a person is to have a story to tell.

—Isak Dinesen

I used arts-based approaches to get at the life stories of female leaders because it makes sense, it is efficient, and it is effective. The busy days and evenings of these leaders means you have to set up an interview schedule months in advance; both participants and researcher are exhausted by fieldwork, and, as you know, there is just not enough time in one day to get everything on tape. Dr. Brogan, for example, works every night into the evenings, arriving home around 9:30 p.m. or so. She attends Friday night high school football games, which is expected by the school board and other stakeholders. So I asked myself, “What would be a good way to do some member checking on the data in the interview?”

Why not write an actual letter? Since email is contested as a means of communication the higher up you go in a bureaucracy, presumably due to potential lawsuits, I chose to do letters to clarify a point here and there and get actual recent data—not old demographic data. Remember that all demographic data are not equal. It is a good rule of thumb to find the latest data to inform the context of the study. For understanding the social contexts of the two districts where the leaders work, I looked at demographics on the website of American Factfinder. ³

This database is filled with the breakdown of all cultural facts, which always adds some nice embroidery to any story. While I am limited here by the number of pages for this issue of Qualitative Inquiry, when I get to complete a book on this topic, I will include pertinent demographics as an appendix and suggest that technique for others working in this area (See Appendices A and B).

Journal Writing and Poetry

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

It takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

—William Wordsworth

Perhaps the most revealing data for me is found in the researcher and participant’s reflective journal writing and poetry. I have written earlier about this in articles (Janesick, 2004, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016) and in books (Janesick, 2010, 2016). Other resources on journal writing, notes, and poetry include Leavy (2011), Hess-Biber and Leavy (2008), Ritchie (2003), and Yow (1994).

What journal writing and poetry did for us, participants and researcher, was to refine our mutual understanding of the interviews and to serve as a means of communication. In addition, keeping a reflective journal of all thoughts about the study is a creative act, much like the creative act of poetry. It leads to greater and deeper communication. In fact, in writing this article limited by length, I continued my reflective journal writing to sort out what I needed to say. I see journal writing as a type of connoisseurship. We become connoisseurs of our own thinking, reflection patterns, and our understanding of our work as qualitative researchers—in this case, as life storytellers.

Looking back on the final interview transcripts, I see LB as one of the hardest working individuals I know. I only wish we had this type of commitment in academia. We could learn from this leader . . . All the jargon we use in higher education about partnerships, global initiatives, etc. is hollow when you actually see partnerships in action, for example, in a school district on the grass roots level, an entire school district. It is astounding that it is taking place . . . Again, why don’t politicians and policy makers talk to those doing the actual hard work?

—Journal entry, VJJ, Juneteenth

The following is an example of a journal entry from Dr. Bishop—and she also mentioned this in the interviews more than once:

Writing for me is a way to retrieve memories . . . sometimes I forget where I started from. I began in special education with an emphasis on visually impaired. I thought I could do something good (working in special education) . . . so I did itinerant work and that was so tiring . . . I left teaching because I was doing two jobs basically. I worked as a manager for a big food chain where I could have only one job and that was nice . . . but I missed teaching and returned to it . . . Then I recall I was mentored by the (then) all female administrative team and that got me to the next level. I will never forget the mentors.

—Journal entry, LB. undated

So here are examples of where journal writing can open up a wide variety of follow-up questions in a study and give insights into the writer’s beliefs and values. Imbedded in the journal writing and even in the interviews, all of us attempted to render meaning through the use of poetry. As you might expect, not every participant will jump at the chance to do poetry. I wondered about how to jumpstart this particular passion of mine and settled on going back to the interviews and asking participants to do “found data poems” (FDP). This is poetry actually found in the transcripts. This process alleviates any stress about writing poetry because it is already on paper, in the transcript. The person who spoke the words can then arrange the words to make a poem. I also suggested we do haiku, which is the poetry method of choice with my doctoral students, but that did not inspire anyone but myself. See this FDP from Dr. Bishop:

Concern? Controversial? Ban the book from the library?

Not really.

Friendship themes and perseverance

Acceptance. Listen to the children.

And this FDP from Dr. Brogan:

Accusations

Interrogations

Subpoenas

Testimony

Reputations ruined.

In the newspapers

Hurtful

Is this preparation for something?

My point in using poetry and certainly this type, the FDP, is a way to elicit information that may not have come in a direct formal interview or an informal interview.

If it is already in the transcript, it may, and often does, spark new insight into the meaning of a particular incident or situation. It is a means of extending the conversation. It is also a way to help participants and researcher get to the heart of the meaning of a critical incident or of everyday work. If it is true that all of us are searching for the meaning of our life, poetry is one tried and true approach to telling one’s story. To summarize, using letters, reflective journals, and poetry is a triangle of marvelous approaches to storytelling in a sophisticated way. All of these force reflection. All of these ignite curiosity and dust off the imagination. Imagination is often stagnated in bureaucracies (Tierney & Lanford, 2016), even when you bring your pets to work (as the workers of “Silicon Valley” keep noting as an “innovation”). Each person has a story to tell and, by using these arts-based techniques, the story telling may come more easily. Poetry and journal writing are ways to keep your imagination alive. They help to get to the story.

Tell me the facts and I learn.

Tell me the truth and I believe.

Tell me a story and it will live

In my heart forever.

—American Indian Proverb