Changing the deafening silence of indigenous women’s voices in educational leadership

The critique of western ethnocentric notions of leadership presented in this paper is informed by debates on issues such as gender and educational leadership that have produced meta-narratives that explore and explain women and men’s ways of leading. One of the troubling aspects of western leadership theories is the claim that the functions and features of leadership can be transported and legitimated across homogeneous educational systems. Despite changes that have been made in definitions and descriptions of educational leadership to provide a focus on gender, there is the implicit assumption that while educational leadership might be practised differently according to gender, there is a failure to consider the values and practices of indigenous educational leaders. Thus, the construct of educational leadership needs to be more broadly theorised in order for knowledge of indigenous ways of leading to emerge.