Abstract
This is a narrative inquiry of Dr. Joan Wynne’s transformative leadership in education that traces the roots of Wynne’s social justice activism and rich descriptions and examples of her transformative leadership qualities. Akin to a Russian doll, integrity is the overall case within which all of Wynne’s transformative leadership qualities reside—constant love and caring for others; respect for other’s ideas, and the shifting of their perspectives; deep and active listening skills; the ability to build and maintain networks of relationships; commitment to the theory and practice of social justice; and hope in the power of youth to enact positive social change.
Keywords
Despite women’s gains in education over the past 50 years, men still greatly outnumber women in educational leadership positions (Hill et al., 2016). Hundreds of articles offer theories about the problem and advice to individual women on how to step up, lean in, and make their voices heard. But the leadership gap is stubborn and systemic, and individual choices alone will not solve this problem. It is vitally important for women educational leaders to tell their own stories on their own terms and through their own experiences. Women who share their stories of leadership embolden them to own these stories and pave the path for other women to walk along the route of educational leadership. Moreover, as evidence mounts that women’s research productivity has been declining during the global pandemic, while the trends for scholarship by men has shown the opposite (Regulska, 2021), it is important that research on women educational leaders be supported, produced, and disseminated.
Joan Wynne is a powerful educational leader whose voice needs to be heard. On April 29, 2015, in one of her final days in her official role as Associate Professor in the Department of Education Leadership and Professional Studies at Florida International University (FIU), Joan gave an open talk at FIU’s College of Education titled “Who Speaks for Justice? Telling our Stories in the Noise of Hegemony.” During her talk, Joannie, as she likes to be called, said the following: As the rapper, Common, sings in Glory, “Justice for all ain’t specific enough.” I want our stories that we tell each other to be specific enough. I want us to tell of the tragedy and glory of cultures, of humans, of trees, of earth. I want us to raise all of those stifled intonations. The youth, the ancestors, the elders, the rock, the land, the river, the sea, the cosmic energy. I believe those vibrations and stories will stir us in our perpetual work toward resistance and inspired action.
In these poetic phrases, Joannie gives us a short narrative of her life, that of a transformative leader.
According to Shields (2010), transformative leadership “begins with questions of justice and democracy; it critiques inequitable practices and offers the promise not only of greater individual achievement but of a better life lived in common with others” (p. 559). Qualities of a transformative leader include: an emphasis on both the individual and the collective good; a focus on emancipation, equity, and justice; an emphasis on interdependence and global awareness; a balancing of criticism with promise; and a call for moral courage in action (Shields, 2020). Transformative leadership is sometimes used interchangeably with transformational leadership (Shields, 2020) but the two are different in critical ways. Transformational leadership is essentially a positivist theory that focuses on organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Transformative leadership is a critical theory that centers on the values of equity, inclusion, and social justice and actions that challenge inequitable practices and promote equitable and inclusive participation both in the organization and the social environment (Shields, 2010). Transformative theory draws on critical race theory, queer theory, culturally responsive leadership, and leadership for social justice.
From her commitment to collaboration, to her insistence on the importance of gaining a historical consciousness, to her hope in the power of education and students’ activism for a better future, Joannie has exhibited the qualities of transformative leadership throughout her professional career and is therefore apt as the subject of this research.
In Joannie’s own words, storytelling provides the essence of meaning. It is therefore most appropriate to use narrative inquiry to uncover her story as a transformative educational leader. Narrative inquiry “involves telling stories, recounting – accounting for – how individuals make sense of events and actions in their lives with themselves as the agents” (McAlpine, 2016, p. 34). Simply stated, “narrative inquiry is stories lived and told” (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 20). As Clandinin and Connelly (2000) note, narrative inquiry begins with a wondering rather than a research question. The “wondering” that forms the basis of this narrative is: What qualities of Joan Wynne’s experience make her a transformative leader? The purpose of this article is to explore Joan Wynne’s transformative education leadership qualities as she uses them in practice.
Method
What follows is Joan Wynne’s story. It makes use of one face-to-face interview I had with Joannie that lasted 3 h, two follow-up phone interviews I had with her, each of which lasted 1 hour, a 1-h phone interview I had with her colleague Lisa Delpit, education researcher and former Executive Director and Eminent Scholar at the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at FIU, and countless hours I spent with Joannie throughout our 17-year working relationship and friendship. Also included are her numerous writings about leadership, systemic racism, social justice, and educational transformation from among her eight published books, 13 book chapters, and 12 peer-reviewed articles. The data was analyzed using Shield’s (2010) predetermined criteria and Wynne’s own criteria for transformative leadership. I coded the interviews I had with Joan Wynne, the confirmative interview I had with Lisa Delpit, the observational hours I spent with Joannie, and Joannie’s writings in order to identify statements and practices that conform to transformative leadership criteria as articulated by Shields (2010, 2020) and by Wynne herself, as well as to identify any contradictory statements.
In constructing Joannie’s narrative, I made use of Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Based on Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience, specifically his notions of situation, continuity, and interaction, Clandinin and Connelly (2000) refer to a “three-dimensional narrative inquiry space” (p. 50) in which the personal and social are on one dimension, temporality (past, present, and future) on another, and place being the third dimension. According to Clandinin and Connelly (2000), all narrative inquiry studies address temporal matters, focus on the personal and social, and occur in specific places. The narrative that follows attempts to do just that.
Interview Sequence
During my first interview with Joannie, on January 12, 2019, she responded to a few general questions about educational leadership and her story as an educational leader. Specifically, she described the characteristics of an education leader, talked about particular experiences with different education projects, gave advice for aspiring women education leaders, and articulated her aspirations for her own future work in education. During our second interview, on April 26, 2019, I asked Joannie probing questions about “hope,” a word that she had used several times in the first interview. Our third interview, on October 29, 2019, took place after I had interviewed Lisa Delpit on her views of Joannie’s leadership skills (October 15, 2019). In this last interview, Joannie elaborated on her vision of leadership and her role in the development of three education programs in which she was involved—at Morehouse College, Georgia State University, and Florida International University.
Meeting Joan Wynne
I became acquainted with Joannie in 2002, when we both started working at FIU. Our offices were on the same floor of the Ziff Education Building (ZEB), one corner away from each other. All I knew about Joannie before we met was that she and Lisa Delpit had come to FIU as a team to run its Center for Urban Education and Innovation, and that they had both previously been leaders of an urban education center at Georgia State University. Lisa Delpit, author of Other People’s Children (1995), was someone I admired, looked up to, and was intimidated by. Not only had I read Lisa’s work in graduate school, but her advocacy for the proposition that understanding the cultural context in which education occurs is of critical importance in teaching and learning is a viewpoint that touched me personally. I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut during the height of the movement to integrate schools through busing. As a teenager, along with all my friends in my predominately white neighborhood, I was bused to a predominately African American and Latinx high school. However, rather than make a positive difference in our education by learning with a diverse group of students, I distinctly remember a profound sense of confusion amongst all of us—the teachers, those of us who were bused in, and the students who had been there before us. There was no professional development for teachers to facilitate students’ learning with diversity, and none of us were prepared to learn in an environment of diversity. I remember thinking at the time: there’s something wrong. There’s got to be a way for diversity to become the catalyst for a positive learning experience, but this isn’t it. It was that scenario that came back to me when I decided to become a teacher educator, and it’s been my mission since to find ways for all students’ voices to be heard and acted upon in the learning process. Lisa’s message certainly reverberated for me as a professional, but it was still somewhat unnerving for me to be around Lisa, someone I considered to have tremendous power as an educator and a writer. So even though I didn’t know Joannie, the thought that she was Lisa’s close colleague made me wary.
I don’t remember my first meeting with Joannie. Although this might be due to my weakened middle-aged memory, I believe that not recalling my first encounter with her has more to do with what “meeting Joan Wynne” means. Throughout our friendship, my experience of Joannie has been that, although she doesn’t hesitate to insert her opinions in conversation, she has a great ability to ask pertinent questions, listen intently to another’s point of view, and engage in topics of concern to that person. So how did Joannie and I meet? I really can’t pinpoint a time or place when I met Joan Wynne. If pressed, I would say that we met one another sometime in the fall of 2002, in our mutual hallway of the ZEB building, in one or another of our offices, at department meetings, and through casual conversations about FIU students, our respective research projects, and our mutual interests.
The Roots of Social Justice Activism
My first interview with Joannie was on a Saturday morning in January 2019, at one of FIU’s academic centers near her home. The Director of Operations met me at the front door, checked my university ID card, took me to meet Joannie, and escorted us to a small conference room on the second floor. I noticed how kind Joannie was to this employee, even though he had barred her from coming in until I had arrived, as I was the official reserver of the room.
We got settled, asked each other about our families, and talked about what we had done for the New Year’s holiday. Then I asked her my first question, “For you, what are the characteristics of a true education leader?” Before she responded, she asked me if she could say something about her mom. “Sure,” I said. So, she told me this: My first exposure to great female leadership was my mother, Catherine Wynne, who parented five children, while at the same time becoming an activist in her community. And besides her activism, she was president of so many different organizations in a time in the South where women rarely led. She was president of civic organizations and Catholic charities for the Archdiocese of Atlanta-Savannah. She led a political campaign for John F. Kennedy for our community. So much of what I do came from watching her and hearing her teach all of us children that it was not enough to be principled; rather one must go public with pronouncements of principles. She said that “Silence is consent,” so it was our duty to speak out loud to people who used the “n” word or who ridiculed other people. We, she taught, must not be silent in the midst of wrongdoing.
In Joannie’s most recent book, Reckoning with our roots: Unearthing Injustice to find our way home (Wynne, 2019) she tells stories of grappling with her own past growing up in the Jim Crow South, and of the counter-narratives that her parents instilled in her. She also gives her readers lessons of the racism that runs so deeply throughout U.S. history and describes the ways in which youth and education give her hope for the future. To get a sense of the roots of Joannie’s social justice activism, the very first lines of the preface of this book are instructive: I’ve nurtured a love/hate relationship with the south since I was 8 years old. That year, the consequences of the Jim Crow south jumped up from our coffee table and slapped my young white face. After arriving home from school, a magazine cover photo seized my attention. It depicted men and women, with contorted faces, swinging chains threateningly at young black children attempting to integrate a southern school, while national guardsmen with rifles stood between them and the angry mob. Stunned by the photo, I asked my Mom, ‘Why are those people so mean?’ She tried to explain that many southerners’ behavior was ugly and bigoted, but, she said, often it came from ignorance. This excuse didn’t resonate with me, at that moment, but I adored my mother, thought she was the smartest person in any room, knew she hated bigotry, and so hung onto the notion of ignorance as a rationale for racism. That is, until my days at a state college (p. XV).
In this book, Joannie goes on to describe multiple instances of overt racism she witnessed at this college from faculty, fraternity brothers, and university officials. These experiences disabused her of the notion that ignorance was the source of racist beliefs and behavior. As Joannie tells it, “I learned to hate my southern roots, my southern drawl, and even my favorite foods of fried chicken, greens, grits, and black-eyed peas” (Wynne, 2019, p. XV). In turning her back on her own cultural roots, she found comfort in the company of her Black students and colleagues and in the writings of Black novelists, poets, and historians.
In another of her books, Confessions of a white educator: Stories in search of justice and diversity (Wynne et al., 2012), Joannie mused about the next step in her social activism, or, as she would say, her journey to finding her roots. This step consisted of taking a faculty position at Morehouse College, a private historically black college (HBCU) in Atlanta, Georgia: I think that growing up in a segregated south was one of those defining experiences for me and possibly a reason for my ultimate need to immerse myself into another culture. Because my parents philosophically stood against racism and segregation, as a family we lived in contradiction to the society we were born into. No one in my neighborhood nor in my catholic school or university seemed to share the same world view as my family. So, although my white skin advantaged and protected me, I became accustomed to feeling intellectually and politically alienated. And because of that, I've come to believe that in the south at that time, only in the black community could I have possibly found a large number of like-minded people. Hence, my sojourn at Morehouse. (p. x).
Joannie found kinship with the faculty and students at Morehouse. It was there that she learned her “first lessons about loving, or at least, reconciling with the south” from the African American students she taught (Wynne, 2019, p. XV). Joannie said that she would have stayed at Morehouse for her entire career had it not been for Lisa Delpit and Asa Hilliard III, who asked her to help them develop and then run a center for urban education at Georgia State University. Joannie took a 3-year leave from Morehouse to collaborate with Delpit and Hilliard, and after the 3 years, she resigned from Morehouse to work full-time as the Associate Director of the Alonso A. Crim Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Georgia State.
Joan Wynne’s Transformative Educational Leadership Qualities
Joannie began to come into her own as a transformative educational leader at Morehouse College. When she started there in 1992, the college did not have a Department of Education. In Joannie’s telling, a lot of Morehouse students pursued a minor in Education at Spelman College, a neighbor HBCU for women in Atlanta. However, Morehouse students couldn’t always get into education classes, as they had to wait to register until after the Spelman women had their opportunity to do so. After several semesters of meeting with students at Morehouse who expressed their desire to teach, Joannie set out to do what was needed to create and implement a department of Education Studies at Morehouse. This included initiating and attending several meetings with the Morehouse College Provost, officials at the Georgia State Department of Education, and administrators at the Atlanta Public Schools’ Board of Education. She used these meetings to generate interest in a new department, develop an education plan with rationale, data, and curricula, and shepherd the plan through a multitude of bureaucratic channels. Joannie was up to these tasks because of her belief in the hope of education and in her students’ abilities to become master teachers and use their courage to change what she called the “plantation paradigm in public schools” (Wynne, 2019). “When you are in love with the work you do, you just do it,” she said.
In Joannie’s writings, she has disavowed the concepts of charismatic and strong leadership. In a narrative she wrote on Bob Moses’ transformative leadership, “Grassroots leadership for the 21st century: Leading by not leading,” (Wynne, 2009), Joannie spelled out the leadership lessons she learned from what she called a continuing internship “shadowing a leader, gathering data, attempting to see the patterns of leadership, the nuances and the directions” (p. 93). These leadership lessons consisted of: (1) the practice of silence; (2) the discipline of patience; (3) the belief in the small and the intimate in life; (4) personal connection; (5) giving voice to the voiceless; (6) a profound capacity to listen deeply and well; (7) building the network of relationships in communities and across the nation; (8) reaching for strategies to move forward; and, (9) working within and against various structures. At the beginning of this narrative, Joannie wrote that Moses exhibited a disciplined denial of any attachment to charismatic leadership. Instead, in her words, he has always been committed to “fostering the leadership capacity of others” (p. 84).
Joannie wrote about leadership again in a chapter titled “Strong People Don’t Need Strong Leaders” (Wynne, 2017). This piece starts with an attribution of the title of the chapter to revolutionary thinker and civil rights leader, Ella Baker (Cantarow & O’Malley, 1980, p. 53), whose “statement epitomizes her philosophy that the wisdom needed to fight against hegemony emerges from the brilliance of the people stuck at the bottom of oppressive systems” (p. x). Joannie continued by writing that Baker’s leadership philosophy stands “in stark contrast to the charismatic leadership philosophy of many in the nation,” and that it leaves no space for “hierarchal iterations of leadership” (p. x).
In my second interview with Joannie, I followed up on her notions about leadership. She reiterated her skepticism of concepts like “strong” and “charismatic” leadership. And she went further, saying that “I need to think of another word for leadership. I don’t want to hold onto a word that represents a plantation paradigm” (Wynne, personal communication, October 29, 2019).
Despite Joannie’s reluctance to use the word “leadership” or think about herself as a leader, her actions throughout her career speak for themselves. Joan Wynne has exhibited all the qualities of transformative educational leadership that she described when writing about Bob Moses. What follows are the themes of transformative leadership that arose during our conversations, with examples of Joannie’s own embodiment of these qualities. As will be noted, these qualities are an amalgamation of the qualities she attributes to her mentor, Bob Moses.
Listening in Action
During my first interview with Joannie, when I asked about the characteristics of a “true education leader” Joannie first talked about listening. Those she considers “sterling educational leaders - Lisa Delpit, Bob Moses, and Asa Hilliard”—are connected by their open-mindedness to all ideas that are on the table, allowing others in a group to think about, assess, and respond to these ideas, while the leader digests what is happening and remains silent. Joannie noted that the listening that transformative leaders do requires respect for everyone in the room, as well as confidence in discussion as process. At one point, she called this confluence of competencies “listening in action.” It is also a compilation of the following leadership qualities that she attributes to Bob Moses: the practice of silence; the discipline of patience; giving voice to the voiceless; and a profound capacity to listen deeply and well. As an example of “listening in action,” Joannie recounted the first time she was in a group meeting with Lisa Delpit: Lisa called the meeting. People came from the University of Georgia, from a number of different places and we were all there, about 15 people at the table. Lisa threw out a question about the grant. She just hushed and let everybody say something. She never put any value on what anybody said, never commented on it. She just listened. By the end of the hour she still had not spoken. Then she summarized what everybody had said and then weighed in with some of her own thinking. But it wasn’t until she had listened to everybody (Wynne, personal communication, January 12, 2019).
Joannie said that she was truly taken by this process of listening and soon started to practice it in her own classroom teaching. When she began teaching graduate students at Georgia State University, she said that she lost this skill, reverting to her ingrained habit of calling out injustices and speaking her mind when a contentious issue was raised. Joannie ended her musing about active listening with these words: “The ability to just hush and listen to others, has been a struggle for me, and, I can say now, it has also been the biggest growth in my life” (Wynne, personal communication, January 12, 2019).
While I can’t speak to growth in Joannie’s listening in action skill, I have seen her be the first voice to speak against injustice. In Joannie’s first few years at FIU, I was in many faculty assemblies and department meetings in which Joannie was the first to speak out against an administrative policy or action that she considered unjust towards faculty or students of color. Sometimes her voice galvanized others to action, like fighting against the university graduate school minimum GRE requirement, a fight that she led, and won. Other times it seemed that the stridency with which she spoke made it difficult for others to voice their own opinions, even if they were in accordance with hers. This was particularly the case with debates about the elimination of Foundations of Education course requirements for particular programs in our department.
Joannie’s active listening skills really come to the fore when she works with the Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project. The Algebra Project is a national mathematics literacy program, founded by Bob Moses in 1982, that aims to help high school students who score in the bottom quartile on state Math tests achieve the Math skills necessary for College Algebra (The Algebra Project, n.d.). Students enrolled in this program double their time with Math during the school year, participate in Math activities during the summer, and develop ways of understanding Math on their own terms. The Young People’s Project (YPP) is an outgrowth of the Algebra Project (The Young People’s Project, n.d.). Founded in 1996, the YPP centers on young people teaching each other Math. The YPP trains high school and college students as “math literacy workers” who teach Math to elementary students at afterschool programs and summer camps in 10 states across the U.S. (The Young People’s Project, n.d.).
Joannie became involved in the Algebra Project in 2004, when civil rights icon and Math educator Bob Moses came to FIU as an Eminent Scholar in the Center for Urban Education and Innovation. With Joannie’s assistance, the first cohort of ninth grade Algebra Project students started at two underserved public high schools in Miami in August 2005. The next summer those same students taught Math to elementary school students in the YPP program as part of a 6-week summer Algebra Project program in which they were engaged at FIU.
As Joannie has documented, she “followed Moses into a myriad of settings from classrooms and parent meetings and academic halls of various universities to foundation board meetings and superintendent offices in Miami and other cities. As a researcher, my observing and being in those arenas alongside Moses have been both humbling and transformative” (Wynne, 2009, p. 87). Whether observing Joannie facilitating a YPP meeting, or talking with Algebra Project students in the hallways, I have seen first-hand the respect with which she treats every student, the concentration she holds for every idea that is voiced, and the resoluteness she shows to ensure that every voice is heard.
Relational Skills: Living the Life of Yet
Closely related to listening in action is what Joannie called relational skills. Before responding directly to the question, “What steps do you take, or think others can take, so that more women can become effective education leaders,” Joannie quickly said that she doesn’t see herself as a leader but as a teacher. Then, after some thought, she told me that “it’s the relational skills that women offer that make them far more powerful and impactful than those women who don’t have these relational skills” (Wynne, personal communication, January 12, 2019). She described these skills by saying that “these women relate to all humans as equals, listen, and respect the ideas of other people whether or not they agree with them. They also respect the ability of people to shift their ideas. I think that’s what it is, yes: They live in the life of yet.” When I asked her to explain what she meant by this phrase, Joannie quoted a line from a book by Remen (2006), professor and teacher of integrative medicine, who, instead of being frustrated by unfulfilled expectations for herself or others, would say, “I (or he, or she) haven’t learned compassion…yet”. Joannie then turned to how this philosophy applied to education by saying, “So, if we see that in our students, or anybody we work with, no matter where anybody is at the moment, we keep our belief in others, and our hope in the learning process.”
In her own life, Joannie has exemplified the philosophy of living the life of yet. With government officials, university administrators, colleagues, and students of all ages, Joannie has listened, shown respect for ideas that are different from her own, and had faith in people’s capacity to change. Although Joannie would not talk about her own relational skills, she did say, more than once, that she has been tapped to administer education projects because, in her words, she can “get shit done.”
Lisa Delpit talked to me openly about Joannie’s relational skills. She described them as a combination of hope, faith, and belief, encapsulated in “being able to feel and draw out in others that which is already there.” Joannie, she said, has “a supreme level of caring for the world, and everyone in her orbit feels it” (Delpit, personal communication, October 15, 2019). Lisa gave examples of Joannie’s relational skills in action with education administrators and students. With the former, she explained how Joannie convinced the Dean of the College of Education at Georgia State University to waive the GRE requirement for students’ admission into a Master of Arts degree program in Urban Education that they two had developed from the ground up. “She was able to appeal to the Dean’s higher angels,” by arguing that the university has an obligation to bring students in and allow them the opportunity to succeed. With students, Lisa talked about Joannie’s firm belief in the strengths and leadership potential of students in the Algebra Project and the YPP. As Lisa put it: Joannie touches the spirit of these students. Not so much teaching them but igniting that which is already there. She does it and they respond. They see that she has a supreme level of caring for the world, for each of the students. Everyone in her orbit feels this.
In addition to encompassing “the belief in the small and the intimate in life,” Joannie’s relational skills encompass the leadership qualities of “personal connection,” “building the network of relationships in communities and across the nation,” and “reaching for strategies to move forward,” all qualities she attributes to Bob Moses.
Historical Consciousness
Many of Joannie’s writings and public lectures include stories about slavery, segregation, and discrimination against people of color everywhere. Understanding the history of racism, particularly racism in the U.S., is essential to Joannie’s own story, her own journey to “finding her way home” (Wynne, 2019). Joannie also fervently believes that, by learning the reality of 400 years of slavey, racism, and discrimination against people of color in the U.S., our youth will be equipped to build a new political system based on justice, or, as Joannie put it, “knit a new American tapestry with a stronger moral fiber, knotted intricately with justice” (p. XVI).
Joannie never talks or writes about uncovering the history of injustice as “historical consciousness,” but she is a true pioneer in this field. Historical consciousness is defined as “the understanding of the temporality of historical experience or how past, present and future are thought to be connected” (Glencross, 2015, p. 413). Simply put, it is the “acknowledged consciousness of living in history” (p. 416). Long before historical consciousness became a popular term in university history departments, or a method of teaching and writing about history and the social sciences, Joannie was weaving stories of 400 years of racial injustice in the U.S. and around the world into her writing about education. From 2005, when she issued an urgent plea for what has become known as “race talk” (Sue, 2015) in order to activate school reform (Wynne, 2005), to her last official public talk as an Associate Professor at FIU, a call for the teaching, learning, and sharing of the history of one’s people throughout the K-20 education curriculum. Joannie has been a constant student, teacher and advocate of historical consciousness as content, pedagogy, and a way forward toward justice.
Joannie’s professional career itself is a study in historical consciousness. At Morehouse College she learned the complexities of place from the nostalgia of home that she heard from her Black male students from Alabama. At Georgia State University she saw first-hand the transformation of Black teachers in the inner-city schools of Atlanta who had “swallowed the Koolaid about their own children, that they can’t read, and can’t be taught to read” (Wynne, personal communication, October 29, 2019). By openly discussing the legacy of racism with the teachers whom she mentored in a graduate teaching program that she and Lisa had developed, Joannie not only witnessed their own flourishing, but was able to see the fruits of their labor in the success of their students. At FIU Joannie extended her sharing of historical consciousness with Latinx, Caribbean, and Miami-born and raised teachers and students who were part of the many teacher education programs supported by her Center. While working with “F” rated predominately Black middle schools and high schools in Miami, Joannie and Lisa understood the urgent need for the students to learn essential Math skills, and they brought in Bob Moses, which led to Joannie’s involvement with the Algebra Project and the Young People’s Project. Social justice is built into the fabric of both of these programs, as students learn from their peers their own ways of discussing Math and solving complex problems, allowing them to chart a path for their own success. As a retired professor, to this day Joannie has continued her work with the Algebra Project and the YPP.
Joannie once said to me, “I have been telling the same damned stories my whole professional life.” Within these stories lie her perspectives on the roots of racism, segregation, and discrimination, as well as an intense love for her students, and eternal hope in our youth to mend our fragmentation as individuals and as a nation.
Moving Forward in Integrity and Hope
In my discussion with Lisa Delpit about Joannie’s leadership qualities, she talked about Joannie’s willingness to tackle difficult issues, her advocacy for Black students and teachers, her determination and persistence, and her love and care for her students. After giving general examples of each of these leadership qualities, Lisa paused, and then, with much intention, spoke about Joannie in terms of integrity. Lisa explained Joannie’s integrity like this: Above all else is Joannie’s integrity. Anytime anyone is around her they recognize how much she backs up what she says with action. If she says that students need x, y, or z, she is the first one to go out of her way to spend time to provide it for them. So, when she brings up action items, it’s harder to dismiss them, because she is already doing it, or that she is willing to do it and is going to do it. That kind of integrity, a combination of theory and action, always helps to get things done.
In its article on integrity, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017) maintains that, when referring to an individual, the discourse of integrity consists of two parts: the formal relation one has to all the aspects of oneself, and one’s moral actions. In other words, as Lisa Delpit said in reference to Joannie, integrity encompasses theory and action. Akin to a Russian doll, integrity is the overall case within which all of Joannie’s transformative leadership qualities reside—constant love and caring for others; respect for other’s ideas, and the shifting of their perspectives; deep and active listening skills; the ability to build and maintain networks of relationships; commitment to the theory and practice of social justice; hope in youth, for youth, and for the power of education. To end our first interview, I asked Joannie if she had any aspirations for her future work in education. Her response was, “I will be working with education until the day I die. I love it. It’s my passion. Education continuously transforms me. The more I am at it, the more I change and the more I learn.”
Discussion and Implications for Adult Education
Joan Wynne’s transformative leadership traits are indisputable. Throughout her long career in education working with students, faculty, administrators, and community members, she has kept a laser focus on justice, equity, and inclusion of underserved populations, has been unyielding in her critique of inequitable practices, and has consistently called for and exhibited moral courage in action. Many of her colleagues view Joannie as a one-woman support team behind the success of well-known social justice educators such as Bob Moses and Lisa Delpit. But as this research brings to light, Joan is a formidable transformative woman education leader in her own right. One of the implications of this research is the importance of investigating, and then telling, the stories of the transformative women education leaders who have worked alongside their better-known counterparts. What particular pedagogical strategies did Septima Clark employ at the Highlander Folk School workshop that Rosa Parks attended that later gave her the courage and conviction to refuse to give up her seat on the bus five months after returning from that workshop (Theoharis, 2019)? What grassroots tactics did LGBTQ transnational activist Julie Dorf use in the founding and building of OutRight Action International, an organization she started in 1990 that became an authoritative source for information about LGBTQ rights on a global scale (Thoreson, 2015)? These and so many other stories of relatively unsung women transformative education leaders need to be added to the adult education literature.
Another implication of this research is the association of the main tenets of transformative leadership—social justice, equity, inclusion, and activism—with adult education. Transformative leadership is part and parcel of much of adult education research and practice. In terms of research, adult education for transformation, or as Welton (2005) puts it, the concept of the “just learning society,” in which the focus is on education to meet the needs of the marginalized and disenfranchised in society, has been a key strand of the field since first nation inhabitants first met colonizers in nations around the world. Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning has contributed to the shaping of adult learning theory since its inception in 1978. Since 2016, social justice has its own adult education journal, Dialogues in Social Justice. The list goes on and on.
Emblematic of transformative leadership in adult education practice is Adult Learners’ Week, a UNESCO initiative that was first celebrated by the American Association for the Advancement of Education in 1980 and is now enjoyed in 40 countries around the world (Adult Learning Australia, n.d.). Often used as a platform to celebrate the experience of marginalized groups, and as a vehicle to highlight how barriers to equitable participation may be overcome, those who participate in Adult Learners’ Week activities create powerful stories of social change and transformation. In the United Kingdom, Adult Learners’ Week is culminated by individual and group awards for Outstanding Adult Learners, chosen as symbols of the way learning in adult life can transform lives and inspire others (Tuckett, 2018). One example is Adult Learners’ Week 2012 winner, Anne Wallace. Anne was the owner of a struggling fish and chips shop in an economically depressed area of Greater Manchester, England. After she tried in vain to sell the shop, she asked her staff for strategies on keeping the shop going, and they suggested that culinary training might help (Hughes, 2012). The training was so successful that the shop started winning awards for their fish and chips. Awards meant publicity, which led to more customers. Wanting to pay it forward, Anne mortgaged her house, and with additional funds from the NIACE Transformation Fund, she took over two empty lots next to her shop and opened a café. The café quickly became the site of adult education workshops for the local community in a variety of trades, including knitting, card making, and information technology. The upstairs of the café became the “School of Fish,” where Anne extended training workshops to local businesses. Due to Anne and others’ transformative leadership skills and ability to facilitate agency for other community members, an economically depressed community was reborn and is now thriving.
This is just one of hundreds of stories of social transformation brought about by the ripple effects of transformative leaders celebrated during Adult Learning Week across the globe. Can there be more stories of transformative leadership in adult education? Yes. Can transformative leadership be the subject of further theorizing in the field? Yes. Can the connections between social justice, equity, inclusion, and transformative leadership be more tightly woven and more clearly articulated? Yes. Why is it important to tell the stories of transformative women education leaders in adult education? So that these stories will inspire others to take action for a more just and equitable world.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
