CHAPTER 12: Using the Senses in Reflective Practice to Prepare Women for Transforming their Learning Spaces

This chapter seeks to push at current conceptual boundaries within the field of educational leadership in understanding relationships between preparing women candidates to lead for social justice through the senses—ways in which school leaders perceive their lived experiences and relation to others. The author examines how three K–12 female public school leaders came to understand what it meant to lead for social justice through their sense-making by exploring their ways of knowing through artmaking. These spaces afford women opportunities to deepen their ways of knowing and responding to the needs of those they serve, especially for those who live on the margins due to race, class, gender, and other differences from the mainstream. This case study is significant to furthering extant literature because it examines how these women make sense of what it means to lead for social justice through the senses. Specifically, it does so through the use of auditory/video reflections and artmaking in an effort to create spaces for school leaders to shift their sense-making from text to audio/visual artmaking—a formal curricular decision grounded in the recognition of rich meanings and imaginative possibilities embedded in nontext-based, sensual understandings. Findings suggest these women brought to their work a more explicitly caring and collaborative ethic to promoting social justice work in schools.