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Gledhill, Karen

University of British Columbia

At a critical point in my career as a leader in independent schools in British Columbia, Canada, I came to the realization that I did not trust many of my colleagues. This sad reflection drove me to delve deeper into the meaning of trust in educational leadership and led me to interview six retired female principals to understand their experiences with trust, distrust, and risk throughout their careers. Trust is a construct that is frequently mentioned in literature from schools, school districts, ministries of education and leadership organizations, but it is rarely defined or examined, particularly with a view to gender influences. I used timeline life history methodology to create narratives based on the stories the principals related about their experiences of trust, distrust, and risk with a focus on how their gender interacted with these concepts. I then analyzed the narratives to generate themes, some of which aligned with existing literature, and some that arose out of the narratives. Some of the most important themes included the diversity and complexity of strategies that the principals used to build trust, the emotions the principals experienced, the barriers they faced to building trust and the behaviours displayed in low trust environments. This analysis allowed me to develop a much more personal, organic, and relational understanding of trust using a metaphorical image of trust based on the growth of symbiotic mycorrhizal networks in forests. Trees communicate with each other using fungal networks beneath them in the soil and I extrapolated this image to think about trust as threads that run invisibly between individuals and institutions and systems in a network. The growth, decay or destruction of trust threads are affected by many things and can take different forms. This research suggests that gendered systems are one of these influencing factors. This research is a start towards attempting to understand the sense educational leaders make of trust, distrust, and risk within gendered systems, the tools they use to build relational trust and the impact it has on their leadership.

Text

2024-08-28

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/89070

Educational Leadership and Policy

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/