Teacher leadership: gendered responses and interpretations

Teacher leadership, which refers to leadership which is more than headship or formal position, is a relatively new concept in South Africa. Within the education management framework of distributive leadership and a collaborative school culture, teacher leadership refers to teachers taking up informal and formal leader roles in the classroom and beyond into areas of whole school development and community involvement. Teacher leadership is fundamentally about change, guided by a collective vision. This article reports on an exploratory study of the relation between gender and teacher leadership through an intimate look at the views of a group of KwaZulu-Natal educators. Using Bourdieu's (1977) concepts of field and habitus, this small-scale study highlights the situatedness of leadership and the importance of context in the take-up of teacher leadership. It points to the social and cultural embeddedness of leadership and the difficulties associated with shifting the taken-for-granted assumption that leadership is a male domain. The article urges women teachers to challenge the existing status quo and take up their rightful roles, both formal and informal, in a move to a more distributed, shared and collective form of leadership.