Brochure

DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Co-Directors
Alicia Crowe, PhD
Associate Professor
Social Studies and Teacher Education
School of Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum Studies
James G. Henderson, EdD
Professor
Curriculum Studies
School of Teaching, Learning, and Curriculum Studies
Outside Program Area Member
Rosemary Gornik, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Foundations, Leadership, and Administration
Graduate Faculty Representative
Kimberly S. Schimmel, PhD
Professor
School of Foundations, Leadership, and Administration
KENT STATE UNIVERSITY
College of Graduate School of Education,
Health, and Human Services
DOCTORAL DISSERTATION DEFENSE
OF
Christina M. Collins
For the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Major: Curriculum and Instruction
Unraveling School Leadership:
A Self-Study in Becoming a Leader
Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2016
9:00 – 11:30 am
White Hall, Room 308D

ABSTRACT
Christina M. Collins
M.Ed. Curriculum and Instruction,
Ashland University, 2008
B.A. English,
The Ohio State University, 2005
Christina began her career in education as a high school
English teacher. Her interests in contemporary educational policy led
her to develop an online weblog for teachers, which quickly led to
additional professional opportunities. In 2011, she became a literacy
specialist at the Ohio Resource Center, which enabled her to work on
special projects with the Ohio Department of Education and school
districts across the state. In 2012, she returned to the district level by
becoming a Secondary Curriculum Coordinator. She is currently the
district Curriculum Director at Buckeye Local Schools in Medina.
During her doctoral work, Christina has presented her work
in self-study and leadership, titled Learning Through Leading: A Self-
Study in District Administration, at the American Educational
Research Association conference. A revision of this conference
presentation was recently accepted for publication in Studying
Teacher Education.
Current contemporary discourse surrounding American
education creates a context for educational leadership that values
observable, behavioral leader traits. Systems of accountability
perpetuate appreciation for qualities such as interpretation of data,
raising student achievement, and producing tangible results. Ignored
in this discourse is the continued development of educational leaders
through critical reflection of the self and one’s practices.
This work is grounded in Palmer’s (1998) belief that being an
educator is moral and ethical work necessitating self-understanding. To
this end, I explored how one educational leader, myself, embarked on a
journey toward self-understanding using self-study methodologies and
Pinar’s (2012) narrative currere. I began with an exploration of the
leader qualities I envisioned for myself as a new Curriculum Director,
which included a democratic disposition and a commitment to critical
reflection. I also explored theories of integral leadership (Putz &
Raynor, 2005; Volckmann, 2012) and reconstructive postmodernism
(Kegan, 1994) and how these were reflected in my understandings of
leadership. The study resulted in uncovering several influences
establishing contexts for my work. These included internal influences
such as personal beliefs, my need to create a leading role for myself,
balancing leading role and self, and relating as an individual to the
collective, as well as one external influence based in how others
defined my role responsibilities.
Through a personal study of leader identity, I aimed to
present one method through which educational leaders could further
their own professional development in a sociocultural and political
discourse that values external behaviors over internal understandings.