Mary Bridget Burns
Boston College
Mary Bridget Burns, MAT, ABD, is the Assistant Director for the Two-Way Immersion Network for Catholic Schools at the Roche Center for Catholic Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. She is also a national coordinator for WomenEdUS, the United States branch of the WomenEd movement. A researcher whose interests include the experiences of women teachers, bilingual education and the importance of context, Mary Bridget is a former teacher herself, having taught both at the elementary and college levels in Ohio, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, and in Hungary as a Fulbright Grantee. She is the former inaugural managing editor of the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, and an active community leader in her semi-rural town in Central Massachusetts. She advocates for US military families and military-affiliated children, in addition to her work with women educators and bilingual students. Mary Bridget has a BA in English literature from Northwestern University, a Masters in the Art of Teaching from Miami University of Ohio, has completed course work in educational leadership, and expects to graduate with her doctoral degree in Curriculum & Instruction, with a focus on language, literacy, and culture from the Lynch School at Boston College in the spring of 2018.
#WomenEd is a grassroots movement that originated in the United Kingdom, but has spread globally, as women educators and women school leaders come together to discuss their ideas, needs, and aspirations. Such networks have offered tangible benefits for participants, such as feedback on lesson plans and professional writing, professional development sessions, and support for professional growth. Benefits have resulted in less tangible ways, in the authentic and sincere support from members. This session will present a global perspective on a movement with very local application, highlighting the experience of WomenEd leaders from Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, Canada, and the US. It will to give an overview of the mission, vision, and goals for their #WomenEd groups in their national context. Additionally, research that has been conducted in the UK on women’s educational leadership and its policy implications will be shared.
In many contexts, women and teachers have long been synonymous, as the assumed maternal instincts of women were considered beneficial and natural characteristics for successful teachers. As Lagemann has explained (2000), this dynamic of women as natural classroom teachers has not always been the standard, but has remained as such for generations. Despite this gendered perspective of teaching (Blackmore & Sachs, 2007) and the numerical dominance of women in teaching (Grogan & Shakeshaft, 2010), there is limited scholarship on the experience of women teachers, women in educational leadership positions, or the reasons for the drop in the number of women in positional leadership roles, such as principals or superintendents. Scholarship on women’s experiences, and of educational leadership generally, has tried to incorporate the values of collaboration, democracy, and humanism, focusing on relationships and connections (Lambert, Zimmerman, & Gardner, 2016). #WomenEd, a grassroots organization, embodies these same values as a whole and throughout the globe in the many iterations of #WomenEd that focus on the national contexts, be it Australia or the Netherlands.
The session will provide the platform to hear from a variety of women leaders who come from classrooms, school boards, universities, and government. They will share their insights on what they have learned from their #WomenEd groups, what members are saying their needs, ideas, and impact are, and their thoughts on the status of women in educational leadership.
