2018 News

Doctoral Student accepts post-doc fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin

TAMPA, Fla. (March 15, 2018) – Ericka Roland, a doctoral student in the College of Education's Educational Leadership and Policy Studies program, has accepted a post-doctoral fellowship appointment within the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, Program in Higher Education Leadership (PHEL) at The University of Texas at Austin.

Upon graduation this summer, she will advance her research agenda on transformative leadership development and work collaboratively with PHEL faculty and students on research into equity issues in higher education.

Roland recently published an article with College of Education Associate Professor Vonzell Agosto, PhD titled "Intersectionality and Educational Leadership: A Critical Review." The article will be published in the 2018 volume of the AERA journal Review of Research in Education.

In this review of research, Roland and Agosto explored intersectionality in the literature on K-12 educational leadership in order to understand how researchers used intersectionality and what their findings or arguments reveal about the work of leading to reduce inequities in education, thereby supporting transformative leadership. A sample of 15 articles used in the review were published in peer-reviewed journals between 2005 and 2017. Prominent themes found in the review were individualism and knowledge relations.

Findings in the review showed that intersectionality was primarily used to support micro-level analysis of the inequities being confronted by leadership practice, used to focus on individuals’ experiences as “leaders” and their “leadership” capacity, and served as an emergent knowledge project. In the article, the authors discussed how the use of intersectionality, conceptions of leadership, and leadership and research practices coincide, and offer recommendations for the use of intersectionality in research related to transformative educational leadership.