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The purpose of this article is to consider the impact of incorporating a set of readings focused on issues of gender, diversity, leadership, and feminist thought into the curriculum of a statewide educational leadership doctoral program.

Based data from open‐ended surveys, semi‐structured interviews, and reflection statements, the article presents a qualitative analysis of how students react to, learn from, and resist social justice‐oriented curricula and teaching strategies, particularly those related to gender issues.

The analysis of the data collected in this research suggests that, after a year of exposure to readings and written assignments about gender and other diversity issues, few students had undergone significant transformations in their learning regarding gender issues. Moreover, it was found that many students demonstrated resistance to reading, reflecting on and discussing gender issues.

Programs and professors that endeavor to prepare leaders who are transformative, require transformative teaching practices that assist in the development of such leaders. When content includes issues of diversity, our findings indicate that it is particularly important that faculty increase their knowledge of student responses to difficult content and transformative teaching strategies.

The purpose of the paper is to reflect on and respond to the papers contained in this Special Issue of Journal of Educational Administration.

A commentary is provided for each of the nine articles in the Special Issue.

The papers in the Special Issue constitute a substantial and important contribution toward incorporating international perspectives into an existing research discourse on educational leadership for social justice. One of the immediate challenges that will need to be addressed is how to systematically work against the hegemony of Western thought and colonialism that infiltrates all our discourses, even those that generate scholarship such as that found in this Special Issue.

The paper reflects on the current Special Issue, and provides directions for future research.

The purpose of this study is to explore the leadership experiences of four female secondary principals (two Black, two White) in one south‐western state to create significant discourse for understanding school leadership nested in complex social, political and cultural contexts. These women confronted education challenges of social justice, democracy, and equity in their schools.

The philosophical tradition of phenomenology was chosen as the qualitative methodology for this study “which is understood to be a concern for human meaning and ultimately for interpreting those meanings so that they inform our practice and our science”. As a secondary analysis of a specific finding (i.e. female leaders who exemplified a values‐orientation around issues of social justice in their leadership practices) from the original study the lived experiences of four female secondary school leaders were further explored.

All four women engaged in leadership praxis by: transforming school practices to promote equity and access for all students and embracing diversity of their student populations; connecting the world of research and practice; adopting democratic and participative leadership styles that relate to female values developed through socialization processes including building relationships, consensus building, power as influence, and working together for a common purpose.

While the focus is secondary school female leaders and educational leadership in a North American context, the implications have a broader transnational focus, exploring themes and issues that may span national boundaries and cultures.

For purposes of this article, the original data were revisited to conduct secondary analyses of the experiences of four women. Research contends that this approach can be used to generate new knowledge, new hypotheses, or support for existing theories; and that it allows wider use of data from rare or inaccessible respondents.

This book provides a deeper understanding of what it means to promote social justice and equity work in schools and communities around the world. Throughout this book, narratives describe how authors continue to reshape the agenda for educational reform. They remind us of the significance meaningful relationships play in promoting and sustaining reform efforts that address the injustices vulnerable populations face in school communities. Their voices represent the need for engaging with obstacles and barriers and a resistant world through a web of relationships, an intersubjective reality (see Ayers, 1996). As authors engaged in thinking about addressing injustices, they describe how their thoughts transformed into actions moving beyond, breaking through institutional structures, attempting to rebuild and make sense of their own situations (see Dewey, 1938).

The critique of western ethnocentric notions of leadership presented in this paper is informed by debates on issues such as gender and educational leadership that have produced meta‐narratives that explore and explain women and men's ways of leading. One of the troubling aspects of western leadership theories is the claim that the functions and features of leadership can be transported and legitimated across homogenous educational systems. Despite changes that have been made in definitions and descriptions of educational leadership to provide a focus on gender, there is the implicit assumption that while educational leadership might be practised differently according to gender, there is a failure to consider the values and practices of indigenous educational leaders. Thus, the construct of educational leadership needs to be more broadly theorised in order for knowledge of indigenous ways of leading to emerge.