Leading from the Middle

To lead as a Black woman in education is to lead from a particular middle. It is to stand between the communities that formed you and the institutions that employ you, between the expectations others carry and the inventions your work requires. It is a position of burden, and it is a position of gift.

I do not write this as complaint. I write it as observation, and as a kind of offering to the women who will lead after me, who are, in many cases, already leading alongside me. We do not have enough honest accounts of what this work actually feels like from the inside.

The literature on women and leadership has grown, and the literature on Black women's leadership has begun to grow. But it still tends to describe the work from the outside, as a set of barriers and strategies. What it sometimes misses is the inner life of the leader: the way one holds one's own authority, the way one discerns when to adapt and when to resist, the way one carries a community's hopes without being crushed by them.

Constructivist leadership has given me language for part of this. It has taught me to understand leadership not as the exercise of power over but as the facilitation of meaning among. This is, I think, a particularly hospitable frame for leaders who have been taught, by experience, to be suspicious of power-over. It lets us lead without becoming what we have suffered from.

I offer these reflections not as conclusions but as inquiries. The work of understanding how women, and Black women in particular, lead, and lead well, is work that belongs to all of us. The schools we build will be better for the honesty with which we take it up.

Written by

Dr. Rhema Stradford Dai, Ed.D.

Experienced Elementary School Leader · Scholar-Practitioner · Author · Speaker. Her work explores the development of people as the central work of educational leadership.

© 2025 Dr. Rhema Stradford Dai. This article is an original work and is protected by copyright.

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