Listening as Methodological Resistance: Hearing Voices at the Margins of Educational Leadership

The Listening Guide method was founded in opposition to other forms of interview coding which either put data into predetermined and/or binary categories. Feminist psychologists believed that other methods of qualitative research disappeared the undertheorized portions of subjects’ narratives. This method does not seek to only hear voices of queer or gender non-conforming educational leaders, but also to hear the contradictions, complexities and multiple voices of cisgendered men and women and enable researchers to hear that a binary construction of gender is not the place where most school leaders live. The Listening Guide is an act of resistance, forcing research away from calcifying experience into static categories. The Listening Guide also acknowledges that multiplicity of self is authentic. Individuals tend to speak in more than one voice at a given time, depending on their context and the culture in which they exist. One can think of this as being like a borderland where different pieces of our identity converge, some taking on greater importance based on context. Gender, race, and sexual identities exist in relationship to one another within everyone, and the contextual nature of how these identities cause us to behave or influence how we are perceived can be heard using this method. The messiness of identity is allowed to come to the surface, resisting binaries and hierarchy in categorization. Listening meets at the intersection of method and praxis, and voice enables researchers to hear the stories at the margins of educational leadership.