Educational Leadership and the Ethic of Care: The Experiences of Four Women Educators of Trinidad and Tobago

As policy makers and educators from varying philosophical platforms develop strategies for facilitating inclusive education, there is a subsequent realization that this involves inclusive leadership. Such leadership may be addressed through ethical decision-making, exceptionality in learning, equity, effective programming, and partnerships (Crockett, 1999). Related to the moral and ethical aspects of decision making is the issue of caring leadership. Among the educational leaders who have demonstrated caring leadership, and who have had transformative influences over followers are the four women who constitute this study. To understand how they evolved as educational leaders, testimonies of their experiences and perceptions were developed. These testimonies are presented as reconstructed narratives. The discussion on these narratives explores relationships between who these women are in character, their experiences of the ethic of care, and leadership. The study directs focus on the lives of these women with a view to documenting their contributions and sharing their voices about the education systems of Trinidad and Tobago, and the broader Caribbean area. Oral history interviewing, within the biographical tradition, is the methodology used for data collection. The data as transcribed narratives and topical life histories were then content-analyzed to identify common themes and link these with contemporary research on leadership, women, and the ethic of care as discussed in the review of the literature. Findings from the study revealed caring leadership as an evolutionary process, and the importance that spirituality, community, and a sense of gender-equity and inter-relatedness played in the lives of the participants.