Coloring Outside the Lines: Mentoring Women into School Leadership (Suny Series in Women in Education)

Presents new practices and ideas for mentoring women for school leadership positions.

Coloring outside the Lines critically looks at mentoring from the perspective of women who have been historically marginalized in school leadership, and grounds itself in a variety of experiences, including those of women school leaders of color. Using a feminist poststructuralist framework, the authors deconstruct the mentoring of women within the culture of K-12 public school administration in which they work. Providing arguments that mentoring has been and can be discriminatory, the authors explore it as a vehicle for transformation and change in education leadership rather than abandoning it completely.

This is an excellent book for anyone looking for a mentor, thinking about becoming a mentor, or reviewing a college or school program involving mentors. Although the view point is mentoring for women of color, the study and examples make us review what makes for excellence in mentoring men or women, of color or of the dominant culture. We intend to analyze and review our whole mentoring system in graduate programs for administrators after reading this study.