Leanne M. Dzubinski

Collaborative Developmental Action Inquiry An Opportunity for Transformative Learning to Occur

Life in the 21st century is increasingly complex, paradoxical, and ambiguous, bringing into question the ways that graduate adult education programs function. In this article, we describe an action research study involving the method of collaborative developmental action inquiry conducted with key stakeholders of a program in adult education at a research one university. Collaborative developmental action inquiry created opportunities for transformative learning to take place. The study process and outcomes suggest that the method and practices of collaborative developmental action inquiry could themselves create favorable conditions for transformative learning to occur.

Envisioning an Adult Learning Graduate Program for the Early 21st Century: A Developmental Action Inquiry Study.

The rapid pace of social and technological change in the early 21st century leaves many adults scrambling to meet the complexities that characterize their daily lives. Adult learners are faced with multiple, often competing, demands from work, education, family, and leisure, which requires adult education graduate programs to carefully consider how best to meet these changing needs of today’s students. Using a developmental action inquiry approach, the authors collected data using multiple rounds of mutual inquiry from diverse groups of stakeholders in adult education. We asked each group to explore the question, “How does adult education as a profession, field, and practice help adults, organizations, and society meet the demands of 21st century life?” The combined results indicate that responsive, dynamic graduate programs in adult education for the 21st century should support the cultivation of critical and timely reflection, create online learning environments predicated on intentional community and mutuality, and foreground the relationship between adult learning and developmental capacity to prepare adult education facilitators who stand confidently in the face of complexity and ambiguity.

Taking on power: Women leaders in evangelical mission organizations

Women leaders are scarce in evangelical mission organizations. Part of the reason may be gender-role stereotypes, which function very strongly in much of evangelicalism. This article presents the stories of two women who worked at executive-level leadership positions in evangelical mission organizations. Using narrative analysis and a critical feminist lens, I examine their stories to understand how these women describe their leadership and how they portray their use of power. The strength of gender-role stereotypes and evangelical gender roles appeared to define and limit the power they were able to use. As long as they stayed within prescribed norms, they experienced some success. Deviations from the gender-role stereotypes led to sanctions from their organizations. Conclusions and implications are that the stereotypes may limit women’s leadership and that both women and organizations need to become aware of how these unspoken assumptions may be functioning. Recommendations for women leaders and for organizations seeking to incorporate women into leadership are offered.

Portrayal vs. practice: Contemporary women’s contributions to Christian mission

From the late 1800s onward, women have comprised two-thirds of the missionary workforce. Yet despite their numbers, women’s mission practice is frequently overlooked in accounts of mission work; instead it may be attributed to a male missionary. Single women are frequently cast in supportive roles and their work credited to that of a male supervisor. Married women’s mission practice is often attributed to their husband as part of the two-person career structure. As a result, women’s mission practice is rarely considered in mission theorizing, and few women are counted among missiologists even today. Studies that do seek to uncover women’s mission theorizing and practice typically focus on their historical contributions. There is a need for further research on contemporary women missionaries to understand their contributions, both embodied and theoretical, to the global mission enterprise. This article presents the findings from the study of women in one mid-sized mission organization. Results show that the women engage in a wide variety of ministry, face specific gender-related challenges, and struggle to understand themselves as valued contributors to the global mission enterprise.

Justice meets justification: Women’s need for holistic ministry in world mission

Missiology continues to be a male-dominated field, despite the fact that the majority of mission practitioners are women. Christian female scholar-practitioners have unique insights into issues facing women in contexts around the world that can be best met through holistic ministry; however, the voices of women scholar-practitioners are often overlooked due to muted group theory and unconscious gender bias. The honor–shame worldview that permeates many societies creates conditions that are especially challenging for women. This article presents the findings of field research and interviews conducted by female scholar-practitioners in MENA, Thailand, and Indonesia, highlighting women’s concerns in those specific contexts. We discuss three issues common across these regions, including gendered expectations, educational opportunities, and geographical challenges. Implications for mission practitioners as well as for future research are discussed.

Rigorous missiological research using qualitative inquiry

Over the years, we (the authors) have fielded many questions concerning qualitative inquiry (i.e., research whose findings are reported in descriptive narrative rather than concrete numbers). An oft-repeated theme of these questions concerns rigor (e.g., how can the study be rigorous when you collect people’s perceptions of things?). Hence, this article primarily addresses the issue of rigor in qualitative inquiry. However, given that rigor in qualitative inquiry touches on every aspect of its design and implementation, we have chosen to embed our discussion of rigor in an overview of what a qualitative inquiry consists of, as it is practiced in numerous academic contexts all around the globe. Taken in its entirely, the article seeks to enhance readers’ appreciation for the qualitative research paradigm, to whet their appetite to deepen their understanding of it, and to encourage them learn more about it so they might employ it rigorously in their own missiological research.

Foregrounding Women in the Doctoral Classroom: Mainstreaming and Single-Sex Approaches to Graduate Education.

ABSTRACT An increasing number of published studies have drawn attention to gender disparities in various dimensions of Christian higher education. Although the majority of students on the campuses of member institutions of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities (CCCU) are women, and the percentage of women holding faculty and administrative roles has increased, the male-normed environment of the academy continues to be evident in various ways, particularly in these Christian institutions. At the same time, higher education—and doctoral education in particular—is an important pathway to prepare future leaders and professors for Christian organizations. One potential way to begin to shift toward a more welcoming climate that benefits both men and women on CCCU campuses is to “foreground,” or make central, womens issues and concerns as part of regular classroom teaching. Such foregrounding can help counter the historic tendency to treat mens experience and concerns as normative for the human race. In the discipline of missiology, women make up the bulk of the practitioners yet are underrepresented as scholars, making it a pertinent field to challenge the neglect of womens voices and concerns in the academy. This article describes how a missiology classroom has been used to create a climate where women have opportunities to be central and where womens perspectives are treated as equally important as mens perspectives. To do this, I used three key practices: intentionally addressing gendered topics in mixed classes, offering selected single-sex education opportunities for women, and focusing on gender-related topics for research and publication. Using the discipline of missiology as a case study in relation to the importance of giving womens contributions to the field both recognition and voice may also offer transferable insights for doctoral faculty in other disciplines.