Learning to lead as learning to learn: Experiences of Malay women in Malaysian higher education

This study examined how Malay women learn to lead in institutions of higher education within a Malaysian socio-cultural context. The purpose of this study was to develop a deeper understanding of how Malay women learn to lead within institutions of Malaysian higher education. Two semi-structured interviews were conducted with four deans and two directors from Malaysian public universities. The findings demonstrate the paradoxical contexts that these women faced in learning to lead in higher education, and how they learned to navigate the multiple tensions and contradictions they faced in assuming leadership positions within Malaysian society. For these women, learning to lead is about learning to learn from and through these tensions and contradictions.;The learning of these women was essentially self-directed, experience-based, and both intentional and unintentional. Tacit learning (Schugurensky, 2000) was clearly evident in their acknowledgement and acceptance of their society's traditions, and the ways in which they learned to navigate the values that placed more emphasis on their roles as mothers and wives, than it did on their roles as educational leaders. While considerable emphasis has been placed on the role of reflection within informal learning, their stories revealed limited instances of the explicit use of reflective learning.;Central to the processes by which these Malay women learn to lead was their commitment to learning to learn. The women in this study learn to lead by living through and learning about paradoxes that characterize their roles as leaders within the particular socio-cultural context in which they were living. The socio-cultural contexts in which they worked were described by the participants as largely patriarchal and quite hierarchical. While the women were not actively discouraged from assuming leadership positions, they experienced little explicit and direct support for their roles as leaders. Nonetheless, they still flourished as higher education leaders. Their stories reflected a process of learning to lead that involved powerful social and emotional processes.;These women learned to hold the blatant tensions and work around the contradictions surrounding their professional roles as leaders in higher education. Their accounts of emerging as mid-level leaders in higher education reflected a process of learning to learn from working through these tensions and contradictions rather than a process of learning about what constitutes good and effective leaders. This emphasis on learning to learn contributed to their ability to navigate the complex social roles in which they found themselves as women leaders in a male-dominated and hierarchical society. While much research and theory regarding informal learning has been focused on explicit structures and functional processes, this study supports greater attention to the more tacit and paradoxical qualities of everyday experience, and the importance they play in our learning from and through these experiences.