Call to Advocacy: Expanding Graduate Students' Leader-Advocate Identities

This poster session informs attendees about findings, perspectives, and recommendations from a qualitative study exploring students' leader-advocate identity formation during an online doctoral course. Connections are made between the stages of leadership identity development and features of development that enhance successes of leaders and advocates as identified by previous researchers. One question guided the study: how do early childhood educators develop or evidence leader-advocate identities. The data sources included 34 final reflection papers and six semistructured interviews with students who took the course 18-24 months prior to the interviews. Participants indicated the course and related doctoral program made them consider the importance of collaboration to leadership and advocacy. Interviews indicated that participants continued to enhance their leader-advocate skills after the course experiences. All incorporated advocacy into their dissertation work.

Recommended Citation

Trube, M. B., & Dawson, C. M. (2020, October 1-2). Call to advocacy: Expanding graduate students' leader-advocate identities [Poster presentation]. Walden University Research Conference 2020 (online). https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/researchconference/2020/posters/51/