Storying family experiences in higher education: Surfacing, awakening, and transforming developing leader identity

Humans lead storied lives. This quality makes people natural storytellers who can be characters in their own stories to experience the world (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). The stories people tell and retell hold cultural significance as they “carry values, convey morals, describe solutions to dilemmas, and shape the patchwork of culture” (Deal & Peterson, 2016, p. 81).

Family stories are often told to socialise and communicate a set of expectations about a family’s norms, values, and practices, and the world, while influencing how members understand their leader identity (McCain & Matkin, 2019). Indeed, family is one of the first places where members get a sense of who they are, including by gleaning meaning from both positive and negative family experiences (Thompson et al., 2009). For many cultural communities, oral histories are treasured and passed on to the next generation to be preserved and maintained. This intergenerational transmission of legacy stories—stories that are told, re-told, and accumulate over time, enable family members to gain a sense of their own identities and family culture (Thompson et al., 2009).

Families also tell stories to generate shared understandings about intergenerational experiences and history, including in relation to complexity and change (Armstrong, 2021). This provides one way for younger generations to expect and navigate change. Stories in Indigenous communities commonly point to and honour family elders as leaders (Fraser, 2012). Elders are considered vital to how families and communities work together and how decisions are made for the good of the group. Elders also guide and inform through their stories and experiences with a sense of knowing that these teachings will guide others and foster kinship ties with the next generation. Indigenous scholar, Young Leon (2012) argued that leadership develops from listening to and learning from the cultural teachings of the elders and ancestors, the gifts they leave with the community, and the responsibilities they hand to family and community members. Hence, elders’ stories hold power as they convey their unique worldview and skills of cultural leadership to the family and future generations (Fraser, 2012).

The oral sharing of sayings, proverbial expressions, stories, and collective memories provides a means for learning about leadership in many cultural communities. For example, Māori Indigenous communities in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) draw meaning from creative expressions such as: “Te tohu o te rangatira, he manaaki. The sign of a chief is generosity” (Glover, 2013, p. 86). For Glover, this expression evokes an image of leaders looking out for others, protecting, nurturing them, and knowing when to step up and stand back. It also reflects a Māori view of respecting others as potential leaders, including those within their own homes (Glover, 2013). Similarly, Pacific communities in NZ, those with ancestral ties to their Pacific Island homelands, draw meaning from leadership sayings that value service to others. For example, one Samoan proverb: “O le ala i le pule o le tautua—the pathway to leadership is through service” conveys that leadership from a Samoan perspective is learned through service (tautua) to the family and community, not by serving one’s own interests. Samoan children are taught that service is critical to family life and, as they grow older, they learn that one must serve the family and related members (aiga) before becoming a leader or village chief (matai) (Taleni et al., 2018).

Stories not only shape us; they help us to make sense of our leadership and the influence we may have on others (Armstrong, 2021). Stories provide a tool to enhance self-awareness as a leader, while resonating with and informing others (Armstrong, 2021). In ECE in NZ, storytelling as a narrative method is a common approach to assessing children’s learning (Carr, 2001). Yet, the use of storytelling for leadership development features more in the organisational literature than in the educational literature, suggesting it has potential for greater utilisation in education, including ECE.

The potential of storytelling to support leadership development is evident in the organisational literature. For example, Auvinen et al. (2012) found that leaders could use storytelling with their organisation members to motivate, inspire, resolve conflict, influence other leaders, discover a focus, and establish trust. The leaders’ intentional use of storytelling supported their leadership development by breaking down barriers with colleagues and supporting their interactions. Similarly, Snyder et al. (2017) found that storytelling assisted organisation leaders to build a values-based culture of innovation and sustainability by making complex situations and ideas accessible to all, making values and principles embedded in a culture more visible, and providing a platform for understanding different perspectives. Although these ideas derive from outside of education, we contend that storytelling provides a powerful tool for preparing new leaders in education and ECE.

Storytelling can inform one’s developing leader identity (Armstrong, 2021). Identity is a much debated and multi-faceted concept. For our purposes, we adopt Gee’s (2018) definition of identity as “a way of being in the world connected to special ways of doing and knowing” (p. 76). Therefore, leader identities provide an organising framework for how leaders, or those undertaking leadership activity, understand their own ways-of-being, doing and knowing in relation to their work, relationships, commitments, and priorities. Understanding how leader identities are formed and change over time has informed recent scholarship seeking to make sense of and support leadership development (McCain & Matkin, 2019; Priest & Seemiller, 2018). These studies focused on the process of becoming a leader by understanding identity development as an ongoing, relational, and social process.

Leader identities are not fixed, related to defined characteristics or behaviours, nor biologically determined (Cooper, 2020). Rather, they are formed in a reciprocal relationship between the person’s “activities, norms, values and standards” or their ways of knowing, being and doing, and relevant professional communities (Gee, 2018, p. 74), their past and present experiences, and the sense they make of these. These experiences include early leadership experiences and the socialisation processes that occur within families (McCain & Matkin, 2019; Sinclair, 2007). Priest and Seemilller (2018) described leader identity development as “a dynamic process of interpretation and reinterpretation of experience” (p. 94). In addition to experience, Cooper (2020) pointed to the place of reflective activity and the role of emotion and affect in how identities are shaped, surmising that identity development is an evolving process influenced by internal and external factors. As educational leadership is about people and relationships, then emotion becomes an important factor in understanding leadership and what it means to be a leader in a particular social context (Crawford, 2011). These perspectives on leader identity highlight its “locally occasioned, fluid and ever-changing nature” (de Fina et al., 2006, p. 3) and suggest that a leader identity is not something that someone has but is something that someone does repeatedly and becomes continually.

Scholars researching lifespan development of leadership contend that leader identity development begins in childhood (Murphy & Johnson, 2011) or is specifically tied to the way young people are parented (Liu et al., 2019). Liu et al.’s focus on Chinese adolescents highlighted that being perceived as a leader at any time of life may be an initial step on the journey towards developing a leader identity. Other scholars proposed that early experiences with family potentially foster the drive to take on leadership responsibilities later in life. For example, Hyvärinen and Uusiautti (2014) analysed the narratives of 10 Finnish female leaders to explore how their experiences in their childhood homes informed their development as a leader. Core features of their narratives were found to underpin their predisposition towards becoming a leader later in life, including: a sense of safety fostered by caring, concerned, and present parents; encouragement to learn, study and work; and a positive attitude towards work as something valuable. These findings suggest the important role that childhood experiences in the home play in fostering early dispositions towards being a leader. The idea of storying a leader’s origins to understand their pathways to leadership was also central to Zheng et al.’s (2021) exploration of 92 leaders’ narratives of becoming and being leaders. Zheng et al. found that the leaders’ narratives illuminated clear links between their current enactment of leadership and their past experiences. Furthering these ideas, we focus on narratives of family experiences to understand potential sources of motivation for leadership and leader identity in education and ECE.

Many students viewed the hardship, work ethic, and selfless actions of family elders as a source of leadership inspiration. For example, Jill (pseudonym) felt inspired by her grandfather overcoming poverty and his commitment to community:

I am proud of my grandpa’s generation, who made life hopeful despite having nothing in hand. They watched each other’s back while doing farm work during wartime; they shared everything in a significant shortage of life necessities; they took [to] each other like real siblings. People’s spirit of sharing and uniting to overcome difficulties made them alive and resisted the bitter life.

Jill’s storytelling encouraged her to reflect on her grandfather’s generation about their “spirit of sharing and uniting to overcome difficulties,” realising that this attitude helped them to feel “alive” and resist a “bitter life,” important lessons for her leader identity.

While Jill felt a mix of emotions, including shock, as she reflected on these family experiences, she realised these had helped her to “acknowledge myself and the source of my leadership” while challenging her thinking:

I was shocked by the influence of childhood. Honestly, I [had] many doubts while reading related literature for the first time. However, I changed my mind after recalling my past and re-reading those materials. There should be valuable and subtle impacts originating from childhood, even if they are somehow indefinable.

Similarly, Penny storied the challenges her grandparents had faced, specifically when the local government wanted to shut down a museum in China that her grandfather founded. She described her nai nai (Chinese - grandmother) as their core family leader, who modelled moral actions of shanliang (kindness) and fuwu (serve others). Penny described how her grandmother had used these attributes to support Penny’s grandfather through these hard times. Penny acknowledged her grandmother’s moral dedication, service to the community, strength, and courage to never give up. She further reflected on this experience:

[My] grandmother’s moral behaviour planted deep roots in my teaching and leadership practice. I show great respect and trust towards the leader’s model moral behaviour in the organisations, I advocate moral behaviours at my working field, and strongly believe that good leaders must first become good servants, (Greenleaf, 1998), which links to fuwu (serve others).

Storying in this way, therefore, had made Penny aware of the impact of these family experiences on her leadership practice.

Sally shared that her “current orientation to leadership” had also been influenced by her grandmother, a school principal who was “meticulous about work and pursued perfection”, expecting this from herself and others. Her grandmother’s advice, which came as part of a reprimand to Sally for not working hard enough, was that women needed to “put in double or even triple effort” to be recognised in a male dominated society. Sally acknowledged the role her grandmother had in encouraging her to “work harder” and follow the same path as her grandmother, “a successful female leader.”

Positive memories of the influence of family elders were also evident in Maggie’s narrative. Maggie wrote about the influence of women in her family, including her grandmother, inspired by their experiences of adversity and hardship. She described these family elders as “guiding spirits” and “unannounced leaders” in her life, illuminating their influence on her values and leadership:

I have been truly inspired from my family’s humble yet honoured background, the grit and courage women put up in adversity, their undying faith in times of hardships, strength to carry out heavy tasks shoulder to shoulder with menfolk and their decisionmaking abilities for the good of the family.

William’s grandmother raised him while his parents worked in another city. He shared how his grandmother’s childhood was marked by “political unrest, wars, poverty, [and] disasters” which had “shaped her disposition vastly.” As he reflected on his grandmother’s family leadership, he noted that as an elder she had “absolute priority to make decisions for our family” but “usually acted as an advice-giver rather than a dictator.” William recalled that:

She shared her wisdom with our families when we were dealing with things she was familiar with and let others decide if she was not. Since she knew that she could not catch up with the fast-changing world, she carefully maintained the hard-earned peacefulness by less interfering in other family members’ business.

Her leadership philosophy extended to raising William who remembered how “she always encouraged me to make my own decisions and respected them as long as they were reasonable.” This was sometimes experienced as a burden by a young William whose childhood was “composed of making decisions, taking responsibility for the wrong decisions and reflections.”

Writing about the value of storytelling in his own leadership development, William demonstrated that good could come out of adversity by admitting that recalling childhood experiences could be “challenging and painful sometimes” but that reflecting on them offered him the “freedom to grow and lead differently.” He concluded by observing that “all of these experiences may fade away as time goes on, but I know they will always be there at the bottom of my heart and remind me if I am off track.”

In summary, storying historical, family influence on values and ways-of-being regarding the hardships, work ethic and selfless actions of family elders had prompted Jill, Penny, Sally, Maggie, and William to engage in a process of sense-making about their own leader identity development.

Another theme identified centred on what being the first-born in the family meant in terms of leadership. This was about taking responsibility and being responsible for others. Taylor, the first born of four children, felt this placement came with the responsibility “to role model to my siblings and to do everything right as my siblings would look up to me.” In striving to meet her siblings’ expectations, Taylor reflected on how she had “developed high expectations for myself and others” and that although this had “given her the confidence to lead” it also led to her “biggest challenge … managing my expectations of both myself and others,” early on in her teaching career. Through these reflections, Taylor realised that leaders “cannot do everything, and leadership involves providing others with the opportunity to develop, grow and lead.”

Similarly, Lena expressed that being the eldest child in her family meant it was her “duty to take care of my elderly grandmother.” She reflected on important teachings from her grandmother about faith and a strong sense of community:

My leadership was influenced by my grandmother urging me to take part in everything that related to the church or the community. My grandma became an influential Christian woman [who] shared her gift of inspiring stories, preaching, biblical verses, sermon, and wisdom. She uplifted and encouraged women to be their own leader, either a minister, teacher, spokesperson, or to be in the workforce. It showed me ownership, collectiveness, teamwork, and contribution as components of effective leadership.

Through her storytelling, Lena described utilising the wisdom she was gifted from her grandmother as a family elder to inform her own values-based leadership practice and leader identity:

I use skills adopted from my grandmother and have applied them also in a Pasifika early childhood education settings and cultural events. Within my youth team they are encouraged to be spiritual, humble, have faith, and practise their cultural values.

The storytelling process had enhanced Lena’s awareness of her developing leader identity and encouraged her to consider her “strengths and weaknesses as a leader” including “reciprocal communication with [her] peers … where different interests clash.”

Jessica’s narrative focused on being the eldest cousin in the family, explaining that “the eldest child in the next generation is the ‘bellwether’ who is responsible for leading and being the role model for all the younger ones.” While she gained a sense of achievement and self-esteem from these early family leadership experiences, the responsibility was also “boring and stressful” and felt like a “weight on my shoulders.”

Jessica was able to make meaningful connections between these “unconscious” early experiences with her “desire of becoming a good leader” who respects, listens to, and cares for others. However, she revealed that the pressure of these early experiences remained somewhat of an obstacle to her taking on professional leadership roles:

The teachings from my father and the experience I gained through looking after younger cousins helped mould me into someone that is kind, respectful, willing to listen and care about others. However, the pressure of being a leader that needs to be the perfect “bellwether” and make the right decisions feels like a heavy weight on my shoulders. The desire of becoming a good leader is always there, deep in my heart; however, lack of self-confidence, fear of failure and disappointment from others are my “unconscious drive” stopping me from stepping up into more leadership roles.

The opportunity to recall and confront her past experiences offered Jessica the opportunity to understand and free herself from these. She explained that recalling these experiences was:

… a chance to understand my past, to unshackle me from it so that I could surmount my “unconscious drive” to be able to develop and deepen my leadership. Moving forward, pushing myself to take small leadership responsibilities to build on my confidence as a leader will be the starting point for my new journey in leadership.

Building on the idea that experiences can be challenging yet still insightful, Xingjin as an only child chose to see her family’s high expectations and pressure on her to succeed as a source of leadership inspiration. Xingjin explained how the pathway of her childhood and negative experiences had taught her about resilience and honesty. She reflected on the hard work, dedication, and commitment her parents had shown her so that she could have the opportunity to learn how to play an instrument. She also felt at times being an only child meant there was a great deal of pressure on her. Xingjin’s storying of her family experiences made her realise the impact on her current leadership beliefs.

Looking back, I am grateful for going through the unique experience at a young age. It brought me great pain at that time, but what it taught me about leadership was priceless.… Through going back to my early experiences, I gained a better understanding of my current leadership orientations. More importantly, I had clearer self-knowledge on my strengths and vulnerabilities.

In summary, Taylor, Lena, Jessica, and Xingjin’s storytelling revealed the significant influence their position in the family had on their ideas, understandings, and practice of leadership, including responsibilities, and addressing expectations.

As our findings show, several students selected meaningful intergenerational stories about family members’ resilience to adversity and hardship to share as sources of their leadership orientations. McCain and Matkin (2019) describe these kinds of stories as “family legacy stories’’ (p. 164) that communicate important intergenerational wisdom, and reiterate shared cultural experiences, values, and beliefs. Such legacy stories were apparent, for example, when Jill wrote about her grandfather enduring hardship by uniting with others and staying hopeful and when Maggie wrote of her grandmother facing adversity and hardship with grit and courage. Similarly, William wrote about his grandmother’s experiences with hardship, and the lesson of resilience he took from it. Family-oriented stories can illuminate unique experiences in which “actions and happenings contribute positively and negatively to attaining goals and fulfilling purposes” (Armstrong & McCain, 2021, p. 61). Surfacing such stories provided our students with an opportunity to reflect on the lessons they embody and connections with their own leader identity. By selecting and retelling family legacy stories, the students were able to reflect on the themes that emerged, including unity, hope, courage, and grit, in relation to their developing leader identities.

The students’ narratives revealed commonly shared leadership beliefs and values that included kindness, love, compassion and caring for others, and open mindedness. For example, Jessica pointed out that the values of kindness, open mindedness, respectfulness, and being a lifelong learner that her father had passed onto her, guided her leadership practices today, revealing how surfacing them through storytelling had reinforced them. Penny reflected on the values of moral behaviour learned from her grandmother, such as shanliang – kindness and fuwu – to serve others. Jill’s narrative highlighted the value of helping self and others, appreciation for learning, and self-acknowledgement, resonating with Taylor’s uptake of responsibility for her siblings and then colleagues. McCain and Matkin (2019) reinforce the value of learning about and understanding cultural norms, values and practices in family-oriented stories and the influence these can have on leader identity. The beliefs and values evident in these students’ narratives align with Deal and Peterson’s (2016) idea of foregrounding cultural values and morals to support leader identity. From these stories, the students were able to reflect on long-held beliefs and values related to their families and make connections to their knowledge and understanding of their developing leader identities.

Students’ storytelling also surfaced shared values of culture, traditional values and spirituality, and their connection to acts of service. This was evident, for example, when Lena storied being encouraged by her grandmother to be involved in the church and community and when she drew on her grandmother’s teachings to support her role as a youth leader. Deal and Peterson (2016) identified some of the roles that storytelling of culture and history give affordances to, for example, the idea of sparking action through transmitting values and reinforcing core values and beliefs. Lena reflected on her cultural and spiritual values from her grandmother and identified these as significant influences on her leader identity. In many Pasifika cultures the seeds of leadership are first developed in service to family and community. In Samoan contexts this value is expressed as tautua (Taleni et al., 2018). In choosing to tell stories about her grandmother’s experiences and advice in relation to service, Lena was connecting to culturally situated leadership values including the importance of commitment to and sacrifice for her own people, community, and society.

Clear values of hard work, service and commitment were reflected on in relation to leader identity. William had gleaned the value of hard work, especially in the pursuit of perfection. Maggie realised she had taken on her father’s values of hard work, service, and sacrifice. Xingjin experienced the value of resilience and honesty. She also acknowledged her parents’ influence on the values of hard work, dedication, and commitment. These stories of hard work, service and resilience in the family align with Thompson et al. (2009) who explained that young adults learn lessons from family sharing of legacy stories, which are commonly based on notions such as hard work ethic, caring for others, and a sense of community. Reflecting on their stories touting similar values had influenced the students’ surfacing and awakening of their leader identity. Armstrong (2021) referred to this idea as the identity work of thoughtful leaders where through storytelling they can examine their self and their culture.

Many of the students’ stories touched on how influential a grandparent was, foregrounding the significant role that family elders can play in developing leader identity. This was most evident, for example, when William considered his grandmother’s influence in raising him and encouraging independence as both a gift, but he still had leadership lessons to learn. Maggie honoured the leadership of the many women elders in her family. Penny reflected on her grandparents’ teaching that through strength and courage, you don’t need to give up. Fraser (2012) acknowledged the significance of listening to and learning from elders’ stories and how these shape and support individuals’ leadership development and identity. The students’ recalling, retelling, and reflecting on their beliefs in these ways concur with Young Leon’s (2012) suggestion that elders’ stories play a powerful role in communicating a rich worldview and passing on experiences of cultural leadership. By storying family experiences, the students were awakened to the idea of family elders as leadership teachers and trusted guides in their developing leader identity.

Findings show that our students engaged in a process of leader identity work. This work involved connecting with and reflecting on past family experiences that conveyed certain meanings, values, and beliefs. Such learning supports individuals to make sense of and give meaning to who they are as aspiring leaders (Zheng et al., 2021). Promoting storytelling as a transformative method for leader identity development requires a consideration for how the students’ thinking about and orientations to their leader identity were potentially transformed. First, the retrospective family storytelling (McCain & Matkin, 2019) that our students engaged in was one of deep reflection and emotion (Cooper, 2020), including vulnerability and honesty, which allowed for greater awareness of self and others. For example, William acknowledged that looking back was challenging but at the same time, he was open to growth and for his story to become a reminder of his past.

For Jill, her emotions progressed from sorrow to pride, to shock and surprise, and then to joy as she articulated what she knew of her family story. This process revealed storytelling as an emotional process of increasing self-awareness. Stories are relational tools that represent the interconnected stories of our lives and those stories that “live in us, in our bodies, as we move and live in the world” (Clandinin, 2013, p. 22). Storying our experiences can illuminate how we use emotions to inform our decision-making and navigate relationships with others. This learning can enhance our understanding of ourselves and others and potentially lead to more empathetic practices of leadership in education (Crawford, 2011). These ideas highlight the embodied and emotional nature of identity stories that allow us to connect and reconnect with ourselves and others each time our stories are told. Our students showed us this in relation to their developing leader selves.

Having time to reflect on such stories is fundamental to the process of transformation of leader identity (Cooper, 2020). Armstrong (2021) emphasised that stories which are supported by reflection have potential to communicate emotions, reframe expectations, and shift reality. As part of this deeply reflective process, our students’ realisations and enhanced awareness from telling their stories, encouraged them to take control of factors they could either embrace or reject as part of their developing leader identity and orientations to being a leader. For example, the high expectation placed on Jessica to perform leadership as “the perfect bellwether” was something she was willing to accept as part of her past, but not necessarily to incorporate into her transformed orientation to being a leader. This burden on her was something she had decided to free herself from, to unleash the confidence she felt she needed to be a good leader today. Similarly, Xingjin’s recall of the pressures placed on her as a young child revealed some emotional tension for her. Yet, storying her family experiences enabled her to transform a negative experience into one that could fuel and foster a strong and resilient leader identity. Like all the students, Jessica and Xingjin were sharing their stories with us for the very first time and were able to use the storytelling process to “unshackle” themselves from what might have become their enduring narratives of leadership. These insights align with Clandinin’s (2013) idea that if we share and change our stories, we quite possibly change who we are and even those with whom we are in a relationship.

As motivated readers of this work, we were collectively moved and awakened by our students’ stories (Armstrong, 2021). We recognised and appreciated the trust given to us as receivers of these cultural prompts that had informed their leader identity development. Beyond thinking “about” their stories, we were inspired by Clandinin (2013) to think “with” these stories where we allowed the narrative to influence us. We were able to think about not only the story we were engaged in, but also our own leader narratives that were unfolding in the process. We were open to thinking “with” their stories by utilising them ourselves as reflective prompts to contemplate the sources of our own leadership motivations.