Black women teachers’ shapeshifting boundaryless careers

Abstract

In this analytic narrative, we story the career of a Black millennial woman, Andrea Gamble, who, over 20 years, four states, and two coasts, cultivated a professional repertoire as a middle school teacher and K-8 assistant principal while maintaining a parallel career in postsecondary student affairs. Her shapeshifting portfolio included a B.S. in Middle Grades Education, an M.Ed. in Educational Administration, and a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction in progress. All the while, she carefully nurtured a 20-year marriage with her college sweetheart. Theorizing Gamble’s itinerant career choices through a boundaryless-career framework, our findings suggest that longstanding metaphors for “servant leadership” fall short of capturing how Black millenial women organize, strategize, enact, and re-imagine different ways of being and existing in the contemporary K-12 marketplace.