Integrating Care and Critical Reflection in Women's Leadership Development Programs

Abstract

Women's leadership development programs (WLDPs) have been suggested as programmatic additions for achieving gender-equity in organizational contexts. These programs are conceptualized as transformative learning spaces affording women the opportunity to explore uncritically examined assumptions and create new perspectives of themselves as leaders. This paper explains how these types of transformative learning environments are predicated on dialogue that encourages critical reflection in the context of caring relationships. Recognizing that women may arrive in leadership programs with varied capacities for both relational learning and critical reflection, this paper seeks to explore the communication practices needed to create the dialogic conditions of care and critical reflection. It outlines the results of a qualitative study that examined critical incidents of dialogue in a women's leadership development program to demonstrate the ways in which facilitators communicate to create these conditions. The results suggest how taking a communication perspective on dialogue may increase a facilitator's capacity to integrate care and critical reflection.