Extending Thurber’s and Zimmerman’s models for developing feminist leadership in art education through collaboration, community building, and creativity

In this article, I describe how Frances Thurber (1946–2012) and I began in the early 1990s to conduct research concerning empowerment and leadership themes in art teacher education. Over the next decade, we were involved in researching leadership issues in art teacher education and conducted a series of studies that focused on both theory and practice related to developing voice, collaboration, and social action as components of feminist leadership in art education. Our goal was to educate in-service art teachers to become empowered and take leadership roles in programmes in Nebraska and Indiana. By 2002, we had constructed several pedagogical models as a result of our studies of various components of leadership and empowerment. I describe how I then used these models from 2003 to 2012 to study three different populations of undergraduate and graduate students in the United States. Finally, I make a case for extending the leadership models to include creativity as a new component for considering leadership and art education. Rethinking my past decade of work about building leadership models for art education, from a more extended lens than the one through which the two leadership models were originally constructed, provides an avenue for new collaboration, community building, and consideration of the role of creativity in empowerment and leadership in art education and considers a variety of populations and organizations that can be enriched by using these extended leadership models in the future.