Making Lemonade from Lemons: A Road to Leadership for Women in Science Education

We now recognize throughout our careers we had unknowingly been building on the wisdom of Naisbitt (2006) as stated in the following: “Times of change are times of opportunity. When relationships of people and things are shifting, new juxtapositions create new needs, and desires offer possibilities” (p. 92). Similar to the rest of society, the rate of change in higher education has accelerated. We see shifts in administration at all levels, faculty movement among institutions, national and state policy, university shrinking budgets, grant funding patterns, and subsequent colleagues’ desires to preserve or expand their turf. Our responses to barriers emerging from these shifts were to let go of whatever was interfering with, or blocking our creativity and personal job satisfaction, and to seek new professional relationships with associated new tasks. This behavior invariably put us in leadership positions.