Educational leadership and social activism: a call for action

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating effects on education. Empirical data from an activist high school principal, activist university professor, and activist priest reflects their development of political clarity, political capacity, political collaboration, and an ethic of risk. It is suggested that the work of socially active educational leaders needs to be broadened to include such things as public policy advocacy, networking, organising, community development, and scholarship. Finally, the article concludes with a variety of ways educational leaders can demonstrate their social, moral, and political activism as they challenge the status quo, fight for social justice, and come to understand the politicised notion of leadership.     

School leadership and social justice: Evidence from Ghana and Tanzania

Headteachers working under conditions of severe hardship in Africa face tremendous challenges, often exacerbated by a sense of hopelessness and lack of agency to effect improvements within their school. This paper focuses on notions of leadership agency and ‘social justice’ within an African educational context, with a specific focus on the school level, and reports on a small-scale research project involving primary headteachers in Ghana and Tanzania engaging with action research in order to bring about changes which they feel will benefit the quality of pupil learning. The study presents some positive impacts generated by the headteachers’ actions and indicates ways in which these actions illustrate developments in areas of ‘social justice’ related to fairness, equity, recognition, and redistribution. The findings suggest that empowering headteachers through the use of action research can enable them to act creatively and positively to benefit the quality of education offered to the pupils within their schools.     

Social justice leadership and inclusion: a genealogy

The purpose of this article is to engage in an historical analysis of research about two concepts: social justice leadership and leadership for inclusion. Recent experiences have caused me to wonder about our interpretations of justice, equity, and inclusion. Analysis of the relevant literature revealed a lack of consensus among scholars as to a clear, operational definition of both social justice leadership and inclusion. I use a Foucauldian genealogical method to examine texts and uncover the historical development of social justice leadership and leadership for inclusion in the United States. Uncovering past meanings and contexts should help illuminate current meanings and uses of these concepts. It is recommended that leaders engage in critical reflection to uncover the common sense language of equity-oriented leadership practices and that researchers take a more critical, historical, open stance of social justice leadership, and inclusion.     

Levinas,bureaucracy, and the ethics of school leadership

Given present criticisms of contemporary education and leadership practices, this article investigates the ways in which the basic concepts of state freedom and bureaucracy stifle ethics and social justice in educational leadership practices through the philosophical framework of Emmanuel Levinas. By investigating Levinas’ ‘an-archy’, the definition of ethics and justice in school leadership can be reframed towards responsibility to otherness rather than individual freedom. The anarchical ethic of pure responsibility to the Other suggests that educational leaders should prioritize specific acts of responsibility over general actions based on the assumptions of traditional state education. Aspects of transactional, transformational, and social justice leadership are critiqued from this perspective.     

Interrogating conceptions of leadership: school principals,policy and paradox

Currently educational research literature demonstrates wide discussion and endorsement of ‘distributed’ leadership while concurrently traditional, hegemonic forms prevail in practice. This article investigates understandings about educational leadership held by Australian school principals. The article describes the contradictory conceptions about educational leadership currently in circulation. It interrogates underlying assumptions and questions how both hegemonic and newer leadership conceptions and assumptions serve educational leaders. Data from principals around the country and across education systems reinforced the predominance of un-theorised or under-theorised notions about leadership, with similar assumptions found in important policy artefacts and practices. This article emerges from interviews with 100 principals focusing on their professional learning needs, which revealed interesting ideas, issues and dilemmas concerning ‘leadership’. It fills a gap in research on distributed leadership by exploring contradictions inherent in policy, practice and understandings in this area. The article is structured into four sections. First, extant literature on this topic and the research are explained. Second, the article focuses on principals' conceptions about leadership and those inherent within important policy and practical artefacts. A discussion of the findings focuses on the discrepancy between theory and policy endorsement and the views of practitioners. Finally, the article canvasses the implications of the research.     

Leadership of education psychological services: fit for purpose?

At a time of great change for educational psychology services in England, this paper reviews current theories of leadership and proposes how an integration of key aspects of these can be applied to support a self review of leadership practice, both by individual leaders and by services. The message from current theory is that in the midst of complexity and rapid change, a primary focus on the head of service is outdated; there should instead be a focus to develop the leadership capacity of the service as a whole. Key constructs considered are systems thinking, social identity, authenticity, and leadership as social construction.     

谈教育局长的领导力及其提升策略

教育局长是我国区域教育行政管理的基本领导群体,其领导行为直接影响着区域教育发展的内涵与进程。按照权变领导理论框架,教育局长的领导力与教育局长的工作情境直接相关。由于教育局长的工作情境具体由教育局、政府和学校系统三个开放的工作系统构成,因此,教育局长的领导力呈现出三维结构,即行政领导力、政治领导力和教育领导力。相应地,教育局长要提升领导力,应该从三个维度入手:领导领导者,有效提升教育局长的政治领导力;认识教育组织特征,有效提升教育局长的教育领导力;发展组织文化,提升教育局长领导的有效性。     

Identity learning: the core process of educational change

The aim of this paper is to offer an additional perspective to the understanding of educational change processes by clarifying the significance of identity learning. Today’s innovations require changes in teachers’ professional identity. Identity learning involves a relation between social‐cognitive construction of new meanings and individual, emotional sense‐making of new experiences. This relationship between cognition and emotion asks for a strong learning environment: the question is whether schools provide these strong learning environments. To answer this question, the paper provides an overview of the existing knowledge about schools as contexts for teacher learning and change. It will become clear that the emotional side of the change process has been overlooked. A model for identity learning is presented, involving both meaning‐giving and sense‐making. Building on this model, it is discussed how school leaders can build strategies for the identity learning of teachers.     

Effective Leadership is Not Enough: Critical Approaches to Closing the Racial Discipline Gap

A review of student discipline and suspension data disaggregated by race highlights how school leader biases influence disciplinary decisions. Yet, the majority of principal preparation programs have failed to develop structures and norms that result in critical conversations pertaining to race and racial inequities. This article is written from a stance that school leaders must move away from traditional leadership approaches and toward a social justice leadership orientation that creates critical spaces and discourses, empowers communities, and enables the adoption of social justice practices in all aspects of the school. After reviewing literature on critical race theory and social justice leadership, three leadership action areas are recommended to support principals and assistant principals in closing the racial discipline gap.     

重视和加强教育领导学的研究

教育领导就是确定教育组织的发展方向与共同愿景,对全体成员施加积极的影响,使其积极主动地为实现组织目标而努力工作的过程与活动。带领、指导、教育、劝说和激励等是施加影响的重要手段。教育领导学是研究与提高教育领导活动的合理性、科学性和有效性相关的一般性的主要的领导问题的理论体系。我国的教育领导学研究应主要包括学科性质、基本要领领导行为、领导能力等内容,并且要采取适当的措施,加强教育领导学的学科建设与推广工作。     

Group coaching: a new way of constructing leadership identity?

This paper focuses on group coaching, one of the newer school leadership development approaches to recently emerge. Using a group-coaching methodology developed at the University of Oslo, we deconstruct the concept of leadership identity as it is reported in texts from students in the National Principal Programme. We suggest that leaders develop greater confidence in their leadership role through personal and contextual feedback from other leaders. We argue that bringing existing and aspiring school principals together in a target-oriented group-coaching process may have profound positive effect on leaders' context-based identity development.     

Leadership identity in a small island developing state: the Jamaican context

While the role of leadership in improving schools is attracting more worldwide attention, there is a need for more research investigating leaders’ experiences in different national contexts. Using focus-group and semi-structured interview data, this paper explores the background, identities and experiences of a small group of Jamaican school leaders who were involved in a leadership development programme. By drawing on the concepts of culture, socialisation and identity, the paper examines how the participants’ journeys of becoming and being school leaders are influenced by national-level societal and cultural issues, experienced at a local level. The findings suggest that in becoming school leaders, the participants perceived that they had a strong sense of agency in attempting to change the social structures within the institutions they lead and in the surrounding local communities, which in turn, they hope, will have a lasting effect on the nation as a whole.     

Preparing ‘educational’ leaders in managerialist times: an Australian story

The preparation of educational leaders is a global phenomenon. Education systems have developed numerous means by which current and aspiring leaders are prepared for the role. Through the example of a large public school system in Australia, this paper argues that the doxa of school leadership establishes a particular identity of the principalship. One which constructs the principal as the deliverer of state initiated reforms. Theoretically informed by Bourdieu, this paper argues for an alternate way of thinking about leadership preparation, one based on introducing participants to the conversation of the world.     

Cross-cultural dimensions of applied,critical, and transformational leadership: women principals advancing social justice and educational equity

This study, based on the qualitatively rendered experiences and perceptions of educational leaders from historically underserved backgrounds in the US, argues that identity impacts leadership practice. To make this point, researchers build upon an emergent theoretical framework for applied critical leadership from the theories and traditions of transformational leadership, personal leadership, critical pedagogy, and critical race theory. With regard to methodology, a two-subject case study was validated by adding three additional participants for points of verification to the findings and discussion. Interview, field notes, and relevant documents were analyzed using phenomenology and constant comparative methods. Major findings indicate participants’ practice reveal characteristics of cross-cultural applied, critical, and transformational leadership. These scholarly findings are significant because they can inform mainstream leadership practices contributing to educational equity, authentic multiculturalism, improved intercultural relations, innovation, increased academic achievement, and sustainable educational change.     

Social justice leadership and The Art of War

ABSTRACT

The social justice leadership research recognizes the pivotal role that educational leaders play in mobilizing the discourse and achieving social justice in schools. However, current social justice leadership studies may be seen as limited in that the variety of important themes and issues identified in the discussions of social justice within educational leadership are generally addressed in an isolated manner, focusing on specific aspects. There seems to be a lack of an overarching framework which may be used to examine social justice leadership in a holistic and multidimensional manner by taking into account leadership, organizational conditions and environment. This article aims to examine social justice leadership through the lens of the ‘Five Fundamentals’ outlined in The Art of War by the Chinese General, Sun Tzu. In doing so, the article extends the theoretical boundary in social justice leadership by considering its moral purpose, human and environmental conditions, leadership practices, and technical constraints.     

Culture,gender and school leadership: school leaders' self-perceptions in China

Since the 1980s, numerous studies have demonstrated the influences of culture and gender on leadership, including school leadership. Such studies have been criticised, however, for being dominated by Anglo-American paradigms and frameworks and for under-exploring the roles of culture and gender on leadership in non-Western societies. With reference to China, this paper focuses on the relationship between gender and school leadership and explores gender differences between Chinese male and female school leaders in their leadership orientations. The study adopted a mixed methodology of a questionnaire survey and individual interviews to solicit Chinese school leaders' views in 2008. The study finds mixed patterns of gender differences in Chinese school leadership, including stereotypical, non-stereotypical and no differences. This paper argues that these patterns can be interpreted as resulting from the dynamic interplay among traditional Chinese culture, contemporary political context and organisational settings into which Chinese school leaders are socialised and in which their leadership styles and behaviours are shaped and leadership is exercised.     

Distributed leadership: developing theory from practice

Hopes that the transformation of schools lies with exceptional leaders have proved both unrealistic and unsustainable. The idea of leadership as distributed across multiple people and situations has proven to be a more useful framework for understanding the realities of schools and how they might be improved. However, empirical work on how leadership is distributed within more and less successful schools is rare. This paper presents key concepts related to distributed leadership and illustrates them with an empirical study in a school‐improvement context in which varying success was evident. Grounding the theory in this practice‐context led to the identification of some risks and benefits of distributing leadership and to a challenge of some key concepts presented in earlier theorizing about leadership and its distribution.     

Adaptive leadership in school boards in Australia: an emergent model

When school boards are confronted with the challenge of unfamiliar, changing contexts, opportunities and governance responsibilities, they have to be able to respond appropriately. The research reported in this paper investigated the response of five Western Australian primary school boards to such situations. It analyses interview data from 49 board members on their roles and responsibilities using elements of Heifetz' framework of adaptive leadership, and explores the implications of these findings for the boards and their leaders. The findings reinforce the importance of the leader's role in choreographing the learning of the board members, and raise questions about the effect that the composition of boards may have on their capacities for strategic thinking. The paper concludes with a model of adaptive leadership appropriate for school boards, emphasising key elements that are necessary for sustained change.     

Creative leadership: a new category or more of the same?

New categories of leadership are continually being invented. Because the ways we think are productive of the ways in which we act, it is important to hold these rhetorical innovations to account. This paper focuses on the latest of these categories – creative leadership. Mobilising a Foucauldian notion of ‘discourse’ I deconstruct the notion of creative leadership as it has recently been represented in five published texts. I suggest that the interpretation on offer has a determinist view of the future, ignores the history of debates about creativity, offers creativity as a generic skill and underestimates what it is that teachers and leaders might need to do in order to work creatively. I show that the notion of creative leadership on offer is strongly connected with that of creative learning, and put the ‘recipe’ offered by one set of texts into conversation with a body of empirical evidence about what is happening in schools that aim to promote creative learning. I argue that what is evident from the dialogue between the texts and the empirical studies is that it is pedagogical leadership that is absent but is actually most required, embedded in leadership/management principles and practices that promote social justice.     

Entrepreneurial leadership competencies among Malaysian university student entrepreneurial leaders

Developments in entrepreneurial leadership as a distinct area of both research and practice raised many questions about the personal competencies of entrepreneurial leaders that enable them to successfully lead entrepreneurial endeavours. Although identifying entrepreneurs' specific capabilities has been one of the main focuses of entrepreneurship researchers, our knowledge is limited about personal leadership competencies required in entrepreneurial contexts. This qualitative study aimed to explore the personal competencies of undergraduate student entrepreneurial leaders in four Malaysian universities. Fourteen student entrepreneurial leaders were purposefully selected to participate in this study. Analysis of the semi-structured and in-depth interviews revealed different dimensions of proactiveness and innovativeness as previously identified competencies of entrepreneurial leaders for the student entrepreneurial leaders. Furthermore, love of challenges and versatility emerged as the personal competencies of the students. Implication of the findings and suggestions for developing entrepreneurial leadership competencies in university students through purposeful interventions are proposed.