Implementing Inclusive Practices in Schools: The Route to a Personal Vision Through Life Histories Accounts of School Leaders in Greece

Author(s):

Aikaterini Matziari(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 03 A, School Leadership and Inclusive Education

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-02

17:15-18:45

Room:

B013 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Jo Rose

Contribution

The conceptualisation of inclusion as a political and social value commitment to advance educational provision for all (Norwich, 2008) calls attention to the importance of the role of school leaders who perform their role with a recognisable value-driven activity which inform practice. The inclusive values through education policy are enacted in abstract and contradictory articulations (Allan, 2007; Slee, 2010) leaving space for interpretation by the school agents in the light of their own values and beliefs. Such a view recognises the influence that school leaders exercise upon their organizations suggesting that the headteacher is or could be a carrier of a vision for the school. The role of the leader in this context is generally attributed to the school’s headteacher who as instructional leader is responsible for both attitudinal shifts and implementation of practices (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2005; Leo & Barton, 2006; Lindqvist & Nilholm, 2011).

Literature identifies the leaders’ vision as a powerful predictor for positive attitudes towards inclusion in education and its salience is declared either explicitly by suggesting that the inclusive leader holds a vision of inclusion (Lipsky & Gartner, 1998; Senge, 1997; Villa & Thousand, 2009) or implicitly, by stressing the need for a value driven leadership where leaders appear to be responsible to embody inclusive values in the school organisation (Barton, 1997; Booth, et al., 2002; Kugelmass, 2001, 2006; Zollers, et al., 1999). Notwithstanding that the existence of vision is recognised as vital to inclusive education, little is known about how educational leaders create such a vision. Especially, in the context of an inclusive school culture the process under which a leader’s vision grows to formulate its content remains unclear.

The paper develops its theoretical concepts in an interdisciplinary context using literature from the fields of inclusive education studies, educational leadership, and business and management. The concept of vision as a leadership’s quality (Bennis & Nanus, 1985; Conger, 1989; Strange & Mumford, 2005; Kantabutra, 2009) is deployed to explore the ways through which headteachers develop and communicate values which promote inclusive practices in schools. The study aims to map the function of vision in the context of educational leadership for promoting inclusion and to reveal probable patterns of experience in the process of forming such a vision. The explorative character of the research focuses is on the experiences and life histories of headteachers identified by their colleagues as holding an inclusive vision for their school in Greece, aiming to answer:

What is the content of an inclusive vision in education?
What is the process of its emergence in the school organisation?
How do educational leaders conceptualise the content and the context of an inclusive vision?
What is the relationship between leadership’s practices to promote inclusion and the leadership’s vision in the context?

Method

The adopted epistemological position values the subjective and idiographic as a valid type of knowledge in the research inquiry. More specifically, life history methods were employed aiming to reveal a sense of continuity in the process of vision emergence. The applicability of the approach for researching leadership for diversity, as Coleman (2012, p. 604) stresses, derives from the complexities of intersectionality that ‘would appear to call for an interpretative research approach, perhaps one that stresses biography and narrative’. The paper draws on narrative data based on interviews with primary school headteachers looking at how they experience and perform their role in the daily workload as part of their personal life history. Narrative inquiry shares to a great extent the postmodern view of what counts as social data and the notion of subjectivity as a political construction boosts its validity as a research method. The ongoing analysis relates the stories of the participants around its major themes emanated from thematic analysis and construes the stories into their historical context as social constructs (Goodson and Sikes, 2001). The aim of the analysis is to produce rich life history accounts which will represent both the researcher’s interpretation of the life stories presented and the contextualisation of the life history account (Cole & Knowles, 2001, p13). The interrelationship of the participants’ knowledge generated through data analysis and the ways that the research inquiry is formulated will be discussed as a central issue in the development of the research methodology.

Expected Outcomes

Preliminary analysis suggests that the formation of an inclusive vision is a complex and ongoing process -rather than a starting point for inclusive education- driven by personal values and empowering practices. The study, albeit not generalisable, contributes to knowledge about the development of inclusive forms of educational leadership by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of the under-researched concept of vision. Furthermore, the analysis process discloses the importance of the socio-historical context in the understanding and implementation of what constitutes an inclusive form of education. Especially in Greece, which is under recession, the influence of the social context to the formation of the underpinning principles and practices of inclusion becomes even more explicit and augment our knowledge on different perspectives on inclusive education.

References

Allan, J. (2007). Rethinking inclusive education: The philosophers of difference in practice (Vol.5): Springer. Barton, L. (1997). Inclusive education: romantic, subversive or realistic? International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1(3), 231-242. Bennis, W., & Nanus, B. (1985). The strategies for taking charge. Leaders, New York: Harper. Row. Booth, T., Ainscow, M., Black-Hawkins, K., Vaughan, M., & Shaw, L. (2002). Index for inclusion. Cole, A. L., & Knowles, J. G. (2001). Lives in context: The art of life history research. Oxford: AltaMira Press. Coleman, M. (2012). Leadership and Diversity. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 40(5), 592-609. Conger, J. A. (1989). The charismatic leader: Behind the mystique of exceptional leadership: Jossey-Bass. Goodson, I., & Sikes, P. J. (2001). Life history research in educational settings: Learning from lives. Buckingham: Open University Press Kantabutra, S. (2009). Toward a behavioral theory of vision in organizational settings. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 30(4), 319-337. Kugelmass, J. W. (2001). Collaboration and compromise in creating and sustaining an inclusive school. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 5(1), 47-65. Kugelmass, J. W. (2006). Sustaining cultures of inclusion: The value and limitation of cultural analyses. European journal of psychology of education, 21(3), 279-292. Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (2005). A Review of Transformational School Leadership Research 1996–2005. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 4(3), 177-199. doi: 10.1080/15700760500244769 Leo, E., & Barton, L. (2006). Inclusion, Diversity and Leadership: Perspectives, Possibilities and Contradictions. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 34(2), 167-180. doi: 10.1177/1741143206062489 Lindqvist, G., & Nilholm, C. (2011). Making schools inclusive? Educational leaders' views on how to work with children in need of special support. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 17(1), 95-110. doi: 10.1080/13603116.2011.580466 Lipsky, D. K., & Gartner, A. (1998). Taking Inclusion into the Future. Educational Leadership, 56(2), 78-81. Norwich, B. (2008). SPECIAL SCHOOLS: What future for special schools and inclusion? Conceptual and professional perspectives. British Journal of Special Education, 35(3), 136-143. Senge, P. M. (1997). The fifth discipline. Measuring Business Excellence, 1(3), 46-51. Slee, R. (2010). The irregular school: Exclusion, schooling and inclusive education: Taylor & Francis. Strange, J. M., & Mumford, M. D. (2005). The origins of vision: Effects of reflection, models, and analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(1), 121-148. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2004.07.006 Villa, R. A., & Thousand, J. S. (2009). Making inclusive education work. Kaleidoscope: Contemporary and Classic Readings in Education, 336.

Author Information

Aikaterini Matziari (presenting / submitting)

University of Huddersfield

School of Educational and Prodessional Development

Manchester

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