Toward a Common General Framework Bridging Curriculum Theory / Didaktik and Educational Leadership Studies: Discursive Curriculum Leadership

Author(s):

Michael Uljens(presenting / submitting)Rose Ylimaki(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

27. Didactics - Learning and Teaching

Format:

Paper

Session Information

27 SES 06 B, Didactics and Curriculum : A Theoritical Perspective

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-09

15:30-17:00

Room:

202.Oktatóterem [C]

Chair:

Helmut Johannes Vollmer

Contribution

General Description

Recent neoliberal policies have intensified a focus on school leadership, results, and curriculum standards. An increased focus on educational leadership is prevalent in Europe, while leadership has been prominent in the US for decades. Such societal changes, including the move from a European social-democratic welfare state (old public management) to a neoliberal competition-based model (new public management), have consequences for professional activity and development. These developments make it crucial to see connections among societal trends / aims, selection of educational content, methods, and leadership; however, curriculum and leadership scholars have yet to make these connections explicit.

Objectives
In this paper, we present a common general framework for curriculum work-leadership. Our point of departure is that any successful accomplishment of educational practice, be it or teaching or educational leadership, is partly guided by prevailing conceptual framework and theories, dominating policies, cultural and historical traditions.

Questions:

a) How do we define the relation between school and society, i.e. the relation between institutional education and other societal forms of practice e.g. politics, economics, and culture? How are the dynamics between e.g. education and politics explained?

b) How does an educational leadership theory explain the relation between individuals in terms of pedagogical influence? If leadership is to influence somebody else, then what kind of influence are we addressing?

Theoretical Framework
Our framework builds upon literature from two distinct fields, educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik as well as philosophy and discursive institutionalism that we believe address a key blindspot in both fields (Uljens, 2015). Leadership studies often focus on approaches (individual or collective) that indirectly influence effectiveness and student outcomes (Day, 2005; Drysdale, et al., 2009; Levine & Lezotte, 1990; Purkey & Smith, 1993), functions that can be reproductive and normative (e.g. Foster, 1989). A growing number of scholars approach leadership through critical theory with practices now aimed at social transformation (e.g. Scheurich, 1998; Theoharis, 2007; Touchton & Acker-Hocevar, 2001). However, such critical, position-taking perspectives on leadership can also result in a normative view with leaders influencing others toward a pre-determined vision of an ideal future society. Regardless of approach, leadership studies focus on the micro level of interactions and social practices in schools with little attention to societal aims.
Curriculum theory/didaktik explicitly considers how socio-cultural aims are translated into content and instruction (e.g. Klafki, 1998; Pinar, 2013); however, leadership and micro interactions have received little attention. Contemporary international studies (e.g. Pinar, 2013; Smith, 2013) focus on socio-cultural and political trends and policies, often from critical perspectives, including globalization, neoliberalism, and changing identities in the midst of these trends. Earlier curriculum theory (CT) and European Didaktik (e.g. Gundem & Hopmann, 1998; Hopmann, Riguarts, Westbury, 2000) contained more overt references to leadership with regards to monitoring teacher implementation. For Didaktik, curriculum making involves an implicit view of leadership in an authoritative selection of content that must become embedded in the forms of teacher thinking (Hopmann, 2015). A blind spot for both curriculum theory / didaktik and educational leadership is the limited attention paid to the interplay between, on the one hand aims, contents and methods, and leadership forms / structures and interactions on the other.
Discursive institutionalism (Scmidt, offers a complementary approach to understanding how educational policies, ideas and values relate to administrative processes on different levels. More specifically, discursive institutionalism aims at understanding how cognitive and normative ideas are developed and communicated across societal, philosophical, policy, and program levels. Institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 2006; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Greenwood & Hinings, 1996) has been used recently in educational leadership studies to consider multi-levels of leadership but do not consider how ideas (curriculum) circulate within and between institutional levels.

Method

Methods We use comparative educational research methods (e.g. Broadfoot, 2000; Crossley, 2000) to examine macro-historical questions about the relationship among education and political, economic, and social change (“development”), using cross-national or comparative evidence as well as micro-level institutional practices at various levels and in various contexts. This type of research is appropriate to make sense of globalization processes and the way in which education is internationally organized within and between institutional levels. Closely related, we use critical discourse analysis (CDA) procedures (Fairclough, 2010) adapted for a less normative perspective on macro- and micro-discursive social practices. In a broad sense, CDA is an approach to analyzing language and its involvement in the workings of contemporary capitalist societies. More specifically, CDA features three properties: 1) relational; 2) dialectical; and 3) transdisciplinary. First, CDA is relational in the sense that its primary focus is not on entities or individuals (including both things and persons) but on complex, layered social relations, including relations between relations. Here Fairclough (2010) includes relations of communication (oral, written, corporal) between people as well as relations between concrete communicative events (conversations, policy texts, newspaper articles) and relations between enduring complex discursive ‘objects’ (with their own complex relations), including objects in the physical world, persons, power relations, and institutes, which are interconnected elements in social activity or praxis. These relations are ‘dialectical’, meaning there are relations between object which are different from one another but not in a discrete sense that one excludes the other (e.g. power and discourse). Power and discourse are, for example, different elements in social processes or “moments”, yet power is partly discourse and discourse is partly power; they are different and yet flow into each other. Finally, CDA is transdisciplinary in that objects of research (e.g. curriculum work-leadership; institutional levels; curriculum policies) are constructed in ways that allow various ‘points of entry’ for discourse analysis. Analysis in terms of these categories are helpful to link ‘micro-analysis’ of texts (school curriculum planning documents, etc.) with various forms of social (cultural, political) analysis of practices, organizations and institutions. Further, our research project includes policy (textual, semiotic) analysis, including multiple policy levels (transnational, national, state, district, and school). We are particularly interested in changes in the nation state in the midst of globalization, homogenization of curriculum and evaluation policies, and local (district and school) responses to these policies.

Expected Outcomes

Expected Outcomes In contrast to pre-modern and modern explanations of education as being located within existing society (socialization-oriented), education as revolutionary or super-ordinated to society (transformation-oriented), and centrist that combine social reproduction and transformation perspectives, our general framework explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. We further consider what kind of influence educational leadership has and how this influence is related to the person being influenced. In our framework, educational leadership, from classroom to school, district, national, and transnational organizations, is understood as an invitation, intervention or provocation, a violation, disturbance or expectation concerning the Other’s relation to himself/herself, the world and others. Educational leadership is, then, to recognize somebody as if they are already capable of doing what they are supposed to become capable of - and to act accordingly (Kant, Fichte, Herbart, Schleiermacher as conceptualized further by Benner, 1991). To elaborate, we find three concepts particularly relevant: 1) recognition - how the Self is aware of the Other as being free (ontological assumption); 2) summoning to self-activity - how a teacher or a principal has a mediating role with respect to the Other in the maintenance and development of the Other’s self-relations; and 3) Bildsamkeit - the individual’s own conscious efforts aimed at making sense of the world and her experiences. These very same core concepts may be laid out as foundational for both teaching and educational leadership as human interpersonal practice. The paper concludes with a proposal for new research fields and questions with understandings of different research traditions with their cultural-historical and political context. This general framework and related research agenda will extend our understanding of what curriculum work-leadership means in a neoliberal era and beyond.

References

Benner, D. (1991). Allgemeine Pädagogik: eine systematisch-problemgeschichtliche Einführung in die Grundstruktur pädagogischen Denkens und Handelns. Weinheim: Juventa. Broadfoot, P. (2000). Comparative education for the 21st century: retrospect and prospect. Comparative Education, 36(3), 357-371. Day, C. (2005). Sustaining success in challenging contexts: Leadership in English schools. Journal of Educational Administration, 43(6), 573-583. DiMaggio, P. J. & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160. Drysdale, L., Goode, H., & Gurr, D. (2009). An Australian model of successful school leadership. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(6), 697-708. Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Routledge. Greenwood, R., & Hinings, C. R. (1996). Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism. The Academy of Management Review, 21(4), 1022-1054. Gundem, B. B., & Hopmann, S. (1998). Didaktik and/or Curriculum. An International dialogue. New York: Peter Lang, 47-78. Hopmann, S. (2015). ‘Didaktik meets Curriculum’ revisited: historical encounters, systematic experience, empirical limits. 2015, 1: 27007 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27007 Klafki, W. (1998). Characteristics of critical-constructive Didaktik. Didaktik and/or Curriculum: An International Dialogue. Peter Lang, New York, 307-330. Levine, D. & Lezotte, L. (1990). Unusually effective schools: An analysis of research and practice. Madison, WI: National Center for Effective Schools Research. Meyer, H. D., & Rowan, B. (Eds.). (2006). The new institutionalism in education. SUNY. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? New York, NY: Routledge. Pinar, W. F. (Ed.). (2013). International handbook of curriculum research. Routledge. Purkey, S. & Smith, M. (1993). Effective schools: A review. Elementary School Journal, 83, 427-452. Scheurich, J. (1998). Highly successful and loving, public elementary schools populated mainly by low-SES children of color: Core beliefs and cultural characteristics. Urban Education, 33(4), 451-491. Schmidt, V. (2008). Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science 11, 303–26. Smith, D. (2013). Wisdom responses to globalization. In W. Pinar (Editor), International handbook of curriculum research (pp. 45-59). New York: Routledge. Theoharis, G. (2007). Social justice educational leaders and resistance: Toward a theory of social justice leadership. Educational Administration Quarterly, 43(2), 221-258. Touchton, D., & Acker-Hocevar, M. (2001). Using a Lens of Social Justice To Reframe Principals' Interviews from High Poverty, Low Performing Schools. Uljens, M. (2015). Curriculum work as educational leadership - paradoxes and theoretical foundations. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 2015, 1: 27010 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/nstep.v1.27010

Author Information

Michael Uljens (presenting / submitting)

Åbo Akademi University

Department of Education

VAASA

Rose Ylimaki (presenting)

University of Arizona

Educational Policy Studies and Practice

Tucson

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