Session Information
WERA SES 09 A, Understanding the Nature of Educational Practices Through Narrative Research.
Symposium
Contribution
This paper reports on the conduct and outcomes of a project which was undertaken at the University of Nottingham in the UK with funding from the Higher Education Academy in England. This project was based on a concern about the ways in which knowledge of educational leadership was being presented in an MA in Educational Leadership which had recently seen a rapid expansion in international students. There were two main concerns in this, the first being that the forms of leadership being presented were de-contextualised. They were based on research which made abstract generalised claims about what leaders do but which as a consequence, did not present leadership as an activity linked to the contexts of people’s lives and work. The second concern was that this literature is dominated by western, English speaking, conceptions of leadership, conceptions which, increasingly, did not represent the kinds of contexts in which students on the programme worked. In this project 10 life history narrative of school leaders were generated from participants who came from a range of international settings including: Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, the Solomon Islands, Bangladesh, and France. These were then shared with students. Having reviewed and discussed these narratives interested students then took on this approach themselves and made use of it either to tell their own stories, or ask others from their own settings to share stories of their own experiences. This further extended the adoption of the use narrative to an even wider international context. In this paper I present a series of observations on what this use of narrative can tell us about the ways in which educational leadership is understood, represented and discussed. Drawing initially from some of the 10 narratives generated for this project I seek to illustrate the distinctive ways in which narrative was able to relate claims about leadership and how these were articulated by the leaders in question. I then go on to talk about how this was received by the international body of students on the MA programme. This discussion leads to a series of reflections on the process of meaning making from research about educational leadership. In conclusion I propose ways in which this approach could act as a stimulus for broadening the range and diversity of voices who are able to frame understandings of educational leadership and reflect on the opportunities this presents for internationalising this area of research.
References
Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1990). Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2-14. Chase, S. E. (2005). Narrative Inquiry: Multiple Lenses, Approaches, Voices. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed.) (pp. 651-679). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd. Case, J. M., Marshall, D., & Linder, C. J. (2010). Being a student again: a narrative study of a teacher's experience. Teaching in Higher Education, 15(4), 423-433. Frank, A. (2002) Why Study People’s Stories? The Dialogical Ethics of Narrative Analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 1(1), 109-117. Gallagher, K. (2011) In search of a theoretical basis for storytelling in education research: story as method, International Journal of Research & Method in Education, 34:1, 49-61 Ryan, J., & Carroll, J. (2005). Canaries in the Coalmine. In J. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.), Teaching International Students. Improving Learning for All (pp. 1-10). Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, J. (2011). Agency and Female Teachers’ Career Decisions: A Life History Study of 40 Women. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 39(1), 7-24.
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