Envisioning inclusive schools: the content of an educational vision towards more inclusive forms of education narrated by Greek head-teachers

Author(s):

Katerina Matziari(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 04 B, Inclusive Schools

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-24

09:00-10:30

Room:

OB-H0.12

Chair:

Gunilla Lindqvist

Contribution

The paper discusses the ways that Greek head-teachers created and implemented their vision for an inclusive school. The theoretical stance adopted for such an exploration conceptualises inclusive education as a change process where education leadership holds an important role in the implementation and development of inclusive practices within the school organisation (Ainscow & Sandill, 2010; Coleman, 2012; Fullan, 2007). In organisational and business management literature, the concept of vision is described as a driving force for organisational change (Bennis & Nanus, 1985; English, 2008; Kotter, 2008). Similarly, vision holds a distinctive place in the field of inclusive education studies as a leadership practice by emphasising the need for a value driven leadership able to communicate and embody inclusive values within the school organisation (Barton, 1997; Booth et al., 2002; Kugelmass, 2006). Hence, the school leaders’ vision is identified as an essential element in the process of organisational change and a powerful predictor for positive outcomes in the implementation of inclusive practices within the school organisation.

By adopting such a view over the concept of vision in the process of inclusive education, the research project looks at how the concept of vision as a leadership quality applies in the Greek educational context by posing research questions around the vision content that school head-teachers hold for their schools identified as inclusive schools by the school community. More specifically the research design aimed to explore in the specific context:

- What is the content of an inclusive vision?

- How do educational leaders conceptualise the content of an inclusive vision?

It has to be mentioned that the research questions around the content of the vision were explored in parallel with the process of its emergence in the school organisation.

The paper conceptualises the vision process as a systemic process where transition and change are interrelated. Adopting such a view, the content of an inclusive vision appears not to be stable and pre-determined. In literature, the dynamics of organisational change and professional development are interrelated and explored by employing the concept of transition. Bridges (1991, 2004), who first introduced the term, described the concept as an internal process of change referring to individuals contrasting with change as external to individual. Several scholars in the field of educational leadership have developed stage-models to describe the organisational leaders’ experiences of transition during their professional career (see Oplatka, 2012 for relevant discussion). However, in the description and explanation of the different phases by the suggested transition models, the head-teacher’s vision, although identified as an important element in the transition process, the ways that it is developed at different professional phases remains a tacit correlation. The paper discusses the construction of a vision for an inclusive school in relation to the head-teacher’s professional development in the specific context and offers valuable insights for the contextual characteristics of school leadership for inclusion.

Method

Coleman (2012, p. 605) discussing ‘the difficulties of researching leadership for or with diversity’ suggests that methodologies which stress biography and narrative appear to be more appropriate to reveal the complexities of the leadership practice. The research project employed life history methods in order to produce narrative accounts of head-teachers’ experiences of developing and holding an inclusive vision for their school. Polkinghorne (1995, p. 7) defines narrative as ‘the linguistic form that preserves the complexity of human action with its interrelationship of temporal sequence, human motivation, chance happenings, and changing interpersonal and environmental contexts’. The paper discusses the exploration of how all these elements are inter-related in the process of vision formation, and the significance they appeared to have in the narrated experiences of six (6) head-teachers. The exploration of the concept of vision was based on the condition that the participants were holding such a vision for their schools, and the methodology adopted allowed the exploration of how that vision was informed and shaped through their personal and professional history. Analysis aimed to identify salient themes in the narrative accounts of the head-teachers and it resulted to a suggested stage-model that depicts the process of vision formation in the form of different phases. Such an analytical stance offered a valuable representation of the process, but it could not describe the nature of the relationship between the different stages. The methodology adopted to explore and produce a coherent narrative account employed complexity theory tenets, which offers an alternative conceptualisation of causality not as a deterministic action (Osberg and Biesta, 2010), but as a move between different stages of systemic order. By adopting a complexity vocabulary in the interpretation of data, the process of vision formation - as depicted in the suggested model - could be described as a complex change process by employing the properties of complex systems.

Expected Outcomes

The suggested model of vision emergence in the school denotes a connection of the vision content with the content of the head-teachers’ changing professional identity. The theoretical inferences for the content of vision through that process suggest different characteristics and qualities of the school vision at different stages in the head-teachers’ professional course. More specifically, three (3) different transition phases in the head-teachers’ professional development will be presented in relation to the changing nature of the vision that they hold for their schools. The changing nature of the school vision appears to have differences in the ways it is articulated and communicated to the school community, the origins of its guiding principles, and the experience of its impact on the context. In general, school vision appears to be developed in response and in relation to contextual characteristics and personal experiences. The paper aims to describe the content of an inclusive vision in the specific context and discusses the implications of a conceptualisation of inclusive vision as a changing concept. Such a view, apart from the theoretical significance on the conceptualisation of vision formation, has important implications for the meaning and content of inclusive education as it recognises a space of freedom (Rose, O'Malley, & Valverde, 2006) for individuals to attach and develop personal understanding of what an inclusive school could be. Such a perspective considers carefully not only the ways we conceptualise inclusive vision, but also how we present its content and any alleged universal character. The paper concludes to a consideration of the value of complexity theory for conceptualising inclusion process as a transformative process which leaves its development in a constant open state as an essential element of the meaning of inclusion (see Allan, 2005; Biesta, 2007; Hausstätter, 2014 ; Slee & Graham, 2008 Osberg & Biesta, 2010).

References

Ainscow, M., & Sandill, A. (2010). Developing inclusive education systems: the role of organisational cultures and leadership. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 14(4), 401-416. Allan, J. (2005). Inclusion as an Ethical Project. In S. L. Tremain (Ed.), Foucault and the Government of Disability (pp. 281-297). University of Michigan Press. Barton, L. (1997). Inclusive education: romantic, subversive or realistic? International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1(3), 231-242. Bennis, W., & Nanus, B. (1985). Leaders: The strategies for taking charge. New York: Harper & Row. Biesta, G. J. (2007). " Don't count me in"-Democracy, education and the question of inclusion. Booth, T., Ainscow, M., Black-Hawkins, K., Vaughan, M., & Shaw, L. (2002). Index for inclusion. Developing Learning and Participation in Schools. Bristol: CSIE. Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making sense of life's changes: Da Capo Press. Coleman, M. (2012). Leadership and Diversity. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 40(5), 592-609. English, F. W. (2008). The art of educational leadership: Balancing performance and accountability: SAGE Publications. Fullan, M. (2007). The new meaning of educational change. Routledge. Hausstätter, R. S. (2014). In Support of Unfinished Inclusion. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 58(4), 424-434. Kotter, J. P. (2008). Force for change: How leadership differs from management. Simon and Schuster. 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. Oplatka, I. (2012). Towards a conceptualization of the early career stage of principalship: current research, idiosyncrasies and future directions. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 15(2), 129-151. Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. (2010). The end/s of education: complexity and the conundrum of the inclusive educational curriculum. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 14(6), 593-607. Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(1), 5-23. Rose, N., O'Malley, P., & Valverde, M. (2006). Governmentality. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2(1), 83-104. Slee, R., & Graham, L. J. (2008). Inclusion? In S. L. Gabel & S. Danforth (Eds.), Disability & the politics of education: an international reader (pp. 81-100). Peter Lang.

Author Information

Katerina Matziari (presenting / submitting)

Manchester Metropolitan University

Faculty of Education

Manchester

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