Session Information
26 SES 05 C, Educational Leadership from a Gender and Ethnographic Perspective
Paper Session
Contribution
The belief that educational leadership matters has been well documented and reinforced by empirical research showing that there is a direct link between principal leadership and organizational effectiveness (see Hallinger & Heck, 1996; Leithwood & Jantzi, 2000; Fullan, 2006). In a similar vein, Hallinger (1996) makes the observation that ‘there is relatively little disagreement in either lay or professional circles concerning the belief that principals play a critical role in the lives of teachers, students and schools’ (p. 5). Kelley et al. also go so far as to state that: ‘Education leadership is possibly the most important single determinant of an effective learning environment’(2005, p. 17). It is no surprise therefore that, in this and the latter parts of the last century there has been an increasing rise in the development of various leadership approaches. One of these leadership approaches can be regarded as distributed culturally-responsive leadership.
By inverting the traditional hierarchical triangle of leadership, distributed leadership ‘shifts the emphasis from developing leaders to developing “leaderful” organizations through concurrent, collective, and compassionate leadership with a collective responsibility for the latter’ (Serrat, 2009, p. 4). Within this framework, multiple sources of leadership emerge; leadership is considered not to be the property of one individual but rather is an organizational entity from which individuals can collectively realize the organisation’s aims and objectives. This leadership model challenges the conventional orthodoxy of the top-down leadership approach, and it pursues a more sustainable and effective model by transforming the school into an environment where‘leadership is one that is distributed and premised on the quality of shared activity and interaction’(Harris, 2009, p. 241). All told, it can be said that leadership has become a shared practice in a different context among the members of organization.
As the world has become a globally small place, in which people from different cultures have lived, done business or studied together, the way, leaders have acted, has changed dramatically. In this case the leadership has turned into a practice, which is not only dispersed among organization members (Gronn, 2002), but also becomes culturally-responsive. It is possible to say that leadership pattern is affected significantly by the culture. However culturally-responsive leadership may require leaders to organize people from not particular culture but different cultures in order to attain organizational goals. For example, for the school context, in order to do this, culturally-responsive school leaders must combine students’ cultural background including history, values, knowledge, with the curriculum and act in culturally mindful ways (Magno & Schiff, 2010). According to Merchant, Garza and Murakami Ramalho (2013, p. 181), culturally-responsive leadership includes social justice practices, community and family involvement from diverse cultures and supports social change. In this case it can be said that culturally-responsive leaders should be globally literate, curious, life-long learner, mature, flexible, tolerant for ambiguity
As a result, in many countries education organizations have become more multicultural and diverse because of migrations, student mobility for studies, and wars etc. In this diversity, distributed culturally-responsive leadership has gained more importance. For this reason, distributed culturally-responsive school leaders should see their role as being bridge builders among people from various cultures. In this context the purpose of this study is to identify distributed culturally-responsive school leadership techniques of principals. In accordance with this purpose, the following questions were answered:1. What are the views of principals, teachers, school secretary and parent representatives about principals’ leadership techniques? 2. What is told in the documents of mission and vision statements, literacy and numeracy national test scores, inspection reports about principals’ leadership techniques?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bowen, G. A. (2009). Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative research journal, 9(2), 27-40. Fullan, M. (2006) Turnaround leadership. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco. Gronn, P. (2002). Distributed leadership as a unit of analysis. The leadership quarterly, 13(4), 423-451. Hallinger, P., & Heck, R. (1996). Reassessing the principal’s role in school effectiveness: A review of empirical research, 1980–1995. Educational Administration Quarterly, 32(1), 5-44. Harris, A. (2009). Distributed leadership–Different perspectives. Dodrecht: Springer. Iorio, S. H. (2004). Qualitative research in journalism: Taking it to the streets. London, UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kelley, R. C., Thornton, B., & Daugherty, R. (2005). Relationships between measures of leadership and school climate. Education, 126(1), 17-25. Magno, C., & Schiff, M. (2010). Culturally responsive leadership: Best practice in integrating immigrant students. Intercultural Education, 21(1), 87-91. Merchant, B., Garza, E. & Murakami Ramalho, E. (2013) Culturally responsive leadership. In C. Day & D. Gurr (Eds.), Leading schools successfully (pp. 174-183). London, England: Routledge. Leithwood, K., & Jantzi, D. (2000). Principal and teacher leadership effects: A replication. School Leadership & Management, 20(4), 415-434. Miles, M. and Huberman, A. 1994. Qualitative data analysis: An expanded source book (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Serrat, O. (2009). Exercising servant leadership. Knowledge Solutions for the Asian Development Bank. Retrieved from http://www.adb.org/documents/information/knowledge-solutions/exercising-servant leadership.pdf Stake, R. E. (1994). Identification of the case. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research. City, CA: Sage. Tellis, W. (1997). Application of a case study methodology. The Qualitative Report, 3(3). Retrieved from http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR3-3/tellis2.html Wolcott, H. (1973). The man in the principal’s office: An ethnography. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, Inc.
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