Session Information
26 SES 12 B, Leading Change, Leadership Standards and Educational Leadership and Networking
Paper Session
Contribution
Recent school reform initiatives have positioned school leadership as a key mechanism to transform educational practices (Leithwood, Harris & Hopkins, 2008). This “leadership turn” in school reform has been manifested in policies that mandate standards of leadership practice for school administrators (Ingvarson, Anderson, Gronn, & Jackson, 2006).
As this new wave of reform unfolds, it has become crucial to understand the processes by which policies are translated and recontextualized into practices (Hall, Gunter & Bragg, 2013). Some studies have explored this phenomenon in Australia (Eacott, 2011), the UK (Hall, 2013), and the US (English, 2012). However, transferring their conclusions to the complexity of the Canadian educational landscape would be problematic given the marked differences between policy contexts (CEPPE & OECD, 2013). This study offers a grounded understanding of these processes, rooted in the unique policy context of Ontario. It aims to inform the efforts of local school boards, ministries, universities, and other stakeholders interested in supporting the work of school leaders.
Objectives
1) To provide a detailed and context-sensitive account of the processes by which policies that mandate school leadership standards are translated into practices in schools in Ontario.
2) To expand and enrich theoretical understandings of educational leadership by recasting leadership as a policy-bounded phenomenon.
Theoretical Framework
Critical approaches to education policy analysis (Ball, Maguire, & Braun, 2012; Olssen, Codd, & O’Neill, 2004) and leadership (Newton & Riveros, 2015) have interrogated the widespread adoption of managerialist discourses in educational policymaking and administration. Managerialism is evidenced in the emphasis that recent school reform initiatives place on marketization, choice, accountability, and the measurement of performance (English, 2012). O’Reilly and Reid (2010) argued that these discourses position leadership as “an organizational and social technology [...], construed as enabling and facilitating public service reforms” (p. 961). An interrogation of the effects of policy discourses on leadership practice has the potential to inform our understanding of the dynamics of school reform (Newton & Riveros, 2015).
In order to analyze how policies are translated into practices, this study also builds upon the notion of “policy enactment”. Ball, Maguire, and Braun (2012) proposed this notion to convey the “creative processes of interpretation, that is, the recontextualization –through reading, writing and talking – of the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualizing practices” (p. 3). These authors identified four contexts that contribute to policy enactment: 1) the situated context, which refers to the historical and sociocultural settings of the school; 2) the professional context, which refers to the professional cultures and the values and commitments of practitioners; 3) the material context, which refers to the buildings and infrastructure that bound the enactment of policy; and 4) the external contexts, such as the “pressures and expectations generated by wider local and national policy frameworks” (p. 36). Ball et al. (2012) called for a context-sensitive analysis of policy. In their view, policy makers tend to assume “best possible scenarios” for policy implementation, that is, ideal schools, administrators, students, teachers, and communities. In contrast, the notion of policy enactment takes into account the idiosyncratic elements that interact with policy in practice, such as the professional and organizational cultures, the social challenges, pressures, and supports inside and outside of the school context. (Ball et al., 2012). The notion of policy enactment constitutes a rejection of the instrumentalist assumptions of most policy analysis, which highlights the role of school actors, their practices, and actions in the adaptation of policies to the school environment (Riveros & Viczko, 2015).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. London: Routledge. CEPPE & OECD. (2014). Learning standards, teaching standards, standards for school principals. Paris: OECD Ingvarson, L., Anderson, M., Gronn, P., & Jackson, A. (2006). Standards for school leadership. Acton: ACER Eacott, S. (2011). School leadership and strategy in managerialist times. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. English, F. W. (2012). Bourdieu's "Misrecognition": Why educational leadership standards will not reform schools or leadership. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 44(2), 155-170. Hall, D. (2013). Drawing a veil over managerialism: leadership and the discursive disguise of the New Public Management. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(3), 267-282. Leithwood, K., Harris, A., & Hopkins, D. (2008). Seven strong claims about successful school leadership. School Leadership & Management, 28(1), 27-42 Newton, P., & Riveros, A. (2015). Toward an ontology of practices in educational administration. In S. Eacott & C. Evers (Eds.), New frontiers in educational leadership, management and administration theory [Special issue]. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 47(4), 330-341. Olssen, M., Codd, J. A., & O'Neill, A. (2004). Education policy: Globalization, citizenship and democracy. London: Sage. O'Reilly, D., & Reed, M. (2010). 'Leaderism': An evolution of managerialism in UK public service reform. Public Administration, 88(4), 960-978. Riveros, A., & Viczko, M (2015). The enactment of professional learning policies: performativity and multiple ontologies. In M. Viczko, & A. Riveros, (Eds). Policy enactments, assemblage and agency in educational policy contexts [Special Issue], Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(4), 533-547.
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