This paper pays attention to teacher leadership practices in the Norwegian school system, and teacher leaders’ role as boundary brokers. In 2015, a new initiative was implemented in Norwegian schools, giving 200 teachers the title of teacher specialist, with a particular responsibility for the professional development at their school. The initiative brings several new elements into what historically has characterized the profession, including a role differentiation which scarcely has been present in Norway earlier. As egalitarism is claimed to be firmly rooted in the culture of teaching (Lortie, 1975), teacher leader initiatives may challenge this norm (Weiner, 2011). Consequently, new differentiated teacher roles like teacher specialists could face a challenging task, balancing between the role as a teacher and leader. Teacher leadership pushes teachers as well as principals towards new ways of thinking about their roles, and several studies highlight how teacher leaders feel squeezed between the principal and the teacher staff (Doaldson et al., 2008; Mangin, 2013). In this presentation, the following research question is pursued: How is teacher specialists positioned at the boundary between the school administration and the teacher staff, and how do they negotiate their role?
A great deal of the teacher leadership research are focusing on the foundational components of teacher leadership, i.e. the characteristics of the leaders, the type of work they do and the conditions that support their work. A small amount of the empirical body of teacher leadership literature is grounded in theory (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). It is suggested that future research should be defining and articulating the targeted context of teacher leadership, e.g. how principals is involved in the leadership process and how the work of the teacher leaders is situated. This presentation takes such considerations into account, and contributes to existing literature by foregrounding principals’ involvement in the implementation process, and how the teacher specialists enact and experience their role within the organization.
The theoretical framework in the presentation is based on the notion of boundary crossing and boundary work (Meyer, 2010; Liljegren, 2012). An increasing specialization in contemporary societies has contributed to boundaries becoming more explicit, as professionals must negotiate and combine ingredients from different contexts to reach hybrid solutions (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011; Engström et al., 1995). This process, in which a person transits and interacts across contexts, can be referred to as boundary crossing, where boundary denotes socio-cultural differences leading to discontinuity in action or interaction (Suchman, 1994). Approaching the teacher specialists as workers at the boundary between the school administration and the teacher staff, a central question is also where this line is drawn, i.e. what the administration represents that differ from the teachers’ knowledge and values are standing for. In order to answer this question, the notion of boundary work is useful. The term describes the process in which “professions create, maintain, and breakdown boundaries in order to separate ‘us’ from ‘them’, and to keep others out of areas of claimed professional turf” (Liljegren, 2012, p. 296). In general, exploring teachers’ and principals’ perception and view of the teacher leader role provide an entrance to investigate how boundaries are drawn within the school context.
