Session Information
26 SES 10 B, New Approaches to Visualizing and Conceptualizing Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
Tropes and tales of heroic leadership are a common feature of media analyses and discussions of education. In the UK, for example, we see this phenomenon in reports of the so-called ‘superheads’, who are parachuted in to ‘turn around’ what are deemed to be ‘failing’ schools. These instances reflect a cult of leadership and embody a widespread faith in the potential of 'trasnformational' or 'visionary' leaders to redeem our institutions and our society. At the same time, however, a growing body of literature questions the existence of leadership as a phenomenon (Lakomski, Eacott, & Evers, 2016; Samier, 2016), insisting on its imaginary and rhetorical, rather than real, status. In Eacott's words, '"leadership" is a myth generated by, and sustaining of, the managerialist project... through its seductive agentic rhetoric, that of individual will and choice, not to mention the aspiration for something "better", when positioned in opposition to the technicist, alienating and emionless administration of the bureaucracy, "leadership" has become the dominant ideology of educational leadership, management and administration' (2016, p. 159). In other words, the discourses surrounding leadership speak to our deeply cherised, if potentially conflicting, desires for knowledge, power, purpose, security, freedom and a better world.
Against this background, the current paper provides an analysis of a series of interviews conducted with the upper levels of the leadership of a flagship academy trust - a group of independent schools that have formed an alliance as part of the academisation movement in English education that began with the Blair new labour government but which has been taken to new levels by the subsequent coalition and conservative regimes - in the south of England that explicitly seeks to offer an elite form of education to those from backgrounds traditionally excluded from such circles. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, 1977, 1991) - and in particular Lacanian notion of the human psyche divided between conscious and unconscious, and between the registers of the imaginary, symbolic and real - the paper highlights the imaginary constructions of leadership identity generated by participants during the interviews and examines how these can provide insights into the power, but also the 'stupidity' (Alvesson & Spicer, 2016), of the symbolic regime of the current neoliberal education policy context, with its relentless emphases on 'standards' and 'accountability' and its punitive use of audit and inspection. We also focus on the ambiguities, omissions, slips, false starts, tangential detours and other rhetorical features that indicate failures in this imaginary process of identity construction, representing moments of short circuit when our unconscious desire disrupts our conscious constructions. The paper concludes with a consideration of the implications of these insights for leadership studies and practices, as well as for educational policy.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
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