This abstract presents selected, preliminary findings from a phenomenologically inspired practice-based PhD project in educational research that is not yet completed. The empirical material has been collected over a period of 1.5 years, spread out over three methodically different phases in a school in a suburb of Copenhagen. The focus of the research is on the significance of the body in leadership of inclusive learning environments in the Danish elementary school.

Research question

The main research question of the dissertation is: How can an increased focus on the language of the body contribute to the development of the teachers’ leadership skills and thus support their work with differentiated teaching in inclusive learning environments?

The practical, empirical part of the project is divided into three phases with different subordinated secondary research questions. In the first phase the study is very open and explorative and attempts to describe if/when/how the body comes into play in the leadership practice of the teachers. The second phase takes its point of departure in the empirical material from the first phase and is deeply rooted in collaborative, co-creating research processes where the researcher together with the participating teachers examines their own practice. Here it is explored how a focus on the significance of the body in leadership can contribute to a greater personal awareness of one’s own leadership practice. The practice-based research initially explores the individual teacher’s unique lived experiences. The ambition is not to describe a ’best practice’ example to be followed, but to have narratives that can shed light on practice as it is experienced and to gain more experience with methods that can open up an often languageless world for reflection and knowledge sharing for both practitioners and researchers. In the third and final phase the primary research question is opened up slightly to better involve the voices of the students. Here there is a focus on the students’ experiences of the daily life with the teachers in school as they can be expressed both with and without words.

To explore these questions, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s embodiement phenomenology and his perspective on the body and our being-in-the-world is applied.(Merleau-Ponty, 1994). In addition to this perspective, Helle Winther’s work on embodied professionality acts as a theoretical as well as analytical foundation (Winther, 2012). Winther understands the body, the personality, and the professionality as inseparable elements of the teacher’s embodied leadership competence and further, she differentiates analytically between three interrelated dimensions: Self-contact and somatic awareness, Communication reading and contact ability, and Leadership in groups or situations (Winther, 2013). Ole Fogh Kirkeby’s event philosophy (Kirkeby, 2009, 2013) gives the project a philosophical and value-based theoretical leadership perspective.

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