Session Information
26 SES 14 A, Questioning and Advancing Knowledge on Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
In this paper I challenge the increased globally widespread and one sided performance orientation in educational leadership (Pashiardis and Johansson, 2016). I argue that there is something special about education and educational leadership that makes it highly problematic to model its leadership after any kind of performance oriented model of leadership derived from economic theories or imaginaries limiting agency to instrumental reason and transaction to economic exchange (Rönnström, 2010a; 2010 b; 2012; Spring, 2013). My paper aims at challenging highly influential imaginaries of performance increasingly lived in education reform and practice, and the role that educational leadership is supposed to play in such performance imaginaries. I also challenge the value of models of educational leadership growing in importance in the global era, such as the evolution of instructional leadership, as Hallinger (2015) prefers to describe it.
In the paper I show in what sense recent imaginaries of performance are flawed and how they are connected to globalist imaginaries prevailing in education policy and reform in the 21st century in Europe and elsewhere. Moreover, I argue that many models of educational leadership (Bush, 2007), and in this context instructional leadership models in particular, suffer from descriptive and explanatory inadequacy but also from problematic and unexamined normative assumptions that follow from their orientation towards performance and effectiveness. Finally, I describe why flaws in performance imaginaries prevailing in education but also in leadership models calls for a re-appropriation of leadership models in education. In education in general, and in educational leadership in particular, there are reasons to imagine leadership anew suited for schools and education in the global era in Europe and elsewhere.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections of the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Beck, U. (2009). World Risk Society. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Beck, U. (2016). The Metamorphosis of the World. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Bush, T. (2007). Educational Leadership and Management: Theory, Policy and Practice. In South African Journal of Education, Vol 27, No. 3: 391-406. Delanty, G. (2009). The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hallinger, P. and Wang, Wen-Chumg (2015) Assessing Instructional Leadership with the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale. Springer Verlag. Pashiiardis, P. and Johansson, O. (eds.) (2016) Succesful School Leadership.International Perspectives. Bloomsbury Robinson, V. (2011) Student Centered Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Rönnström, Niclas (2010a) ”Cosmopolitan Leadership”. In Cunningham, Peter and Fretwell, Nathan (eds.) Lifelong learning and Active Citizenship. London: Cice Publicat‐ ions, pp. 61‐69. Rönnström, Niclas (2010b) ”Pedagogik mellan dialog och monolog”. I Mathiasson, L. (red.) Pedagogik som motstånd. Svenska Korczaksällskapets skriftserie nr 2, 2010. Svenska Korczaksällskapet, ss.29‐54. Rönnström, N. (2012). From globalist to cosmopolitan learning: on the reflexive modernization of teacher education. Ethics and global politics, 5, 4: 193-216. Rönnström, N. (2015). Educating Competitive Teachers for a Competitive Nation?. Policy Futures in Education, 13, 6: 732-750. Taylor, C. (2004). Modern social imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press . Taylor, C. (2007). A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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