This study aims to undertake a systematic mapping of research trends within the field of educational leadership research over a twenty-year period.
The field of educational leadership research is broad, and traditions within the field diverge, with critical educational leadership research (with a focus on inequitable power relations) being seen as having mutually incompatible objectives and foundational epistemologies with more functional research into ‘what works’ in leadership (Gunter, 2016). There have been recent suggestions that the field would benefit from more engagement in discussion and debate of ideas and concepts (Eacott, 2018). Other researchers have argued that the field might usefully employ a wider variety of methods in undertaking research (Thomson, 2017), that critical approaches are discursively and materially subordinated to functionalist ones (Wilkinson and Eacott, 2013a, 2013b; Courtney, McGinity and Gunter, 2017), e.g. within funding and policy-making regimes and yet that there have been marked turns towards the adoption of more critical theory in the field (Niesche, 2018).
In an era of ‘risk’, where research funding is decreasing around the world (Beattie and Thiele, 2016; Heffernan, 2017), and calls persist for research that promises solutions (see Whitty, 2016), as a research team we found ourselves wondering to what extent the liminal and subaltern status of critical research and its knowledge claims apply also to the past. How are the objectives, methods, claims and relative significance of educational leadership research, and the identities and epistemological assumptions of educational leadership researchers, changing over time? What does this mean for the health of the field? This project takes account of similar enterprises to map the field, such as those projects undertaken by Gunter (2016); Wilkinson and Eacott (2013a, 2013b); Niesche (2018)and Thomson (2017). Our project contributes a novel, robust and, significantly, relatively wide-ranging empirical basis to these mostly conceptual studies (but see Thomson, 2017, whose empirical focus is on methods only).
This paper marks a first step into the project of mapping the key trends, methodologies, theories and theorists and subjects of research within the wider field of educational leadership research over the past twenty years. In addition, through the project, we seek to explore the contributions made by researchers and the citation networks, patterns, and genealogies of branches within the field of educational leadership to test previous claims of silos and a lack of debate and discussion.
By undertaking this work, the project will identify key trends as well as gaps and silences within the field of educational leadership research. We seek to better understand the areas that are potentially under-researched, the ways the field might be creating and reproducing power dynamics in research and researchers, and the impact of the increased marketization of universities over the past twenty years on the research being undertaken within the field.
We ask the following questions:
- What are the key trends characterising the field of educational leadership research over the past twenty years?
- What patterns can we see in research methodologies, theories, and objects of study?