Session Information
26 SES 12 C, Digital and Technology Leadership in the Scope of Education
Paper Session
Contribution
School leaders are generally regarded as important actors and promoters of school development (e.g. Cramer et al., 2021; Eickelmann, 2010), and thus usually face a multitude of different tasks and demands. At the same time, school leaders, their everyday work and their activities are transformed by social transformation processes (Krein & Schiefner-Rohs, 2022). One example of such transformation phenomena, which is also frequently discussed in the discourse on development processes (in) schools, is digitality (Stalder, 2016). Digitality does not only affect school leaders in the context of school development and the related requirements of organizational, instructional, personnel, cooperation, or technological development (Eickelmann & Gerick, 2018). Likewise, the everyday work and actions of school leaders, e.g., school administration or cooperation with non-school actors, is cross-sectionally shaped by digitality (Schiefner-Rohs, 2019). In their explorative study, Tulowitzki and Gerick (2020) were also able to show that digital media "unfold potentials and possibilities as well as entail changes and consequences in the activities of school leaders" (p. 333; translation by the author). Similarly, school leaders also reported various challenges relevant to their actions (ibid.). However, more profound insights into such digitality-related potentials, changes, and challenges are still lacking. Furthermore, little research has been done on how school leadership action itself is concretely shaped in situ and in actu under the perspective of digitality or is transformed by it (e.g., Heffernan & Selwyn, 2021). In this context, Håkansson and Pettersson (2019) even state an international need for holistic research on school leaders and their everyday professional life and actions.
Addressing this desideratum, this contribution aims to provide insights into the actions of school leaders under the conditions of digitality. The focus is on different facets of school leadership actions and the potentials and challenges that become visible in these facets. Accordingly, the contribution is based on the following research questions:
- How do school leaders act under the conditions of digitality?
- How do digitality-related transformation processes manifest themselves in the everyday work of school leaders?
- What are the potentials and challenges of school leadership under the conditions of digitality?
Method
In order to examine the actions of school leaders under the conditions of digitality, an empirical-qualitative research design was chosen. The research was conducted in several phases using a multimethodological approach: First, explorative expert interviews (N=7) were conducted (Meuser & Nagel, 2009), which were intended to provide initial insights into the everyday work of school leaders and digitality-related transformation processes. This was followed in a second phase by a comparative case study using shadowing (Tulowitzki, 2019). Shadowing is a multi-method approach that includes participant observation as well as recording of conversations, anecdotes, and episodes as a central element. Two school leaders of secondary schools in Germany were each accompanied in their daily work for three weeks. In addition to the participant observations, reflective interviews were conducted with the shadowed school leaders during the shadowing, which were recorded and subsequently transcribed. Furthermore, methods of virtual ethnography (Koszinets et al., 2018) were used to also capture the school leaders' actions in the digital space. The data obtained were analyzed and triangulated using qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2018) and phenomenological analysis (Brinkmann, 2015) to highlight different facets and conditions of school leaders' actions under the perspective of digitality.
Expected Outcomes
The analyses identified four digitality-related conditions of school leadership under which the respective actions of school leaders take different forms. These are (1) school leadership action under connecting conditions, (2) school leadership action under accelerated conditions, (3) school leadership action under panoptic conditions, and (4) school leadership action under over-administered conditions. The results show a diversity of school leadership actions that are cross-sectionally characterized by digitality. On the one hand, transformations of actions, such as the shift of communication into the digital space, were observed, on the other hand, an extensification of school leadership actions and a shaping of new tasks of school leaders were noted. For each of the four facets of school leadership action, it was also possible to identify both digitality-related potentials (e.g., direct communication) and challenges (e.g., increasing parallelism of actions) for school leadership action. These offer a variety of implications for school leadership research as well as for the professionalization of school leaders, which will be presented and discussed at ECER 2023.
References
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