Session Information
26 SES 11 C, Educational Leadership for Diversity and Equity
Paper Session
Contribution
Diversity is sometimes seen as one of the major challenges facing educators today. In this century, educational organizations, including throughout Europe, face numerous changes and challenges including the recent covid-19 pandemic, global unrest, rapid migration, and so on. Amid these changes, attempting to educate students from a range of socio,-cultural and economic backgrounds, as well as of different genders, religions, and sexual orientations, is often seen as problematic.
Moreover, in 2015, 160 nations, including all entities in Europe, signed on to the Sustainable Development goals of the United Nations. The fourth of these calls for education to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Here, these concepts imply that attention must be paid to diversity and inequity within all nations.
The 2023 EERA conference theme, “the value of diversity in educational research” implies the positive nature of diversity within the larger frame of educational research. This would therefore suggest that the theoretical frameworks which could best support educational research in the 21st century would pay explicit attention to diversity. Nevertheless, this does not necessarily seem to be the case.
The question, therefore, to be examined here is “what kind of leadership might foster the inclusion of diversity “into the core of educational values, educational practices, … , and educational research” to promote the sustainable development goal of inclusion and equity, for as the 2023 call for proposals states, this “is a complex, contested and at times contentious concept.”
Purpose: The purpose of this largely conceptual paper is to explore, drawing both on research related to leadership theories and on data from interviews conducted over 30 years with school and district leaders, the ways in which theory guides and inspires practice. The objectives are:
a) to distinguish among the abilities of various theories of educational leadership (positivist, neutral, and critical) to lead and serve multiple and diverse school communities, and
b) to identify the pros and cons of various kinds of theories as a foundation for inclusivity, equity, and excellence in the 21st century.
Background. Culbertson (1995) explains that one of the dominant beliefs that emerged from a seminal educational leadership conference held in Chicago in 1956 was that “ought” questions had no place in science, and hence, lie outside the study and practice of educational administration. From this conference, he argued, emerged the common wisdom that a theory of educational leadership should not be normative, but should instead be scientific and objective—a concept that continues to dominate the field both in North America and in Europe. This debate has been heightened in recent years, as scholars like Uljens and Ylimaki (2017) have powerfully asserted that educational leadership must be what they call non-affirmative – arguing that “non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era” (p. 3).
Nevertheless, it is apparent from the work of scholars like Follett (1918) or Greenfield (1978) that values have never been far from the surface of educational leadership. Moreover by the 1980s, scholars were arguing, not only for a normative approach, but for a critical theory of leadership (Foster, 1986; Quantz, Rogers, & Dantley, 1991) that addressed the “needs of the billions of the world’s people in the direct want (Burns, 1978).
In an era of heightened awareness of diversity, a theory of leadership that attends explicitly to the concept of diversity may be necessary to overcome the hegemony of traditional dominant groups and to be inclusive and equitable towards diverse perspectives, cultures, and values.
Method
Primarily conceptual, this paper draws on numerous studies describing approaches to leadership, both empirical and conceptual, and argues the need for a balance between positivist, technical approaches to school leadership and more critical, values-oriented approaches if we are to reform education to address the diversity of the 21st century. The paper also draws on 30+years of research related to leadership in schools often with heterogeneous and low-income populations in which the purpose was to understand whether (and if so how) theories of leadership have helped them to address the complex challenges of todays’ educational leaders. Here, I use abductive reasoning (Evers & Wu, 2006) to examine various approaches to leadership. They cite a number of authors (including Josephson & Josephson, 1994; Lycan, 1988; and Walton, 2004) as they develop their argument that in abductive reasoning, “the justification of a generalisation relies on the fact that it explains the observed empirical data and no other alternative hypothesis offers a better explanation of what has been observed” (Evers & Wu, 2006, p. 513). In other words, it uses “inference to the best explanation” (p. 528). As will be seen, it is my belief that this approach may be used to examine the relevance of various leadership theories. Oakes and Rogers (2006) argue that “technical knowledge is insufficient to bring about equitable education, even when attention is paid to changing the school’s professional culture … [and that] equity reforms must engage issues of power by extending beyond the school” (p. 31). I started from this critique of technical approaches and then also analysed more critical theories (Quantz et al. , 1991) in order to assess their applicability to issues of diversity. These theories included some approaches such as transactional, bureaucratic, transformational, servant, culturally relevant, and transformative leadership. Hence, here I demonstrate, using abductive reasoning, that critical leadership theories best offer ways of attending to the diverse perspectives and values of today’s schools as well as to offer underlying frameworks to guide both dialogue and decision-making on the ground. In sum, I posit that the data from numerous school leaders support the argument that to effect significant educational transformation requires a critical, normative, equity-oriented approach.
Expected Outcomes
Understanding the distinctions among theoretical approaches is not simply an interesting academic exercise, but essential to move beyond decades of educational reform movements that have resulted in little significant change to address the educational challenges of the 21st century (Oakes & Rogers, 2006). The results of this investigation demonstrate how adopting a more critical and emancipatory theory that begins with an understanding of students lived experiences and of societal factors outside the school, can help leaders to avoid the trap of depoliticizing education (Weiner, 2003) and move the field forward towards both equity and excellence. For example, a theory that focuses on improving people and developing followers may create an effective organizational culture, but superintendents have told me that focusing specifically on equity and justice provides a different kind of framework, one that might result in a partnership with local IT providers to ensure that low income students have access to the internet. Thus, an important consideration for scholars and researchers of educational leadership is whether the proposed theory is useful in practice to guide the equity work of educational leaders. There is general agreement in the scholarly literature that positivist and technical theories which tend to focus on first-order change are effective in times of stability that call for straightforward tasks, and when the parts are compliant and consistent (Morgan, 2006). Yet this is no longer (if it ever did) describes 21st century educational organizations. A theory is needed that responds to the diversity and complexity of today’s schools, one which involves “questions of justice, democracy, and the dialectic between individual accountability and social responsibility (Weiner, 2003, p. 89). The abductive approach followed in this paper demonstrates the utility of more critical, social justice oriented and transformative leadership theories (Shields, 2016) for addressing the diverse challenges of todays’ schools.
References
Burns, J. M. (1978). Leadership. New York: Harper & Row. Culbertson, J. A. (1995), Building bridges: UCEA’s first two decades. University Park, PA: UCEA. Evers, C. W., & Wu, E. H. (2006). On generalising from single case studies: Epistemological reflections. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 40(4), 511–526. Follett, M. P. (1918/1941). Dynamic administration. In H. C. Metcalf & L. F. Urwick (Eds.), Pitman, 1941. Foster, W. (1986), Paradigms and promises, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. Greenfield, T. B., (1978), Reflections on organization theory and the truths of irreconcilable realities, Educational Administration Quarterly, 14(2). Morgan, G. (2006), Images of organization, Thousand Oakes, CA: SAGE. Oakes, J., & Rogers, J. (2006). Learning power: Organizing for education and justice, New York: Teachers College Press. Quantz, R. A., Rogers, J., & Dantley, M. (1991), Rethinking transformative leadership, Journal of Education, 96-118. Shields, C. M. (2004). Creating a community of difference. Educational Leadership, 61(7), 38. Shields, C. M. (2016) Transformative leadership in education, (2nd edition), New York: Routledge. Uljens, M., & Ylimaki, R. (Eds.), (2017). Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik - Non-Affirmative Theory of Education. Springer, Dordrecht: Weiner, E. J. (2003). Secretary Paulo Freire and the democratization of power: Toward a theory of transformative leadership. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(1), 89–106.
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