Session Information
26 SES 08 A, Lessons Learned from Researching Leadership and Policy in Different Countries
Symposium
Contribution
Internationally, education has become more and more interconnected. Global reform movements, powerful supranational bodies, and comparative assessments have brought national education systems closer together in one sense. Many individual countries are faced with increasing influences and pressures emanating from external sources in what can now often seem to be a borderless Western education space (McNamara et al. 2022) and this has many implications for leadership and policy. However, it is commonly acknowledged that global agendas, processes, and drivers do not affect national education systems in fixed and linear ways (Savage and O’Connor 2015), and there is growing awareness in some quarters of the importance of context in both leadership (Clarke and O’Donoghue 2017) and policy (Braun et al. 2011; Ball et al. 2012).
While there will be similarities between different countries, certain leadership and policy issues can be very different across countries in terms of how they are embraced, enacted, and experienced by practitioners, as well as how they are explored by researchers. In this session, a range of perspectives will be offered on the lessons a group of researchers have learned from researching leadership and policy in different countries: Australia, England, and Ireland.
This symposium is being held by the Critical Education Leadership and Policy (CELP) research group from the Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester. As a research group, CELP undertakes policy scholarship that explores education leadership as a site where policy is enacted, power relations exerted, and professional identities and practices are suggested and inhibited. Researchers in CELP use and develop a wide range of methods, social theories and conceptual frameworks, and a critical approach that foregrounds the relationship between the wider context and school leaders’ practices and identities. This context includes the policy, ideological, historical, economic, political and cultural.
A particular strength of the CELP group is that it comprises scholars from different countries and with experiences of working and researching in different countries. As part of this symposium four of CELP’s researchers reflect and share the lessons they have learned from researching education policy and leadership in these different jurisdictions. From this range of perspectives on researching leadership and policy, there will be some commonalities, convergences, and complements, but there will also be more distinctive cases. All of these perspectives, it is envisaged, can help other leadership and policy researchers to follow new lines of thought as well as posing ‘new questions and new problems for leadership and policy researchers’ (Ball 2011, 52).
Educational leadership as a field has previously been critiqued for a lack of diversity in topics of focus (Lumby & Moorosi, 2022), theory (McGinity et al., 2022), and method (Thomson, 2017). We respond to the ECER2023 call for papers by recognising the importance of field histories and research foundations, while centring a future of research that ‘benefits society’ and the wider education profession. In this symposium, we consider what can be learnt from our experiences of researching in different contexts, in an effort to move forward toward a field that recognises the unique and shared contextual features. The papers in this symposium draw upon our research in the field of educational leadership to ask important questions about what it means to “do research that benefits society” and how the field of educational leadership might move towards more diverse approaches to our work.
References
Ball, S. J. (2011). A new research agenda for educational leadership and policy. Management in Education, 25(2), 50-52. Ball, S.J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How Schools do Policy: Policy Enactments in Secondary Schools. Oxon: Routledge. Clarke, S., & O’Donoghue, T. (2017). Educational leadership and context: A rendering of an inseparable relationship. British Journal of Educational Studies, 65(2), 167-182. Lumby, J., & Moorosi, P. (2022). Leadership for equality in education: 50 years marching forward or marching on the spot? Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(2), 233–251. McGinity, R., Heffernan, A., & Courtney, S. J. (2022). Mapping trends in educational-leadership research: A longitudinal examination of knowledge production, approaches and locations. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 50(2), 217-232. McNamara, G., Skerritt, C., O’Hara, J., O’Brien, S., & Brown, M. (2022). For improvement, accountability, or the economy? Reflecting on the purpose (s) of school self-evaluation in Ireland. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 54(2), 158-173. Savage, G. C., & O’Connor, K. (2015). National agendas in global times: Curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA since the 1980s. Journal of Education Policy, 30(5), 609-630. Thomson, P. (2017). A little more madness in our methods? A snapshot of how the educational leadership, management and administration field conducts research. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49(3), 215-230.
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