Session Information
26 SES 08 A, Lessons Learned from Researching Leadership and Policy in Different Countries
Symposium
Contribution
Educational-leadership research in England, as across the English-speaking world, arguably features insufficient methodological diversity (McGinity, Heffernan, & Courtney, 2022; Thomson, 2017). It tends to be epistemologically aligned with a functionalist, instrumental construction of leading (Gunter, 2016), and to investigate this construct through a positivist lens that privileges quantitative data (Thomson, 2017). Importantly, policymakers and practitioners draw upon such research to enact a ‘what-works’ agenda in educational leadership. For example, the UK government has renewed its funding commitment to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2022). The EEF is intended to be a “one-stop shop” regarding research evidence in education and aims explicitly to identify and disseminate “what works”. A recent example regarding leadership guidance concerns a systematic review of the characteristics of effective teacher professional development (Sims et al., 2021), where the methodological approach of a systematic review; the identification of characteristics (or traits) and the privileging of effectiveness all indicate a functionalist framing. This approach reproduces the conceptual collocation of educational leadership with an underpinning managerialist, performative and privatising discourse that de-contextualises and ignores questions of structural inequality and differential agency. England, I argue, constitutes an instantiation of the possible, since the discursive conditions that produced it are Europe-wide (Gunter, Grimaldi, Hall, & Serpieri, 2016). In response, I aim in this presentation to elucidate a worked methodological repudiation to functionalism from a recent research project: “Multi-academisation and its leadership”, which I offer to the field as a ‘lesson learned’ and so, an intellectual resource. I employ a novel methodology which I argue illuminates more profoundly than through functionalism the sociological meaning of “being” and “doing” educational leadership in a marketised English context. Specifically, I describe and reflect upon my recent experiences of rendering my interpretation of participants’ experiences of multi-academisation as Brechtian-inspired scripted drama (Courtney & McGinity, 2021). This enabled my co-author and me to be more literal through being more figurative, by transforming our charismatic, almost messianic participant leader explicitly into a Jesus-like character in our scripted analysis and thereby negating the need to explain his practice through a constructed lens of messianic leadership. This approach enables new interpretations of what constitutes valid forms of analysis, and how the role of imagination in qualitative research might be made more explicit and methodologically raised in status. It exemplifies an alternative methodological approach that better encompasses how social actors may be understood, compared to measurable, quantitative data regarding inputs and outputs.
References
Courtney, S. J., & McGinity, R. (2021). Turning Water into Wine: Scripting Multi-Academisation through Messianic Educational Leadership. In D. Mifsud (Ed.), Narratives of Educational Leadership: Representing Research via Creative Analytic Practices. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Education Endowment Foundation. (2022). New: Government confirms long-term funding for EEF. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/new-government-confirms-long-term-funding-for-eef Gunter, H. M. (2016). An intellectual history of school leadership practice and research. London/New York: Bloomsbury. Gunter, H. M., Grimaldi, E., Hall, D., & Serpieri, R. (2016). New Public Management and the Reform of Education: European lessons for policy and practice. (H. M. Gunter, E. Grimaldi, D. Hall, & R. Serpieri, Eds.). London: Routledge. 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 and Leadership, 50(2), 217–232. Sims, S., Fletcher-Wood, H., O’Mara-Eves, A., Cottingham, S., Stansfield, C., Van Herwegen, J., & Anders, J. (2021). What are the Characteristics of Effective Teacher Professional Development? A Systematic Review & Meta-analysis. London. Retrieved from https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/evidence-reviews/teacher-professional-development-characteristics 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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