Session Information
26 SES 09 A, Same Name, Different Meanings And Practices? Distributed Leadership Across Cultures And Methods
Symposium
Contribution
Over the last several decades, the educational system in the United States has undergone significant reforms leading to new forms of educational leadership that take a distributed approach to school improvement. In the context of shifting student demographics, the accountability movement, and the recent upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, educational leaders have been at the center of multiple initiatives to address the evolving needs of youth (Mehta, 2013; McLeod and Dulsky, 2020). These initiatives have distributed leadership across roles, institutions and levels of the school system in new, innovative ways. In this contribution, we focus on one such initiative, the Chelsea Children’s Cabinet, a cross-sector partnership among institutional and organizational leaders within one small city collaborating to support youth through coordinated actions (Ed Redesign, 2019). Formed in the Spring of 2021 to address issues related to the pandemic, the Cabinet includes local leaders from education, government, law enforcement, mental health and community-based organizations, along with our Boston College research team. We build on prior research about cross-sector partnerships. In recent years, an array of cross-sector initiatives have brought leaders together to address the community conditions that affect youth (Impellizeri and Lee, 2021; Miller et al., 2017). While designs vary, these initiatives share the aim to develop collective, context-specific solutions to community-level concerns (Boyer et al., 2020). We draw on distributed leadership theory as we consider the dynamic interactions among institutional and organizational leaders on the Cabinet. According to this framework, “leadership practice is constituted in the interaction of leaders and their social and material situations. (Spillane et al., 2001, p. 27). As such, leadership occurs across individuals, interactions and the artifacts that mediate those interactions. We use qualitative case study methods to examine distributed leadership within the Cabinet (Yin, 2009). Data sources include 25 semi-structured interviews conducted with cabinet members in the spring of 2021, fieldnotes taken during planning and cabinet meetings as well as community events led by the Children’s Cabinet throughout the 2021-2022 school year. Findings demonstrate how leadership is distributed across sectors based on privileged positioning by sector as well as existing relationships. Our analysis shows how leaders draw on distinct institutional logics to justify actions and rely on various tools and artifacts to structure their interactions. We end with theoretical implications for the distributed leadership framework as well as implications for leadership practice given the need for cross-sector coordination in an increasingly complex education landscape.
References
Boyer, A.M. et al. (2020). Predicting Community Adoption of Collective Impact in the United States: A National Scan. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0899764020964583. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764020964583 Ed Redesign. (2019). Children’s Cabinet Toolkit. https://edredesign.org/files/childrens_cabinet_toolkit_a_roadmap_for_getting_started.pdf Horsford, S. D., & Sampson, C. (2014). Promise neighborhoods: The promise and politics of community capacity building as urban school reform. Urban Education, 49(8), 955-991. Impellizeri, W., & Lee, V. J. (2021). A Comparison of IHEs and Non-IHEs as Anchor Institutions and Lead Agents of Promise Neighborhoods Projects. Education and Urban Society, 00131245211049736. https://doi.org/10.1177/00131245211049736 McLeod, S., & Dulsky, S. (2021). Resilience, reorientation, and reinvention: School leadership during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In Frontiers in Education (p. 70). Frontiers. Mehta, J. (2013), “How Paradigms Create Politics The Transformation of American Educational Policy, 1980–2001”. American Educational Research Journal. 50(2), 285-324. Miller, P. M., Scanlan, M. K., & Phillippo, K. (2017). Rural Cross-Sector Collaboration: A Social Frontier Analysis. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1_suppl), 193S-215S. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831216665188 Spillane, J. P., Halverson, R., & Diamond, J. B. (2001). Investigating school leadership practice: A distributed perspective. Educational researcher, 30(3), 23-28. Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods (Vol. 5). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
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