As an intrinsically caring profession, emotions matter in educating and educational leading. Managing one’s emotions and that of others is a key part of the largely invisible labour of the principalship (Hochschild, 2012). Moreover, educational practices such as caring, disciplining, influencing, administering and managing people and their emotions are crucial sites of knowing in the principalship (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016). From a practice theory lens then, emotions as sites of knowing are not the property of individuals. Rather, the emotionality of a practice such as leadership forms part of the collective know how or taken-for-granted understandings of ‘how we do things around here’. Moreover, in relation to practices such as managing, administering and leading a school, this practice-specific emotionality consists of knowing both what to do and how to do it (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016; Wilkinson, 2021). In this paper, we adopt a practice approach – the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) to examine the practice-specific emotionality (Reckwitz, 2002) of practices of educational leading. In order to render visible this tacit knowledge, we draw on testimonies contributed by Australian principals in 2023-2024 (N=201) in which they narrated a critical incident that had occurred under their leadership and reflected on its emotional impact and key learnings. The data forms part of a three-year, Australian Research Council study examining the emotional labour of Australian principals in socially and politically volatile times (https://www.monash.edu/education/research/projects/school-principals-emotional-labour-in-volatile-times). In keeping with the practice lens adopted in this paper, critical incident as a method was selected for such incidents disrupt ‘normalcy’ to illuminate “underlying trends, motives, and structures that have a more general meaning and indicate something of importance” in the “wider context” of Australian society (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016, p. 272). In analysing these incidents through a practice architectures lens, we ask: What is the work these emotions and practices are doing/performing? What are the broader discursive, material and social arrangements that make certain practices and emotions more or less likely to emerge in this site, rather than that one? What are the implications of this analysis for the broader project and praxis of educational leading? A practice lens thus adds new knowledge about the heightened emotional dynamics shaping principals’ work; the dialectical interactions between these emotional dimensions and principals’ individual demographics; and how emotional labour unfolds over time.

Gherardi, S., & Rodeschini, G. (2016). Caring as a collective, knowledgeable doing: About concern and being concerned. Management Learning, 47(3), 266-284. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615610030 Hochschild, A. R. (2012). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling (3rd ed.). The University of California Press. Kemmis, S., Wilkinson, J., Edwards-Groves, C., Hardy, I., Grootenboer, P., & Bristol, L. (2014). Changing practices, Changing education. Springer. Reckwitz, A. (2002). Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243-263. https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432 Wilkinson, J. (2021). Educational leadership through a practice lens: Practice matters. Springer.