Educational Leadership as a Culturally-Constructed Practice

New Directions and Possibilities

Jane Wilkinson, Laurette Bristol, Jane Wilkinson, Laurette Bristol

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138915312
• eBook ISBN: 9781317426707
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This edited book collection disrupts received notions of educational leadership, culture and diversity as currently portrayed in practice and theory. It draws on compelling studies of educational leadership from the global north and south, as well as from a range of ethnic, religious and gendered perspectives and critical research approaches. In so doing, the book powerfully challenges contemporary leadership discourses of diversity that reproduce essentialising leadership practices, binary divisions and asymmetrical power relations. The various chapters contest and move beyond exhortations for leadership in increasingly diverse societies; revealing through their rich portraits of the hybridity of leadership practice, the shallowness of diversity discourses that are framed as something "we" (the culturally homogenous) leader do to (heterogenous) 'others'.

The volume is more than critique. Instead it offers readers new directions and possibilities through which to understand, theorise and practise educational leadership in the twenty first century. In portraying leading as a "relational practice in contexts of cultural hybridity" (Blackmore, this volume), it extends critical theories for and of leadership practice, examining the intersectionality between leadership and a range of social categories, and challenging notions of leadership as a singular construct. Compelling research narratives reveal educational leadership practice as nuanced, temporal, site specific and prefigured by traditions and cultural understandings that reach beyond a simplification of educational leadership as understood through unitary lenses of race, gender or ethnicity.

This book is essential reading for academics and students of educational leadership and management, as well as administrators.

1 The unexamined constructions of educational leadership

Jane Wilkinson and Laurette Bristol

Introduction

Mainstream approaches in educational leadership have ignored the influence of societal culture and the culturally specific contexts or sites within which education takes place (Dimmock & Walker, 2005). This lack of examination of the cultural specificity in which educational settings are embedded reveals educational leadership scholarship’s historical silence in surfacing the issues of politics and power which lie at the heart of leadership practice. In this chapter, we attempt to go some way to redressing this imbalance, through sketching some key threads of an emerging body of educational leadership scholarship and research approaches arising from what has been labelled a “cultural turn” in education leadership (Blackmore, 2010, p. 48). Due to word length limitations, this sketch is by its very nature a limited and non-exhaustive account. Nonetheless, it highlights a rich and growing body of scholarship in the field that raises serious questions about the applicability and currency of dominant accounts of educational leadership scholarship and practice. The scholarship we examine challenges prevailing discourses shaping and influencing contemporary accounts of educational leadership. It raises questions about the relationship between what we know about educational leadership (epistemology), how we have come to know it (methodology) and the nature of leadership (ontology) across educational sites. As such, it interrogates the epistemological, methodological and ontological constructions of educational leadership in scholarship and practice – an interrogation which is developed further in Chapter 2 of this volume.

In this first chapter we provide a sketch of theoretical frameworks and research approaches which are currently challenging dominant paradigms of educational leadership located in unexamined constructions of the unitary white masculinist leadership subject. We do so as part of a broader challenge to traditional tropes of leadership within educational administration, a challenge which resides in a growing understanding of the implications of educational leadership as a cultural construct. One aspect of this growing understanding is the useful case that has been made by Blackmore (2010) for what has been termed a “cultural turn” in educational leadership scholarship. Her argument for such a turn is based on the emergence of critical theories originating from postcolonial, Black, Indigenous and feminist bodies of scholarship, which have arisen from and/or connect up to a range of contemporary human rights and other civil and social movements (Blackmore, 2010). These movements, Blackmore contends, include Indigenous demands for recognitive justice (Fraser, 2008), which have gained increasing momentum in nation states such as Australia, North and South America and New Zealand over the past two to three decades. They include a shift towards “super diversity”, that is, significantly higher levels of population diversity (Vertovec, 2007), which have placed greater demands on predominantly white principals in Anglophone school settings. These movements also include an increasing volume of research examining women’s experiences of leadership in developing nations. Finally, they encompass literature which examines the clash of values arising from the largely unproblematised importation of Western leadership models to Asian, Middle Eastern and African education settings – an importation which operates as a form of epistemic imperialism and violence (c.f., Spivak, 1988).

The diverse trajectories sketched by Blackmore (2010) that make up this “cultural turn” encompass a range of subjugated knowledges about leadership. However, when these subjugated knowledges are explored in leadership research, they are frequently engaged with through a single social category. For example, leadership is constructed as gendered – as opposed to considerations of the intersections between various categories – such as the relationship between gender, age, socioeconomic status and ethnicity and their impact on leading practices. This intersectionality (the location of culture) is also a space of subjugated knowledges in the field of educational leadership. Such knowledges and approaches remain fringe-dwellers on the body politic of mainstream approaches to educational leadership. Nonetheless, as explicated in this chapter, we argue that they raise serious questions about the utility, generalisability and applicability of dominant leadership models, both in terms of their content, their research approaches and their general applicability.

Before turning to a sketch of this emerging body of leadership literature located within notions of a “cultural turn”, however, we need to elucidate how we are employing the term “culture”. We define culture as signifying the ‘ “glue’ that binds people together through a shared and common understanding of an accepted way of life that is distinguishable from other groups” (Giddens, 1989, as cited in Dimmock & Walker, 2005, p. 8). In so doing, we stress culture as a process (not a fixed or stable entity or ‘given’), and recognise it as a highly contested concept. Moreover, we focus on culture as incorporating the “more recent and contemporary changes and additions” that have occurred in the social sites in which this and the subsequent book chapters are located (Dimmock & Walker, 2005, pp. 8–9). We tease out this conceptualisation of culture further in Chapter 2.

Towards a cultural turn in educational leadership scholarship

Examining Indigenous bodies of literature

In relation to the first trajectory of educational leadership noted by Blackmore (2010) as part of a turn towards culture, i.e., demands for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, a clear thread which emerges is a reframing of leadership as power with the human and material world. Brunner (2005, p. 126) has labelled this a “synergistic, co-active, collective melding of common being or action” (Brunner, 2005, p. 126). This understanding of power is in contrast to more traditional notions of wielding power over others, in which power becomes a form of “dominance, control, authority and influence” (Brunner, 2005, p. 126). Instead, leadership amongst Indigenous scholars is reframed as a participatory, community-based, holistic and interconnected process (Coyhis, 1995, as cited in Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010, p. 78).

There are some parallels here between the concept of power with and Robert Greenleaf’s (2002) notions of servant leadership. In the latter, there is a focus on the growth and well-being of humans and their communities. However, what makes the trajectory amongst Indigenous scholars of leadership particularly distinct, as opposed to the more generic concept of Greenleaf’s, is its insistence on the specific Indigenous cultural contexts and local ways of knowing and understanding the world from which leadership derives. For instance, Benham and Murakami-Ramalho’s model of a “community of leadership” is grounded in critical analysis of interviews with Indigenous Hawaiian educational leaders (2010). These forms of leadership, they argue, may be “derived from the local protocols of exchange among communities of indigenous peoples”, which in turn underpin “stories from which principles of leadership can be elicited which encompass spirituality” (Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010, p. 79). The four principles include the concept of Ha, the “breath of life … that links all persons, past, present, and future”, and the notion of place, in which “land, sky, and sea’ ” are “fundamentally pedagogical” (Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010, p. 81). Thus, they challenge Western notions of formal institutions such as schooling and universities as the sole repositories of valued learning. Instead, they foreground the importance of learning within the lifeworld of community and earth. The model includes the principles of the “sacredness of relations and mana” and “the concept of individual generosity and collective action” (Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010, p. 81). It thus challenges traditional epistemologies of Western leadership as a unidirectional, hierarchical and culturally neutral property of individuals. Instead, it posits an “epistemology of engaging in leadership through which one must understand the context, history, and relations of indigenous peoples within their community, and across diverse or dissimilar communities over time” (Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010, p. 82). Importantly, the research approaches we are highlighting are not essentialising attempts to derive unitary models of Indigenous leadership. Rather, they open up epistemological, methodological and onotolgical spaces through which to “pose questions and to speak back to some of the troubling narratives that do not fully account for Indigenous … ways of knowing, acting, and leading” (Fitzgerald, 2010, p. 103).

Another thread underpinning Indigenous reframing of educational leadership is that leading and managing Indigenous education in a postcolonial world involves reconceptualising learning as part an ecological continuum. Yolnu philosophy in East Arnhem Land, Australia terms this approach “two ways/both ways” teaching and learning (Ma Rhea, 2015, p. 25). Rather than an instrumentalist focus on learning as a series of formal, narrowly measured outcomes, learning in school sites becomes part of an ecological “process of knowledge production” in which two different cultures work together, aiming for a “dynamic … continuous striving for a balanced environment” (Ma Rhea, 2015, p. 25; c.f., Ma Rhea, this volume). This perspective of learning demands a very different epistemology of leadership. It entails a move away from hierarchical and linear understandings of educational leadership in which schooling is managed by non-Indigenous leaders, towards a

fractal approach using an Indigenist, rights-based approach underpinned by theories of complex adaptivity and social exchange, where Indigenous and non-indigenous people can work in equal partnership to lead and manage the improvement in the education of Indigenous children.

(Ma Rhea, 2015, p. 173)

Importantly, Ma Rhea (2015) warns against simplistic assumptions that employment of Indigenous educational administrators will in and of itself disrupt the colonial mindset of educational administrators. Instead she argues that both Indigenous and non-Indigenous administrators should demonstrate an Indigenist approach. This would include non-Indigenous settlers undertaking

antiracist work with non-indigenous people … cultural awareness workshops … and working within organisations that are controlled by non-indigenous settlers to effect changes that acknowledge and respect Indigenous people’s rights, histories, cultures and languages.

(Ma Rhea, 2015, p. 154)

A final thread which characterises much Indigenous research and writing on educational leadership is the critical role played by Indigenous women as researchers, educators and leaders. Much of this research takes an explicitly feminist stance, for Indigenous women leaders are frequently forced to confront gendered racism in their leadership roles, be it from outside their communities or from within (White, 2010). For instance, Lisa Udel (2001) has argued that Native American women regard “motherwork” as being a critical part of the politically activist role they must play in order to ensure the survival and flourishing of their communities. In Australia, there has been an extraordinary growth in the numbers of Indigenous women leaders emerging in a whole range of spheres, including politics and education (Baker, Garngulkpuy, & Guthadjaka, 2014). For Indigenous women leaders in remote Australian communities, leadership involves consultation with elders and achieving community consensus about decisions; that is, as leaders they “speak for their community, not themselves” (Baker et al., 2014, p. 39). The growth in remote Indigenous Australian women leaders disrupts stereotypes of Indigenous cultures as frozen in time. It is argued that as women have become increasingly well-educated, fathers have recognised their potential by choosing their daughters to become clan leaders – a recent development in the past 30 years (Baker et al., 2014, p. 41). While recognising the paternalistic origins of their ascension to leadership – it is the father who chooses – research on the models of leadership the women are enacting is derived from the women’s words, their community’s philosophy and processes, rather than imposing Western theories and paradigms (Baker et al., 2014).

Leading ethnically diverse schools

A second trajectory of educational leadership outlined by Blackmore (2010) as part of a turn towards culture is the demand on educational administrators to lead and manage increasingly ethnically diverse student populations (see, for example, Brooks, 2012; Shields, Larocque, & Oberg, 2002; Theoharis & Scanlan; Wilkinson, Forsman, & Langat, 2013; Wilkinson, in this volume). This movement is encompassed under a range of terms, including culturally responsive leadership, “culturally proficient leadership, culturally relevant leadership, culture-based leadership, cultural competency, multicultural leadership, and leadership for diversity” (Johnson, 2007, p. 148). Drawing on culturally responsive pedagogy and with overlaps with leadership for social justice, culturally responsive leadership “involves those leadership philosophies, practices and policies that create inclusive schooling environments for students and families from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds” (Johnson, 2007, p. 148). Applied Critical Leadership (ACL) is another emergent response whose roots derive from critical pedagogy and critical race theory. It is “grounded in practices that are framed by social justice and educational equity wherein leadership results from both professional practice and leaders’ embodied lived experiences” (Santamaria & Santamaria, 2015, p. 26). As a strengths-based model, ACL attempts to capture the “essence of the complex roles self-described diverse leaders play as they toggle between the reality of being members of historically underrepresentend and often disenfranchised social groups” while simultaneously attempting to “provide effective leadership in various educational settings” (Santamaría & Santamaría, 2015, p. xii).

The Australian Professional Standard for Principals recognises the increasing complexity of this role when it notes that principals must “embrace inclusion and help build a culture of high expectations that takes account of the richness and diversity of the wider school community and the education systems and sectors” (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2015, p. 19). It also notes that principals must “foster understanding and reconciliation with Indigenous cultures” (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2015, p. 19). Yet, there are contradictions here. Despite the increasing ethnic diversity of Australia and its educational settings, diversity and inclusion in the Standard remains a property of the student ‘other’ – something which the principal must lead, direct, “embrace” and respond to. Unlike in ACL approaches to educational leadership, the assumption in the Standard is that principals are raced (gendered and classed) within normative constructions of whiteness and masculinity (Santamaría & Santamaría, 2015, p. xii). The dominance of white, masculinist approaches to educational leadership remains intact, with no call for increasing diversity in leaders or leadership practices. Moreover, the Standard is silent in regard to re-imagining different forms of leadership, such as the different epistemology demanded of leadership when learning is constructed as “two ways/both ways”, as noted in the previous section on Indigenous research for/with educational leadership. Hence, literature which challenges the privilege which whiteness, masculinity and/or heteronormativity confers on educational leadership still remains uncommon, albeit with some exceptions (c.f., Blackmore, 2010; Hernandez & Fraynd, 2015; Koschoreck, 2005; Niesche & Keddie, 2013; Wilkinson, in this volume). Moreover, despite a concomitant increase in students’ ethnic diversity in universities, there does not appear to have been a parallel focus or sense of urgency on how educational leaders in universities should lead diverse student populations or the models and practices of leadership that are adopted ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The unexamined constructions of educational leadership
• 2 Beyond culture as ethnicity: Interrogating the empirical sites for leading scholarship
• 3 The role of ethical practices in pursuing socially just leadership
• 4 “We’re going to call our kids ‘African Aussies’”: Leading for diversity in regional Australia
• 5 Is she in the wrong place? Exploring the intersections of gender, religion, culture and leadership
• 6 Exploring the successful school leadership literature in China
• 7 Indigenist holistic educational leadership
• 8 Communicating research: A challenge of context
• 9 Practice traditions of researching educational leadership across national contexts
• 10 Conduct un/becoming: Discipline in the context of educational leadership research
• 11 Left out: Gender and feminism in the educational leadership curriculum
• 12 Commentary: Leadership as a relational practice in contexts of cultural hybridity
• Index