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Introduction: the state of the field of educational administration
Tanya Fitzgerald and Helen Gunter
As noted in the editorial in Volume 40, Number 1, the Journal of Educational Administration and History [JEAH] is in its 40th year. This occasion is therefore an opportunity to reflect not only on the journal and its contribution to the field, but the theoretical and methodological state of the field itself. With this in mind we have invited seven authors to offer a critical reflection on key issues that underpin the field. Accordingly, in the collection of papers in this book, attention is focused on the identification and critique of key concepts and issues that include headteacher's critique of and resistance to policy, the intersectionality of gender, leadership and ethnicity, ongoing issues in teacher performance management, the orthodoxies of school effectiveness research, a critical analysis of texts related to the field, and the modernisation agenda. This book concludes with an analysis of the preceding papers and their contribution to debates in and the development of the field of educational administration.
The focus that we have elected ‘The state of the field of educational administration’, is not accidental. The genesis of this book began with a conversation amongst a group of scholars that critical debates should continue to surface in journals such as JEAH as well as in scholarly texts. Essentially we were troubled that the term ‘critical’ was, at times, juxtaposed with the term ‘oppositional’ and this was not our collective reading of what being critical, engaging in critical dialogue and what our contribution to critical scholarship entailed. We saw an interconnection between critical reading, critical writing and critical thinking that contributed to current debates and scholarship in the field. By inference, this does not involve a rehearsal of debates but the adoption of a stance that surfaced critical questions concerning the nature and shape of knowledge, how this knowledge was being produced and by whom and the underpinning construction of this knowledge for the field. What remains problematic is that knowledge production is frequently linked with the agenda of the State as we have commented on previously.1 It is essential that critical debates concerning knowledge production continue to occur and that the insistent presence of a neo-liberal reform agenda continues to be critically evaluated, not the least because of its impact on the field and field development.
In order to publicly debate these agendas and surface our disquiet concerning the state of the field, this group of scholars collectively engaged in a connected symposium at the September 2007 British Educational Leadership Management and Administration (BELMAS) conference in Reading. The underpinning concern of the architects of this symposium was that the field of educational administration appeared to be at a point of theoretical disconnection and, accordingly, we shaped our presentations around our concerns. Each of the papers traversed some of the current debates and highlighted the extent to which knowledge production remains connected with a neo-liberal State. In order to draw together the theoretical and methodological threads of these papers, Peter Gronn acted as discussant and reflected on the extent to which the papers highlighted and extended the issues. Substantially revised and lengthened, these papers are collected together in this book.
Documenting debates
As we have indicated, this book highlights a number of contemporary policy and scholarship issues that underpin the field of educational administration. As editors of a learned journal in the field, our challenge is to ensure that a plurality of voices is encouraged and that wider debate about purposes and practices in the field is surfaced. The authors featured in this book, have not only responded to this challenge but have offered their own nuanced understandings of these contemporary issues. What is refreshing, we believe, is that the authors have not simply rehearsed debates but offered their own critical stance that challenges the field itself. How can the field be renewed and re-invigorated with robust debate?
The first contribution by Pat Thomson interrogates the extent to which headteachers deal with escalating policy demands and considers how their agency fosters a level of resistance. In a direct theoretical and empirical challenge to the field, the author challenges headteachers (as professionals) and academics (as scholars) to consider how collective action might ‘speak back’ to policy regimes that are deeply inequitable. Importantly, Thomson raises questions concerning headteachers' voices and the potential for their critical and collective voice to take up multiple subject positions and re-frame the research agenda. Importantly, there is a call from the author for the field to consider ways in which headteachers and headteacher associations might contribute to knowledge production in the field that can offer a rich perspective.
In similar ways, Jane Wilkinson, in the second paper, extends the call for multiple voices and highlights the diversity of possibilities for the field if it is ‘opened-up’ to the inclusion of critical, Black, feminist and Indigenous perspectives. Notably, Wilkinson takes seriously recent calls for research and theorising to include in more explicit ways notions of diversity and leadership in ways that are conceptually rich, socially just, educationally transformative, as well as providing critically reflexive possibilities. As part of her own reflexive turn, the author examines the interplay of her own biography and scholarship in the field and proposes that serious questions concerning power and knowledge production should be more insistently raised. Wilkinson concludes by suggesting that active intervention is required if genuinely productive, democratic and socially inclusive ways of leading are to be realised and actioned.
In her analysis of teacher performance management, Tanya Fitzgerald highlights ways in which the continuing lack of trust in teachers has underpinned the development and implementation of policy and associated practices. Performance management, as a policy solution to the ‘problem’ of teachers, is, according to the author, predicated on the flawed assumption that the intervention of the State and its agencies is required to ensure that teachers' work is aligned with organisational objectives. Accordingly, the shift in teacher accountability from the profession to the State has, in effect, served to de-professionalise teaching and teachers' work.
The historical construct and emergence of school improvement is examined by Terry Wrigley. Arguing that the concept of improvement is intrinsically ideological, the author argues that the significant and explicit paradigm change that occurred in the early 1990s, resulted in a managerialist and reductionist approach to improving schools that exacerbated poverty and inequities rather than alleviated, or mediated, its effects. One of the key features of Wrigley's paper is that he overviews the emergence in England of school improvement and school effectiveness studies and therefore reminds readers of the long-term consequences of these paradigms.
Richard Bates and Scott Eacott offer a challenge to those working in the field of higher education. That is, they challenge field members to consider the texts that are in use, those that are discarded and the extent to which these texts can be used to formulate the knowledge that is taught, reinforced, received and, at times, regurgitated. Drawing on evidence from the Australian context, the authors question the ‘local’, ‘global’ and ‘international’ and via their highly nuanced study of educational administration programmes in Australia, conclude that there is a focus on the academic (as opposed to the technical and operational) but that there is a steady albeit worrying decline in numbers of Australian studies and authors being used. Central to their analysis are questions about how texts are used (or mis-used), reflected on or deflected in current and contemporary debates. Essentially Bates and Eacott ask — in what ways might the field be complicit, intended or otherwise, in its own demise by decisions made as to which texts are ‘worthy’ and which ones are to be discarded? How might the field be ‘read’ if texts are used as evidence of what ‘counts’?
The penultimate contribution by Helen Gunter provides a theoretical backdrop for this book. The author's examination of modernisation and Barber's policy implementation strategies is a refreshing account of history-making and history-writing as a deeply complex and contested process. Arguably too, the ‘deliverology’ and its consequences that Gunter highlights have similarly surfaced in the work of Thomson, Fitzgerald, and Wrigley. In her call for ongoing dialogue about the nature of the field and what scholarship is in practice, Gunter highlights the central concerns that led to the BELMAS seminar and this collection of papers. The passionate plea for field members to engage in debate and dialogue and position themselves as central to the development of the field is a challenge that requires response.
Drawing this all together, Peter Gronn has used the metaphorical ‘turn’ of Hamlet and the state of Denmark to not only reflect and comment on the papers in this book but also to contribute his own critical ideas to how the field, the ‘kingdom’, has developed and the challenges it continues to face. This is a paper that can well preface as well as summarise the contributions and we would like to suggest can and should act as a catalyst for continuing these critical debates.
1 See here Gunter, H.M and Fitzgerald, T. (2008) Educational administration and history: Debating the agenda, Journal of Educational Administration & History, 40(1): 5–20; Gunter, H.M and Fitzgerald, T. (2008) The future of leadership research? School Leadership & Management, (in press).
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Headteacher critique and resistance: a challenge for policy, and for leadership/management scholars
Pat Thomson
Educational administration scholars are concerned to examine leadership/management in specific policy contexts. In the UK, as in other parts of the world, investigations have focused on how headteachers deal with highly centralised and rapidly churning policy agendas, audit and inspection regimes, media and markets, and escalating expectations about student attainment, engagement and retention.1 Some have pursued the specific circumstances of headteachers in the most challenging circumstances.2
Implicitly or explicitly, all of these studies address the structural constraints that frame and delimit headteacher autonomy, freedom, agency and power. Many describe head-teacher mediation of structural imposts. Day and colleagues, for example suggest that heads can and do make decisions about what happens in their school, selectively following and ignoring what they deem appropriate.3 Thrupp and Wilmott have dubbed this analysis a ‘textual apology’, an academic cover-up of the multiple accommodations that heads make to audit and performance regimes.4 Thrupp argues that there is no scholarly investigation of headteacher critique of or resistance to managerialist policy5 — but there ought to be.
In this article I focus on the questions that Thrupp raises. I argue that if the field is to take critique and resistance seriously it will need to: interrogate and test out the limits of the proposition through empirical example; consider instances where it does appear to occur; and move beyond a focus on individual headteachers to take seriously their collective professional organisations.
I begin with a brief discussion of the scholarly ‘problem’ of agency, critique and resistance.
What can headteachers do?
Scholars have long struggled to understand the organisation, production, reproduction and transformation of social life. Disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and anthropology have endeavoured to get beyond dualistic inside–outside explanations of social practice. Philosophers highlight the role of language, knowledge and the historical/cultural specificities of understanding.6 Social scientists focus on structure/agency: if humans do not have the free will to do exactly what they want, and if their actions are not completely determined by history, language, the practices of class, race, gender and so on, as well as by social conventions and rules, then how is individual and collective agency to be theorised.7 Cultural theorists move beyond notions of structure to consider questions of interaction and discourse,8 while students of science and technology focus on understanding actions and actors9 and activity.10 Much of this scholarship has a decided ‘practice’ turn and not only assumes that social practice is embodied, but also that it operates within specific fields, and at specific times and scales.11
Very little of this corpus of academic work has influenced the field of leadership/ management.12 While the how-to-do-it books assume that headteachers can do as they wish, the how-it-is books narrowly focus on the external constraints of education policy, rather than taking up the approaches used by policy sociologists, for example, policy as a matter of text/discourse13 or as context/text and effect.14
My first contention is that this narrow academic engagement — with the traditions of the social sciences by many in the leadership/management field — limits the kinds of questions that are asked, the studies that are mounted, and the explanations that are offered. I indicate in this article that a more expansive theoretical repertoire supports the investigation of the question of critique and resistance.
Social sciences approaches to resistance
The responses headteachers make to policy can be conceived of as a simple duality — resistance or compliance. Resistance can be seen as an active choice, arising fro...
