Leaders and Leadership in Education

Helen M Gunter

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761954934, 9780761954927
• eBook ISBN: 9781446231050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

`Leaders and Leadership in Education makes a significant contribution to improvement literature. It will challenge school managers taking headship and leadership qualifications, or any reader with a serious interest in reconceptualising leadership for learning? - TES Friday Magazine

`Leaders and Leadership in Education is a well-documented account of how leadership has been studied and therefore presented. For academic readers it is valuable as an insightful and critical text? - Journal of In-Service Education

`Helen Gunter?s book makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on leadership in education.... For anyone who has an interest in current thinking about leadership and in reconceptualizing leadership for learning, this book will be of great interest? - Educational Research

Leadership within educational settings is widely regarded as essential for organizational effectiveness and the improvement of learning outcomes.

Through an extensive review of theory and practice, Helen M Gunter explores the contested field of leadership studies. She describes and critiques the different contributions made by:

- critical studies

- education management

- school effectiveness

- school improvement

Leadership is examined as function, as behaviour and as leadership relationship, from students as leaders, through to headteachers. The author provides an up-to-date review of current thinking about leadership, which challenges the reader to engage with and develop alternative ways of thinking about their own leadership.

This book is essential reading for practitioners on Masters and EdD courses and NPQH/LPSH training, and for anyone committed to teaching and learning.

1

Challenging Leadership

___________

News headlines continue to tell us that there is a crisis in education: ‘4,000 teacher jobs cannot be filled’ (Dean, 2000a), ‘Schools policy crisis as third superhead quits’ (Carvel and Mulholland, 2000), and, ‘Poverty no excuse for failure, says Blunkett’ (Carvel, 2000). It seems that what we need is more leadership of educational institutions, with superheads being drafted in to turn ‘failing’ schools around. The questions I explore in his book are why leadership and why now? And, is it educational leadership? This is problematic for leadership watchers and practitioners because, even though popular models seem to suggest that we have settled the debate, it is still the case that we know little about the realities and possibilities for leaders, leading and leadership in educational settings.

I focus on how particular positions regarding leadership in educational studies can be revealed through an examination of research and theory, and how this interconnects with the education policy context. I ask the question: how can we best describe and explain the emerging field of educational leadership? Investigating knowledge production enables a range of issues to be explored: what is a field and what positions are there within and between fields? How does membership of a field create and resolve debates about theory, practice and research? This allows us to dig deeper and ask: in what ways is the production and organisation of knowledge within a field related to dominant group interests and values? This enables professional practice to be related to systems of control and considers the interplay between the agency of the knowledge worker and the structuring effects of organisational location within an educational institution.

This book is about and is the product of intellectual work, and my contribution is to theorise leadership in education through the use of Bourdieu’s theory of practice. By thinking with Bourdieu’s thinking tools of habitus and field I present the leadership territory as an arena of struggle in which researchers, writers, policy-makers and practitioners take up and/or present positions regarding the theory and practice of educational leadership. This provides opportunities to reveal positions that are being written into and out of the working lives of educational professionals. Furthermore, it enables a historical as well as a contemporary perspective to identify a range of approaches to understanding the everyday work of educational professionals. I draw on intellectual resources from around the world to enable particular questions to be asked about the growth of the field and interconnections with educational restructuring. In order to illuminate the interplay between structure and agency I use site-based performance management in England and other nations of the UK, with a particular focus on schools, as the prime location. The emphasis is on large-scale mapping and contours, rather than on charting of each intellectual pathway. In exploring boundaries I show the messiness and dynamism in the positioning and repositioning of work. I am well aware that much will remain uncharted, and I hope that through reviews and continued dialogue the terrain will be further opened up.

The leadership terrain

The leadership in education terrain is very busy. By using the metaphor of a field we can identify this space as a place of struggle over and within theory and method. Activity is structured, entry and boundaries are controlled. Leadership knowledge workers who engage with what we know and generate new knowledge about what we need to know are located in a range of employment and organisational settings, from teachers in classrooms through to professors in higher education institutions. It is a territory where answers to particular leadership problems are sought, and it is also an interesting site for the exploration of enduring questions about human beings. All are represented in this book, but differences within professional portfolios and the setting in which knowledge production takes place does mean that enabling what we know about leaders and leadership to be made visible is highly problematic. The real-time real-life nature of educational work means that capturing, understanding and theorising the dynamism, even by those directly involved, is challenging. This does not invalidate the project but, instead, provides us with the opportunity to ask who the knowers are, why they are deemed to know and, perhaps significantly, where are the silences?

This book draws on a range of theory and research from knowledge workers who undertake work around particular intellectual positions on the leadership terrain:

• Critical studies: concerned with power structures, and how educational professionals experience work.
• Educational management: promotes improvements in the leadership, management and administration of educational organisations.
• School effectiveness and school improvement: identifies the characteristics of effective schools, and the processes that will bring about improvement.

Even in attempting to describe these positions I am adding to boundary disputes, though the simplicity of these categories becomes evident as the book unfolds. At the moment all I wish to say is that knowledge workers who have identified their work as being located in one of these areas of activity are increasingly interested in leadership. Consequently, networks are developing that are bringing together interesting alliances or are making clearer the boundaries. However, before I can reach the stage of describing this positioning I need to establish some conceptual underpinnings. In particular, I need to be explicit about the authoring process and to problematise my own position.

An intellectual journey

Bourdieu (1988) argues that any attempt to try to be anonymous and to be neutral or to hide behind method ‘is doomed in advance to failure’ (p. 25), and so my position within the unfolding analysis is open to scrutiny. I begin the process of revealing the intellectual resources that make up the ‘the lacework of meanings and significations’ (Seddon, 1996, p. 211) that shapes my orientation to this area of study and practice. My original interest is rooted in a combination of personal experience and academic discourse, and as a knowledge worker in both a school and, more recently, a university setting, I have observed and I am a part of the growth in the field from the early 1980s. This involvement has gone through a number of interconnected, and often parallel, phases involving working as a teacher of history and politics in a secondary school through to a university lecturer in education management. This experience of positioning my professional practice and interests within the field, and securing employment within a higher education institution (HEI), has raised a number of questions about how my own professional identity has been challenged and reshaped. Not least because I have become increasingly networked into other fields both through my research and writing, and it is difficult to escape the dominant language and discourse of ‘effectiveness’ and ‘improvement’. The question I ask is: how do I come to be professionally located where I am today? Exploring this raises the importance of lived experience and how I understand my professional practice and make sense of my situated context. This can be revealed through professional life stories in which choices and decisions, to work here or there, to teach this or that, to write on this topic or that, can enable an understanding of how clusters of people can come together to create and develop an area of activity. Underlying this is an understanding of what it means to be a member of a field in which professional practice is shaped through association with others, and what happens when particular questions are asked, research issues are focused on and debates about theory take place.

Since becoming a student, and then a researcher, I have developed a sense of being within a field of study and how I see my position and how others seek to position my work. This may appear, with hindsight, to be neat and tidy. However, within any person’s professional biography there are contradictions and dilemmas that have had to be faced, and these are often not revealed through the publication process. Underpinning this is the interplay of agency and structure, and issues around what it means at different times and in different situations to be able to make sense of and to live in the world. The complexity of this approach is illustrated when knowledge workers give glimpses into how they understand and handle these dilemmas. Skeggs (1997) describes how we are positioned by macro structures such as nation, class and sexuality, and these affect our access to education and employment, and what we understand as possible in our lives. Often in contradiction to this is epistemological positioning through particular theories, methodologies, funding and fashions: ‘all these positionings impact upon what research we do, when and how we do it. However, there is no straightforward correspondence between our circumstances and how we think: we are positioned in but not determined by our locations’ (ibid., p. 18).

Like Deem (1996a) I inhabit border territory, I simultaneously do and do not belong. Much of my professional practice is the same as other field members, but my research and theoretical interests have shifted from the common-sense problem-solving agenda to that of critical studies and, in particular, the historical setting and development of the field. During this intellectual journey I seem to have crossed Popkewitz’s (1999, pp. 2–3) metaphorical room away from the ‘pragmatic-empiricists’ who are concerned to make organisations work better towards a position where ‘critical’ is interpreted as being about understanding and explaining the tensions and contradictions in why organisations work in the way they do. Being critical is not about taking an oppositional stance but is about opening up spaces for discussion about knowledge claims and production (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996).

This type of reflexive approach enables me to see the link between the dynamic and ongoing development of fields I am studying and changes within my professional identity. In doing this I am taking inspiration from Greenfield because he sees his work and writing as representing ‘a groping towards understanding, not a uniform and logical line of extrapolation’ (Greenfield and Ribbins, 1993, p. 269). This has considerable resonance with me as it supports my argument that this book is a contribution to a dialogue and not a claim to be encyclopaedic. This ongoing reflexive approach is what makes study exciting and worthwhile, but at the same time I am well aware that researching fields and knowledge production can be challenging. As Bourdieu (1988, p. xv) argues, what is spoken or written about ‘is bound to be read differently by readers who are part of this world as opposed to those who are outsiders’. Nevertheless, making the self visible means that the ‘assumptive choices’ (McPherson and Raab, 1989) I have made in the design and development of this book can be opened up to debate and it returns us to the opening questions in how we seek to understand the theory and research about leadership within educational settings through position and positioning. I problematise intellectual work by making connections between the individual knowledge worker and the context in which knowledge production takes place.

Knowledge and knowing

Describing and understanding leaders and leadership in education is about knowledge production: who does it, what they do, how do they do it and why do they do it? The emphasis is not so much on the product of knowledge in the form of a fact or a theory, as the process by which there is ‘a selection and organisation from the available knowledge at a particular time which involves conscious or unconscious choices’ (Young, 1971b, p. 24). This problematises knowledge rather than accepts it as a given, and it sees knowledge production as connected to the interplay between agency and structure.

Agency is concerned with the subjective capability and capacity to control, for example, through the exercise of choice and discretion. In asking about the who, what, how and why of knowledge production we need to consider the skills and the will to use them. This can be related to identity and how the individual is able to position the self as being a knowledge worker and, more importantly, how what the individual does in their relationship with others makes this visible (and invisible). In this way who knowledge workers are is not just about what a role or job is or is not, but it is about what is and is not done. Identity is not homogenous and static, but is about identities that can shift within time and space, and can complement or contradict.

Identity is not just the product of the individual but is a socialised and socialising process in which identities can be received as well as shaped. Structure is concerned with external controls, for example, how technical job descriptions and/or organisational cultures define expectations of what work is and is not about, and so agency can be enhanced, moderated or stifled. Organisations are also places where external power structures are at work in which social injustices in our society related to discrimination and political interests can impact on, and perhaps determine, the exercise of agency within knowledge production. Visibility of the self as a knowledge worker may be highly public, or it could be consciously suppressed or unconsciously repressed. How the self is represented and allowed to be represented is interwoven with social and political issues of age, disability, gender, race and sexuality. In this way the individual is the object of someone else’s gaze, and can be grouped according to abstract categories and essentialised as being a typical example.

This brief analysis of agency and structure enables us to investigate leaders and leadership in education by asking, for example, why did I not write this book in 1985? This could be related to how I saw and understood my work as a teacher, and how I made choices to prepare lessons and mark essays rather than write a book about the exercise of pedagogic leadership underpinning those activities. It could be that even if I had wanted to write a book (and many teachers do), I was unable to do so because of the institutional, political and social context that determined what a teacher should and should not be doing.

If such choices and directions in professional practice are to be theorised effectively, then a conceptual framework that will enable the interplay between agency and structure in the exercise of power to be at the forefront is needed. Work by researchers and theorists about knowledge production is itself a field of struggle through which position and positioning takes place, and from this work there are a number of conceptual issues that enable important issues to be raised about leaders and leadership in education.

Leadership as a paradigm shift

It could be that the growth in leadership studies is due to a new paradigm, and certainly the word ‘paradigm’ is being used increasingly as a means of describing change. Kuhn (1975) argues that knowledge is located within epistemic communities: ‘a paradigm is what the members of a scientific community share, and, conversely, a scientific community consists of men who share a paradigm’ (p. 176). What this scientific community ‘share’ are a number of connections related to professional identity, such as being the practitioners of a scientific speciality, absorbing the same technical literature, membership of professional societies, reading the same journals. In addition to this there is a ‘tacit knowledge’ that comes from the doing of science and in being trained in the rules and assumptions of the paradigm. A paradigm shift takes place when the epistemic community accepts a new way of thinking, seeing and defining the world. Such changes are incremental and are rarely the product of one person. The most important aspect is how these changes are disseminated in journals and eventually reach the lay person through their impact on teaching and textbooks: ‘what were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards’ (ibid., p. 111).

This approach enables us to see that knowledge, and what is or is not the truth, is related to those who produce it. However, it is a rather elitist view of knowledge production because it presents intellectual and manual work as rational and separate. A privileged epistemic community is able to control the progress towards, and the acceptance of, what is the truth through a top-down transmission of what is to be known. It seems that leadership as a paradigm is only helpful if you want to impose a model of leadership. For the field to gain a better sense of itself and its purposes, then, we need a way of understanding knowledge production that not only enables the struggle within and over knowledge to be visible, but also to be more inclusive of who the knowers are.

Leadership as academic tribes and territories

Becher (1989), who like Kuhn (1975) is interested in knowledge communities, broadens out the focus to consider the relationship between disciplines and professional identity: ‘the ways in which particular groups of academics organise their professional lives are intimately related to the intellectual tasks on which they are engaged’ (Becher, 1989, p. 1). Becher (1989) uses the example of discovery and describes how it is very important in some fields of enquiry and less so in others. For example, discovery is very important in molecular biology but not so much in taxonomies of plant life. In mechanical engineering it has been replaced by invention. Discovery is out of place in other areas of enquiry such as history. Becher argues that these differences are not just sociological but lie within the nature of the work of the academic, and this leads him to provide a multidimensional framework to investigate the epistemological features of knowledge:

1. Abstract and reflective or hard and pure: the natural sciences and maths in which there is linear development by building on previous work. Outcomes tend to be concerned with universal and value free truths.
2. Concrete and reflective or soft and pure: the humanities and social sciences in which there is debate about the type of the questions to be asked and the nature and validity of outcomes. There is emphasis on an iterative process and the use of findings as illuminative.
3. Abstract and active or hard and applied: the science-based professions, e.g. medicine and engineering, in which trial and error approaches dominate. Progress may or may not take place, and the emphasis is on mastering the natural world through the use of a practical and problem-solving method.
4. Concrete and active or soft and applied: the social professions, e.g. education, social work and the law in which the intellectual roots are reinterpreted and developed, and so there is no accumulation of knowledge which is agreed and accepted. This domain is concerned with understanding the complexity of human relationships and interactions, and so is unstable and open to change. Outcomes are focused on identifying the best ways of doing things and in arranging human interactions, and can be judged according to pragmatism, or, utilitarianism or ethics.

Becher goes on to show how these knowledge domains are evident in the creation, evolution and reproduction of tribes of academics and the territories they inhabit. Terrain is marked by the spatial characteristics of which parts of the ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Challenging leadership
• 2 Leadership and the performing school
• 3 Leadership in educational studies
• 4 Research and researching
• 5 Theory and theorising
• 6 Preparing and preparation
• 7 Headteachers and principals
• 8 Teachers in the middle
• 9 Teachers and students
• 10 Teachers as professionals
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject Index