Educational Leadership

Educational Leadership as Emotional Pastiche “Envisioning the nature of schools of the future is more art than science” (Barbara Smith - SCU Educational Leadership Course Guide 2011) The premise of this manifesto is based on a post-modern, post-positivist personal vision of the purpose of education. The following list of "what counts” in educational leadership is more pastiche than manifesto. This pastiche leans considerably toward a values-driven vision for education which aims to develop and foster the qualitative dimensions of human experience to enable students to live out their potential as individuals and as connected, socially aware global citizens. Houston (2001) insightfully observes that “school leadership focuses on the substance of what it means to be human and to live together harmoniously in this world. Education isn't about the skills we teach, it is about the spirit we nurture.”(p432). “What counts” in educational leadership needs to engage with the emotional pastiche of human experience if it is to be entirely consistent with this “spirit we nurture” purpose. "School leaders will be effective only if they choose to be artists” (Houston 2001 p432) Leadership as Authentic Moral Purpose. Educational leadership requires a deep sense that you can make a difference. Despite the chaos, leaders need to embrace authentically their inner passion, core ethical values and principles and they need to believe that they have a transformative moral responsibility to co-create a new future in the lives of individual students, parents, teachers and their community. Implicit in this “leadership as authentic moral purpose” is the notion that the individual leader needs a certain inner strength, inner knowledge, inner resourcefulness and self-reflexivity that will be continually called upon in the challenges of their work. Leadership with an authentic moral purpose calls on the individual leader to understand their work as essentially a moral activity. (Sergiovanni 2007; Fullan 2003, in Duigan 2012 p13). Framing educational leadership as a moral activity becomes an essential starting point because a firm moral compass provides the vision and direction from which all subsequent engagement flows. Formulating and articulating this authentic moral purpose is no easy task and will be influenced by a multitude of factors – not the least being the leaders’ personal life journey and experience of education. For my own part my formative Catholic education based on social justice, forgiveness and the dignity of the human person are paramount in my considerations. Since leaders of educational institutions face incredibly complex demands, tensions, conflicts, ethical challenges and dilemmas, they will need to be very clear within themselves of their own personal and professional ethical values. This is not an advocating of a righteous moral rigidity is but more a deep sense in the transformative powers of education creating new ideas and structures for the future. (Theobald 1999, Rock 2006, in Smith 2011). Educational leaders must engage in what Lipman-Bluman (2000 p135) refers to as their own personal odysseys for meaning and they invite their constituents to join the search and in doing so they are not simply managing meaning but co-creating it in a post-modern world. Establishing a moral paradigm that fits congruently with the individual leader and their educational institution is not automatic and would involve dialogue, deep listening, understanding, transaction and collaboration. Leadership as Community. Schools take more of the shape of a community than that of a formal organisation in that they appear as living, complex, dynamic and mostly non-lineal organisations (Duigan 2012 p21). It is incumbent on leadership to seek, understand, articulate and foster the values of their learning community. In framing leadership as community one is immediately looking for connections, innovations and support in their educational enterprise. The adventure of education is at once acknowledging the incredible complexity and challenges while at the same time seeking solutions, transformation and empowerment by developing strong social capital through community (Owens 1998 p224, and Caldwell 2006, in Duigan 2012 p22). The learning community becomes self-energising and self-motivating through this empowering process. Inherent in this view is that school leadership is not synonymous with the principal (Hargreaves and Fink in Duigan 2012 pp118-119), and that the expectations for the role are too great for any one person (Pont et al. in Duigan 2012 p119). Leadership as community is embedded in all other aspects of this manifesto. Leadership must attempt to balance a post-modern sensibility where the promotion of individual happiness and freedom needs to be mitigated by an awareness that this same promotion comes at the expense of the environment, community public involvement, and civic responsibility. Leadership must seek the common good first and nurture discussion, dialogue and divergent points of view when attempting to find better solutions to the problems and challenges they face (Starratt 1993 pp109-110). Implicit in these assumptions is that leadership is far less dominated by positivist, reductionist managerial models but one more based on the constructivist, nature and quality of relationships and interactions of the dynamic learning community. Leadership therefore becomes a navigational point for choice and balance in achieving positive outcomes for both the individual and the community. Navigating this course is not a simple task and will inherently involve costs on both sides. Leadership as Service. The servant leader as described by Sharpe (1995 pp19-20) holds considerable weight for school principals. Using the biography of Weary Dunlop as an example, Sharpe lists the qualities of a servant leader as a highly ethical, values laden communitarian. This list of qualities of service derived from Dunlop’s prisoner of war experiences is enmeshed in all the aspects of this manifesto. There is also the more symbiotic aspect of service noted by Max De Pree (in Owens 1998 p221) which means having the opportunity to make a meaningful difference in the lives of those who permit leaders to lead. A leader as servant mentality may also assist in providing a more agreeable humour to the principal as being “a quick-healing dartboard” or a Messiah who “enters a community as a new saviour who is thought capable of performing miracle dealings”(Houston 2001 pp428-9). Leadership as service also has an innate understanding of the type of soft power required in collaborative learning communities. Service type leadership should not be interpreted as weak or lacking in vision but moreover a type of leadership that is more reflective of the very nature of the school community. Leadership as Hope. Leadership as hope this one that aligns a number of post-modern considerations. Starratt (1993 pp106-110) eruditely paints the post-modern landscape stripped of illusion as neither nice nor kindly. The landscape is more mixed, more complex, and more chaotic and more precariously close to collapse than ever before. Instead of this being an indicator for despair, it is an opportunity for hope. A hope of developing an informed post-modern sensibility featuring a moral agenda, humility, compassion, the recognition of the partiality of knowledge, the relational nature of human existence, recognising the complex ecological connections in the present and a greater awareness and balance between private gain and public benefit. This type of leadership of hope would indeed move education toward more substantive considerations of what constitutes a full and rich human life. Rather than focus on learning organisations we need to focus upon a socially just learning system. Educational leadership is a social practice, not just an intellectual matter, and as a social practice it is also a moral and emotional matter and all this takes place within a narrative of a social covenant (Blackmore 1999 p39). Leadership as hope concerns the emotional intelligence of the leader and the offering of hope to teachers who are in an almost constant state of need that they are connected to a larger purpose than to others who are also struggling to make progress. Articulating and discussing hope when the going gets rough re-energises teachers as they continually negotiate a transformative future. The emotionally intelligent leader needs to be aware of their own emotional health as well is their staff as we move in time of incredible external pressure and exponential change. Boyle (2000 p5) refers to this as “manager of self” in the face of a myriad of factors impacting on principals general health and well-being. As Fullan (1998) insightfully reveals, “Managing emotionally means putting a high priority on reculturing not merely restructuring… Reculturing makes a difference in teaching and learning. Reculturing requires strong emotional involvement principals…as it contributes to personal and collective resilience in the face of change.” There is also the deeply personal sense of hope for principals who can keep their eyes on the horizon amid a flurry of distractions, mini defeats and occasionally being the dog’s fire hydrant... Leadership as Anxiety. We do indeed live in what Lipman-Bluman (2000 p126) refers to as an age of magnificent uncertitude - an uncertitude that is only bound to increase! The anxiety created by the unprecedented increase in the rate of change is self-evident. This spiralling rate of growth, change and challenge paradoxically creates transformative opportunities for connective leaders as they respond to these challenges which stimulate new ideas and technologies. Embracing, acknowledging and communicating the anxiety of the elephant in the room is akin to owning our own humanness and the futility of perennially trying to control the chaos. This is by no means surrender to entropy, but it means having the courage and the knowledge of what is worth fighting for in the face of potential dangers and dynamic uncertainty. Again, coming back to our post-modern reality even the rationality of decision-making may be seen as a delusion (Baldridge in Starratt 1993 p100) and embracing unpredictability and change will be a constant. Harnessing this anxiety into possibilities and hope is a key skill for the future leader even if “the fragility of the enterprise where nothing is guaranteed” is the norm and that “success will almost certainly be mixed with failure.” (Starratt 1993 p110) Leadership as Relationship. Our collective educational future beckons a softer, more collaborative, socially just, post-modern relational leadership. The quality of educational experience in the future is dependent on relations: the networks, pathways and partnerships between systems, communities and groups, the values which imbue those relations, and social and structural infrastructure which underpin them. Through a leadership that is authentically moral, a learning organisation can move toward a socially just learning system where issues of responsibility, recognition and reciprocity are hallmarks of a strong democratic, ethical values laden learning community (Blackmore 1999 p31). A softer post-modern relational leader will look for reflective opportunities on the quality of their relationships and on the deep learning required to bring about transformation in self and others. Leaders will need to understand the importance of presence and the importance of being real human beings in developing relationships based on integrity, trust and respect for the dignity and worth of others (Duigan 2012 p145). Leadership as relationship includes the essential element of collaboration. Christenson (1993) highlights this in the best way possible by stating that home-school collaboration is an attitude not activity. Collaboration has the understanding that divergent views are listened to and welcomed. Duigan’s (2012 pp76-90) Framework for Analysing Ethical Tensions may be seen as a helpful tool in not just understanding competing tensions but a systematic way of valuing competing interests in the process of collaboration. In this way leadership as relationship assists us in “recognising the partiality of knowledge as well is the different levels of understanding in the different perspectives each person brings to the conversation. Hence, in pursuing the truth, no one person can speak for all…conversation and dialogue is as necessary as breathing” (Starratt 1993 p107). Furthermore, Starratt (p110) then goes on to perceptively observe that discussion, dialogue and soliciting divergent points of view is the only way to approach the better solution to problems. Leadership as Humility. The very nature of the enormous challenges of education in the future demands that leadership be undertaken with a high degree of humility. Taking Starratt’s (1993 p108) proposition of post-modern sensibility and the implicit moral agenda, means that leadership will be defined by the degree to which socially just learning communities engage in the more substantive considerations of what constitutes a full and rich human life. This undertaking requires educational leaders who will walk and talk the challenge with humility and compassion. This means knowing that the real task facing the post-modern world is a moral task, and at the same time knowing ingenious human capacity to compromise that task the leader needs to teach compassion. Compassion does not mean rationalising excusing human weakness. It means, rather, the courage to name it, forgive it, and get on with the task again. This humility needs to extend to all aspects in the life of the school as we come to expect failures, and to treat them with compassion, a compassion that flows out of self-knowledge (Starratt 1993 pp105-08) Leadership as a New Spirituality. Leadership as a new spirituality is an attempt to harness the plurality of discourses of learning and pedagogy into an aspirational coherence in a given learning community. Articulating an educational vision involves looking to an unknown and unknowable future with a finesse and subtlety. Educational leadership takes on an almost ephemeral quality like bringing all the instruments of an orchestra together to play a song not yet created based only on out-dated and out-moded music and lyrics of the past. Educational leadership into the future requires us to mind the gap at the bottom of the slide even if we don't know what the issues will be or what they will look like (Kordis 1999 p18). Leadership requires at the very least an understanding of motivation, an understanding of different kinds of knowledge, learning, teaching strategies, curriculum resources and (yet to be discovered) technologies (Darling-Hammond 1999). Future leadership will require an intuitive sense and spirituality in bringing the known, unknowns and unknowables together as a conductor would to a future symphony. Educational leadership is very much like Bradley’s (1995 pp37-8) metaphor of the big picture book. The transformative, interconnectedness and global nature of education means that we must educate the development of a style of mind. Although coming from an entirely different perspective Fullan (2000) ascribes to the view that meaningful sustaining reform not only requires the fusion of “the three stories in concert” but requires a spiritual dimension which harnesses the collective moral purpose. This is further reflected by Robert Theobald (1999 in the course study guide) where we need to “pre-integrate ourselves into the natural order rather than continue to dominate it. We shall have to create a new form of spirituality that recognises how the world in which we are embedded actually operates…" “Leadership Is about passion, changing hearts as well is changing minds… And finally leadership is about hope”. (Blackmore 1999 p39) This lengthy quote largely captures the post-modern inclination of the above manifesto of educational leadership. The apparent forces and intrusions of parents and the community, demographics, government and business, technology, complexity, rapid exponential change, increasing ecological limitations make it impossible to create a formula, format or structure of educational leadership to ensure that students thrive into the future. What is possible however, is to attempt to identify a mindful, self-reflexive, post-modern emotional pastiche which may assist in the preparedness of educational leaders in the future. The above manifesto attempts to identify those features. Co-creation, openness, creativity, mindfulness, emerging world views, perceptions, continuous learning, nurturing, importance of language as a framing device with its paradoxical power to clarify as well as to deceive, power of symbol and metaphor in forming deeper, fuller understandings of the complexity of the interactions in education are also important elements in forming a post-modern leadership manifesto. Leaders must also focus on what energises, being resilient, creating triumph from tragedy and reinventing oneself (Spreitzer and Cummings 2000 in the course study guide) Modernity’s hierarchical, westernised, reductionist, definitive, empiricist and at times absolutist educational response is overwhelmingly inadequate in providing answers to the challenges of the future (Kordis 1995 pp18-25). In coming to new post-modern understandings we are inevitably lead to the role and capacity of our language to wholly represent the nature of not only the questions but the answers to the role and activity of education in the future. This capacity of language to harness educational truths in metaphor and symbol must be carefully nurtured. It is only in creativity, imagination and storytelling that we can begin to come to ever evolving understandings of our future context and the role of education in creating this world. In practice, this means keeping the dialogue alive and fostering conversations that continually reflects on educational practice and the current and future needs of learners. As a final thought one must also look to the possible pitfalls of a purely post-modern response. One such pitfall is falling into what Cizek (1999) calls the ubiquitous “crisis” in education all with a top down response and owned by their creators enmeshed within a culture they create. A good example of this is the “crisis” in literacy and numeracy and the top-down NAPLAN response. Another such pitfall may exist in the apparent dissolution of universal truths from the effects of post-modernism. This dissolution has created an emergent identity politic of pluralistic narcissism which also paradoxically produces a banal cultural sameness. The proliferation of this identity politic actually produces a vacuously multitudinous commoditised sense of choice masquerading as “freedom”. This post-modern Western concept loosely referred to as “freedom” is the same one creating increasing alienation and marginalisation. This is but one example of an emergent challenge as we move to new ethical visions in education. We will need to be ever mindful of our communitarian responsibility in to creating new possibilities. This is reflected somewhat by Fege’s (2000 p4) institutional dilemma; how do schools become more responsive to individual, market-based proclivities of parents and the community, while creating a passion and zeal for the common good?” Educational leadership will require a constant engagement in search for answers to fundamental collective questions necessary to promote the common good: -“What knowledge, values, skills, and sensibilities should public schools nurture in children? What must the nation commit to in reaching the goals? What kind of work and resources must parents, teachers, students, businesses, and the community commit to? 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