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Introduction

In the novel, The Farewell Party, by Czech author, Milan Kundera, the character Jakub describes the tension between the world of machines and that of humans as ‘the longing for order’. Jakub describes this longing as

… a desire to turn the human world into an inorganic one, where everything would function perfectly and work on schedule, subordinated to a suprapersonal system. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death because life is an incessant disruption of order. Or to put it the other way around: the desire for order is a virtuous pretext, an excuse for virulent misanthropy. (1984, p. 75, as cited in Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 10)

The tension between the two worlds which Jakub attests to captures the tensions we have witnessed in Anglophone educational systems which increasingly seek to impose order on the world of educational practice , as part of an adoption of new public management ideologies. By drilling into the capillaries of pedagogical and leading practices, through a variety of technologies such as standards, frameworks, quality assurance measures, audits, and more recently, national testing in Australia, there is an attempt to fix, stabilise, and regiment educational practice .

On the other hand, from the lifeworld or human and humanistic perspective of educational practitioners, be it as teachers or executive staff, attests to the inevitable ‘messiness’ of daily practice, located as we are in classrooms, schools, universities, and childcare centres, where every day we are reminded through our encounters with students that living and working educationally is necessarily disruptive, messy but potentially life-nurturing.

This quotation captures some of the key thinkings that has been a central focus of my scholarly life as an academic and scholar in educational leadership practice. In particular, I draw on research that I have been conducting with colleagues at Charles Sturt and Griffith Universities as part of the international Pedagogy, Education and Praxis (PEP) research network. This research in turn builds on my longstanding interest and scholarship as a feminist scholar using Bourdieuian ‘thinking tools’ in the field of women, ethnicity, class, and leadership (e.g. Wilkinson and Eacott 2013) and practical philosophy (e.g. Wilkinson and Kemmis 2015; Wilkinson et al. 2010, 2013). Recently, it has involved examining what socially just leadership practices may look like when working with students of refugee background (e.g. Wilkinson, forthcoming).

The PEP network was formed in 2005 prompted by concerns that intellectual traditions , other than Anglo-American, were being ploughed under and colonised in the international educational field, particularly in international conferences where the dominant language has become English. The aim of the PEP network was and is to surface and revitalise a range of other intellectual traditions that may assist educators in ‘speaking back’ to the Global Education Reform Movement (or GERMFootnote 1 as Pasi Sahlberg, Finland’s former Director of Education labelled it) (Sahlberg 2012). In particular, the network is committed to exploring what are the necessary conditions in different countries that support the growth of good professional practice or praxis for educators across the life course of their careers (Kemmis et al. 2008).

As a researcher in educational leadership , I have found the experience of discovering and interrogating intellectual traditions other than my own, an enlightening and invigorating experience . In particular, I have found that these explorations have provided my Australian colleagues and I with new sets of conceptual tools with which to not only interrogate and critique the gaps and silences in our respective educational fields, but also to begin to posit alternative ways of thinking and working in/through and with practice and practitioners. This latter point is particularly important for educational leadership theory, for I am mindful of criticism that critique of managerialist orthodoxy is not sufficient on its own. To critique without offering alternatives is to run the risk that we “become … knowing observers of sociological phenomena, comparing clever notes within our exclusive circle, while practices and policies that exacerbate inequalities continue oblivious and unabated” (Francis and Mills 2012, p. 578).

In this chapter, I employ a critical scholarship lens to foreground education as a key but largely taken-for-granted concept in educational leadership . In so doing, I draw on and extend theorising and empirical work conducted with Australian colleagues and partners in Sweden and Norway. The work was conducted as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant which examined the ecological links between leading , professional learning, teaching, students’ learning, and researching practices in schools that were deemed ‘exemplary’ in relation to their innovative leading and learning practices.Footnote 2

Confusing Terms

I begin this chapter by examining some confusions in key educational terms, and discuss how these confusions point to underlying major differences between Anglo-American and European traditions and practices of education. These differences, I argue, need to be understood for they impact on how educational leadership practice is talked and thought about (sayings) in Anglo-American and Continental and Northern European spheres; how it is practiced (doings) and how these differing understandings and traditions of leadership subsequently shape relationships between human actors in the education field (relatings).

Some Confusing Terms

See Table 12.1.

Table 12.1 This table is derived from key concepts examined in Kemmis and Smith (2008a, b)
Full size table

What Educational Leadership Theory Does not Say

In educational leadership scholarship, as well as within the field of practice, there is frequently a slippage between the term ‘education’ and the term ‘schooling’. Yet, as noted in the preceding table, the two are not synonymous and their interchangeability has deleterious consequences for leadership practice and scholarship. In English, the two words have similar but not identical meanings. Education in English is frequently used in its narrowest sense to refer to schooling or training within formal educational institutions. But it also has a wider meaning, that is capturing education’s broader social function and purpose, as both the incidental as well as deliberate institutional and designed practices of ‘bringing up’, ‘rearing’, ‘raising’ and forming the child or young person, intellectually, morally, spiritually, and physically (Dewey 1968). When we talk about something as having an “educative” function, this also hints at the deeper and wider purpose of education.

Moreover, the word ‘education’ draws attention to the reality that educative practices occur not solely as an individual function, confined to parents/guardians or in the private realm, but are the responsibility of the extended family, the community and society at large. In this larger sense, we potentially are all educators. In relation to educational leadership practice, for instance, the reality is that to be an effective educational administrator requires a ‘stereoscopic’ vision (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 165) which recognises administrators’ actions are prefigured both by the system (i.e. the roles, functions, and requirements of schooling) and the lifeworld . Administrators’ actions are necessarily nested in the lifeworld of ‘person-to-person relationships between professionals’ (e.g. teachers, leaders) and students, that is, as members of a lifeworld shaped by shared meanings, in which ‘people organise reality through their own actions, based on their own preferences, in dialogue with others who share the same life world’ (Ax and Ponte 2008, p. 14).

The Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL] standard for principals (http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standard-for-principals) hints at this broader educative and social role of individual and social formation when they refer to principals as necessarily having a ‘belief in the power of education to make a difference to the lives of individuals and to society now and in the future’(Australian Professional Standard for Principals, July 2011, p. 2). The statement implies that education is not solely the province of institutions but has a critical function in forming and reforming the broader polis of society. Yet, debate and discussion, be it informed by alternative intellectual traditions or other forms of knowledge (such as Indigenous Australians’ lifeworld viewpoints of education) are missing in the dominant paradigms which dominate much educational leadership theory and debate.

The broader Anglo-American notions of education noted above along with Continental and Northern European definitions of education in the preceding table alert us to an alternative set of intellectual traditions which inform understandings of education. These traditions derive from thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Steiner, Montessori, Dewey, Piaget, and Nell Noddings. The definition in the right-hand column of the table attempts to emphasise the social function of education at its broadest. It stresses the different schools of thought which have informed our understandings of education, particularly in terms of fundamental questions about ‘what education should be, what dispositions it should cultivate, why it ought to cultivate them, how and in whom it should do so, and what forms it should take’ (Dewey 1968, p. 18).

Thinking ‘Educationally’

So what does the term ‘education’ mean? For John Dewey—an advocate of educational progressivism, philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer—education is how:

… a community or social group sustains itself through continuous self-renewal … this renewal takes place by means of the educational growth of the immature members of the group. By various agencies, unintentional and designed, a society transforms uninitiated and seemingly alien beings into robust trustees of its own resources and ideals. Education is thus a fostering, and nurturing, cultivating, process. All of these words mean that it implies attention to the conditions of growth. We also speak of rearing, raising, bringing up – words which express the difference of level which education aims to cover. Etymologically, the word education means just a process of leading or bringing up. When we have the outcome of the process in mind, we speak of education as shaping, forming, moulding activity-that is, as shaping into the standard form of social activity…the way in which a social group brings up its immature members into its own social form…(Dewey 1968, p. 10).

Dewey distinguishes between the broader social function of education which occurs indirectly and often incidentally in the life world of the infant and young child, and the formalised institutional processes by which increasingly complex societies inculcate their young. He describes schools as:

… [coming] …into existence when social traditions are so complex that a considerable part of the social store is committed to writing and transmitted through written symbols… as soon as a community depends to any considerable extent upon what lies beyond its own territory and its own immediate generation, it must rely upon the set agency of schools to insure adequate transmission of all its resources. (Dewey 1968, p. 19)

Dewey argues that schools have three functions:

  1. 1.

    to support learners to ‘assimilate piecemeal, in a gradual and graded way… the knowledge of complex civilisations’;

  2. 2.

    ‘to eliminate… the unworthy features of the existing environment from influence upon mental habitudes… weeding out what is undesirable’;

  3. 3.

    ‘to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with the broader environment… the intermingling in the school of… different races, differing religions, and unlike customs creates for all a new and broader environment … Dewey 1968, pp. 20–21).Footnote 3

So what does this excavation of the terms education and schooling suggest in relation to educational leadership theory and practice? The first implication is that there is a key distinction between the practices of education and the practices of schooling. To make this distinction is not to set up a self-defeating binary (for the co-presence of lifeworld and system rests in both terms) but rather to foreground the extrinsic value and purposes of education. This value is critical to bring to the fore given the over-emphasis on ‘technical action, guided by rules’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 5), which is an increasing feature of contemporary schooling practice in a number of Anglophone educational systems. The emphasis on technical action has meant that the life world of teachers and leaders as pedagogues is increasingly out of balance with the perspective of schooling as a system:

… increasingly uncoupled from its anchoring in the life world… in which pupils … [both] … learn to understand … [their] … own capacities, preferences and perspectives on future life… as part of a meaningful learning environment … [in which] … they can act as authentic responsible persons.” (Kemmis, personal communication, December 21, 2015)

In making a distinction between schooling and education, I draw on Aristotle’s distinction between praxis and instrumental action, with educational praxis defined as ‘educational action that is morally committed and informed by traditions in the field’, whereas instrumental action is about ‘meeting goals, following rules, and satisfying expectations of … roles’ (Kemmis et al., unpub., p. 5). The difference between these actions is that the actions which inform praxis cannot be pinned down, categorised, regimented, and delineated in capabilities or standards, nor can they be tested for through pen and paper, portfolios, or inspections. It involves educators who are committed not only to doing their best in a technical sense, but ‘doing the best they can, under the circumstances in which they find themselves, for students and the communities they serve’ (Kemmis et al., unpub., p. 5). Their actions ‘cannot be predetermined , but can only be evaluated in the light of their consequences —in terms of how things actually turn out’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 26). It is this constant dance between the systematisation of schooling and the lifeworld of those working in educational sites, between stability and change, which is part of the ‘incessant disruption of order’ (Kundera 1976, p. 75, as cited in Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 10) that gives educational sites their ontological “happeningness ” (Schatzki 2006).

Rethinking and Reimagining ‘Education’ in Educational Leadership Theory

Building on Dewey’s notion of education as having a critical forming and nurturing function and arguing that education must occupy a central role in schooling, I draw on the following definition of education, that is, as:

… the process by which children, young people and adults are initiated into forms of understanding, modes of action, and ways of relating to one another and the world, that foster (respectively) individual and collective self-expression, individual and collective self-development and individual and collective self-determination,, and that are, in these senses, oriented towards the good for each person and the good for humankind. (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 26) (authors’ italics)

The question of what is ‘the good’ for ‘each person’ and for ‘human kind’, however, needs to be an ongoing, critical topic for discussion amongst educational leaders. It is ‘permanently contested’ “and must always be determined anew for changing times and circumstances… what it is good for any person or group to do at any particular historical moment is always a matter for practical deliberation” (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 27).

Broader definitions of education drawing on a range of intellectual traditions such as Continental and Northern Europe and Dewey’s progressivism suggest critical questions for educational leadership scholarship to engage with in order to reimagine the core purpose of education. For instance, an understanding of education as an initiation into forms of life invites us to view the day-to-day practices of principals as not only a constant negotiation between lifeworld and system, but as central to informing broader debates about the forms of life into which young people should be initiated. Key questions suggested from this perspective include: what are the differing forms of life into which educational and schooling practices can and should be initiating our young people? What/Who are the ultimate targets of leading practices? The fully administered/managed world or the fully learning world? What of the lifeworld of the school, particularly in terms of whole child formation, building trusting relationships, an inclusive society and enhancing social and academic outcomes beyond instrumentalist measures? If schools are invested in transforming practices—to what end and for whose purposes and interests do such transformations serve?

Furthermore, what role can educational leadership theories play in generating debate around these questions and bringing them to the foreground? This is where drawing on these different intellectual educational traditions can be enormously helpful in starting to rethink and reimagine the work of schooling, of education writ large and of the role that can be played by educational leadership as both a form of scholarship and knowledge production.

To argue these points is not to overlook the work of academics in the field that have drawn our attention to the importance of considerations of morality and ethical responsibility in educational leadership scholarship (e.g. Furman and Starratt 2002; Sergiovanni 1992; Starratt 2012). Rather, it is to point out that there are important intellectual traditions both within but also outside the Anglo-American sphere with which we can and should engage. It also to highlight the irony that on the one hand, Anglo-American theorists are rediscovering the importance of informed debates about the value and purpose of educational leadership as a set of ethically and morally informed practices. On the other hand, those intellectual traditions which can helpfully inform such debates are being increasingly ploughed under by the pragmatic educational traditions that are the default position of educational leadership as predominantly a field of Anglo-American scholarship.

Crucially, it is also to draw attention to the reality that engaging in debate and dialogue about education (and educational leadership ) practice as a form of praxis in the post-Marxist sense, that is, social action with ‘moral and political consequences —good or bad’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, p. 26)—is to signify that such practices are necessarily social and political actions. Yet in educational leadership scholarship, the ‘p’ words of ‘politics’ and ‘political’ are too often silenced or left uninterrogated (Wilkinson 2008).

Discussion and Conclusion: Reclaiming Education in Educational Leadership

Two key implications for educational leadership theory and practice flow from this interrogation of ‘education ’. First, an analysis of the differing traditions that informs these key terms provides a different insight into the purposes of educational leadership and the broader educational context in which such leadership is located. It does so by situating leadership in an ‘overall project of educational development (a social and critical view)’, rather than a technical and managerialist view, that is, a practice ‘dictated by rule-following, or producing an outcome of a kind that is known in advance’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, pp. 158, 177). The latter view is characteristic of technical actions’ such as school improvement which adopt a highly functionalist approach to school change (Kemmis et al. 2014, p.177).

Second, a social and critical view of education suggests a need for new and different kinds of thinking tools drawn from a range of disciplines with which to apprehend the lifeworld of educational leadership practice. This is where theoretical lenses such as that which are derived from the philosopher, Theodore Schatzki’s practice philosophy (Schatzki 2002), can be enormously helpful. Schatzki’s site ontological view of practice, conceives of sites of practice, such as schools, as part of ‘an existential and ontological given in education … where people meet and engage with one another in practice …’ (Kemmis et al. 2014, pp. 214–215). A site ontological view of the world emphasises that practices such as education and educational leadership are prefigured by the particular kinds of arrangements to be found there. These arrangements or practice architectures (c.f., Kemmis and Grootenboer 2008), encompass the cultural -discursive , material -economic and social–political arrangements which enable and constrain practices. These arrangements do not predetermine the practices of educational leaders but they do prefigure their practices (Wilkinson and Kemmis 2015).

For instance, in one of the ARC case study schools, the principal had instigated a long term program to embed an inquiry approach to leading , professional learning, teaching, and student learning. The practice arrangements which enabled shifts in practice to support teachers and leaders adopting an inquiry approach to their work included changes to the cultural-discursive arrangements that enabled and constrained how a practice such as an inquiry approach to teaching was enacted in classrooms. For example, different kinds of discourses began to circulate in teacher and leaders’ pedagogical discussions, arising from literature which staff immersed themselves in as they discussed how such an approach might apply in their school and classrooms. Changes to specific material and economic arrangements supported a shift towards teachers adopting the practice of inquiry learning, including the principal timetabling staff’s planning meetings so that teachers from the same grades could regularly meet to plan and evaluate their programming. These arrangements also included provision of casual relief so that staff could visit other schools that had adopted an inquiry approach. There were particular kinds of social and political arrangements that supported these shifts in practice, e.g. changes to relationships between stakeholders as a result of more collaborative classroom setups, including changed relatings between students; between students and teachers; and between teachers and leaders in staff meetings.

Moreover, the case studies of exemplary schools’ practices in ethnically and socio-economically diverse sites strongly suggested what made a difference in changing teaching and learning practices in these schools was:

  1. 1.

    a shift from viewing formal leadership roles such as the principalship as primarily a hierarchical and technical practice whose chief purpose was to disperse leading and learning amongst followers in order to improve learning as measured by predetermined , externally audited forms of accountability such as national testing; and

  2. 2.

    a move towards a more collaborative approach to leadership practice leading to a thickened sense of shared responsibility for leading, professional learning , and teaching amongst executive, teachers, and students underpinned by high levels of professional and personal trust (Kemmis et al. 2014).

In this sense, the study concurs with work conducted by other researchers which contends that school leadership is primarily about nurturing a collective ethic of responsibility for the leadership of quality learning and teaching, embedded within a clear commitment to leading as a morally purposeful practice (Duignan 2012). Critically, this core ethic and commitment cannot be externally mandated by National Standards for Teachers or Principals, nor dictated to staff and learners by principals. Rather it is facilitated through shifts in the arrangements to practices at the individual site that occur as part of more holistic educational approach that recognises the collective, social, and political nature of educational practice as a particular species of the practical science of education, with its specific traditions, histories, and moral purpose or telos. An alternative way to state this point, grounded in Continental and Northern European traditions of education, pedagogy and praxis is that it foregrounds an approach to leading development as a ‘praxis-oriented practice’, that is, as morally informed practice in dialectical interplay with the social and critical traditions of the education field (Kemmis 2012). In so doing, it directs the gaze of educational practitioners and scholars to rethink and reimagine the educational implications of leadership practice, as forms of social action with profound moral and political consequences .