Leadership, Ethics and Schooling for Social Justice

Richard Niesche, Amanda Keddie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317816737
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Issues of social justice and equity in the field of educational leadership have become more salient in recent years. The unprecedented diversity, uncertainty and rapid social change of the contemporary global era are generating new and unfamiliar equity questions and challenges for schools and their leaders. In order to understand the moral and ethical complexity of work undertaken in the name of social justice and equity in diverse contexts, this book uses a range of different theoretical tools from the work of Michel Foucault. Rather than a prescriptive, best practice approach to leadership and social justice, this book draws on Foucault's four-fold ethical framework, and specifically, the notions of advocacy, truth-telling and counter-conduct to critically examine the leadership work undertaken in case studies in schools in Australia and England.

Our approach makes transparent the ethical work that leaders in these contexts conduct on themselves towards creating schools that can address the equity challenges of the present climate. It illuminates and enables critical analysis of the moral imperatives shaping the equity work of school leaders and, in particular, the possibilities for transformative leadership that can work to create schools and school systems that are more socially just.

Overall, the book's key aims are to:

• 
  
  

• Provide an innovative and comprehensive theorising of leadership for social justice in contemporary times;

• 
  
  

• Explicate the utility of key elements of Foucault's theorising of the ethical self to the domain of educational leadership; and

• 
  
  

• Provide significant practical insight into the social justice possibilities of school leadership in contemporary times through two in depth case studies

Acknowledgements

We would sincerely like to thank the participants involved in the research projects that make up this book for their time and hard work. Special thanks to Pat Thomson for her critical feedback on the manuscript, and also to Alison Lees for her help with proofreading and formatting. We would also like to thank Anna Clarkson for supporting the book as well as all the team at Routledge for their hard work in seeing this book to publication. Some parts of this book have appeared before, so we would like to acknowledge Taylor and Francis for giving permission to publish excerpts from the following: Richard Niesche (2013) ‘Foucault, counter-conduct and school leadership as a form of political subjectivity’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45 (2), 144–158; Amanda Keddie (2015) ‘School autonomy, accountability and collaboration: a critical review’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 47 (1), DOI: 10.1080/00220620.2015.974146; Amanda Keddie (2014) ‘School collaborations within the contemporary English education system_ possibilities and constraints’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 44 (2), 229–244; and Amanda Keddie (2012) Educating for diversity and social justice (Abingdon, Routledge), pages 31–33. Some of the research that appears in this book was conducted with support from the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship scheme. We officially acknowledge this support.

We would also like to thank our friends and loved ones for their patience, support and advice. In particular, Richard would like to thank Christine Mason, John and Barbara Niesche, Christina Gowlett, Scott Eacott, Jane Wilkinson and Colin Evers. Amanda would like to thank David Lees, Alexandra Keddie, Maree, Jane and Adam Cooper as well as Maria Delaney, Martin Mills and Bob Lingard. Finally, we would like to thank each other for making this collaboration an intellectually stimulating and engaging journey.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315818399-1

Keywords

Amanda Keddie, disadvantage, equity, Foucault, Fraser, leadership, poverty, Richard Nische, schooling, social change, social justice, theory of education

So, I think I’ve really been able to define social justice for me as a person in the last seven months, for the first time in my career really. And maybe that’s a sad indictment on the opportunities I’ve had in life.

(Carol)

In a sense we all have a mission statement, which is to prepare our students for the next stage in their lives, but for us that is recognising that in London, to get a job, to be a worthy and productive member of society, to have an identity, to have choices involves success in exams. It’s not empty, it’s very real. . . especially for us, given the state of the British economy … So, you know, in terms of morality, one of the things that we’re most proud of from last year is that … every single one of [our sixteen-year-olds] is in [education], productive employment or training. And that’s an achievement. And it’s an Ofsted measure. And it’s not a bad measure.

(Ms J)

These two quotes point to the complexities of leadership for social justice in two very different school contexts on two sides of the world. Carol is the principal of a school in a very poor urban area of Australia. Ms J is the head teacher at the Clementine Academy, the lead school of an alliance of schools in outer London. Carol refers to the processes at her school over the last seven months that have prompted her to question the privilege of her white, middle-class, Western background (like that of many principals, head teachers and teachers in Western contexts). These processes highlight for Carol how the ‘opportunities’ in her life arising from this privilege have sheltered her from the vastly complex and challenging circumstances of working in a very disadvantaged part of Australia. As we discuss in later chapters, this then becomes a ‘call to arms’ for Carol as she recognises the highly political and risky work that she needs to do to try to alleviate disadvantage, improve educational outcomes and provide the necessary support for the students in her school. This is the work of leading for social justice.

Improving educational outcomes for Ms J in her role as head of the Clementine-led alliance is a similar ‘call to arms’. She views this agenda as a ‘mission statement’ and crucial to ‘preparing students for the next stage in their lives’. Like Carol, however, as we illustrate in this book, Ms J encounters, and must navigate and overcome, many challenges and barriers in attempting to realise this social justice telos or goal.

These encounters are the key focus of this book. The comments from these two leaders highlight the need for a nuanced approach to understanding the complexity of leadership in the present moment, particularly the challenges involved in pursuing the goals of social justice. This, then, is the aim of this book: to provide a critical understanding of how leaders work in socially just ways to support schools and students to overcome disadvantage. We provide this understanding through the voices of leaders like Carol and Ms J and through the insight offered by the theoretical tools of Michel Foucault.

While critical perspectives in educational leadership have multiplied in recent years, this book makes a significant contribution to the field of educational leadership through an engagement with a variety of theoretical resources and ideas illustrated through empirical research in schools. In this book, we offer something new and different about the way leadership is being practised and undertaken in schools through a theoretically informed approach to educational leadership. While there have been a range of alternative perspectives brought into this fairly conservative and traditional field, such as gender and critical theories, and social justice, philosophical and post-structuralist approaches, few have blended an approach to researching and understanding educational leadership ‘as it happens’ by combining these approaches. In this book we bring together Foucault’s concepts, tools and ideas not only to theorise leadership practice differently but also with particular social justice perspectives at the forefront of our thinking.

Issues of social justice and equity in the field of educational leadership have become more salient in recent years. The unprecedented diversity, uncertainty and rapid social change of the contemporary global era are generating new and unfamiliar equity questions and challenges for schools and their leaders. Framed by the current audit culture in Western education, equity for schools has become a high-stakes issue. This is perhaps most evident in the urgency around ‘closing the gap’ in educational outcomes between disadvantaged students and their more advantaged peers. Lingard, Sellar and Savage (2014) argue that the concept of social justice has actually been rearticulated as equity through a range of national and international testing- and data-driven accountability frameworks. Our explicit engagement with notions of social justice, power, ethics and subjectivity throughout this book signals our intention to reinsert these concepts back into the discourse of educational leadership at a time when these notions have been marginalised by highly performative governmental rationalities in many countries around the world.

Amid this environment, the role of school leaders has vastly changed. Schools’ subjection to ever-increasing forms of external and public accountabilities mean, on the one hand, that principals and head teachers are under greater surveillance than ever before (and are especially accountable to raising the performance of underachieving and disadvantaged students), while, at the same time, schools are more self-managing and autonomous in terms of the devolution of roles that were formerly the responsibility of the state. These tensions are significant in shaping how equity is articulated in schools. They illuminate the moral imperatives of equity work and the significant role school leadership plays in such work. It is clear that the norms and values of leadership shape the way schools approach issues of equity that can, in turn, generate transformative political effects (Niesche and Keddie, 2011; Keddie and Niesche, 2012). The equity work of school leaders in the contemporary educational environment is incredibly complex, challenging and demanding. While the number of studies exploring these issues has increased in recent times, we feel there needs to be a richer theoretical engagement, focus and depth to capture this complexity. This book draws upon Foucault’s work to consider the moral and ethical complexity of work undertaken in the name of social justice and equity in disadvantaged, diverse contexts.

Our aim in this book is not to search for what best leadership practice is, nor to prescribe what a specific socially just perspective must be in schools, but rather to understand and engage with the messy interplay of a range of forces that come together in this enacting, practising and working of educational leadership. Given the vast differences between and within school contexts, to prescribe ideological norms and broad perspectives for social and school change is problematic. Our approach makes transparent the ethical work that these leaders conduct on themselves towards creating schools that can address ever new and changing equity challenges. It illuminates and enables critical analysis of the moral imperatives shaping the equity work of school leaders and, in particular, the possibilities for transformative and socially just leadership that can work to dismantle some of the economic, cultural and political barriers impeding the educational success of marginalised and disadvantaged students. We argue that the complex, contradictory and messy reality of school leaders working in disadvantaged contexts requires a similarly complex toolkit of ideas in order to understand school leadership and equity practices in action.

Central to the work we undertake in this book are considerations of the purposes of education and how important the role of school leadership is in working towards these. For instance, Gert Biesta (2010) argues that the purpose of education needs to be a central and ongoing question for educational policy, practice and research. Biesta (2010: 6) further shows how the reliance on measurable outcomes, coupled with ‘evidence based education’, has resulted in anti-democratic education practices, a focus on managerialism and a valuing on what can be measured. These shifts towards valuing ‘effectiveness’ have had profound implications for educational leadership, too. Michael Fullan (2003) argues that what is needed are school leaders who have moral purpose at the centre of their leadership philosophy.

However, it is important to note that we do not align ourselves with any particular notion of ‘ethical leadership’ or even necessarily with approaches such as ‘authentic leadership’. We, more so, emphasise leadership that works towards goals of social justice. We theorise the practices of the leaders in the case study schools, drawing on Foucault’s work on ethics, power and subjectivity and his ideas of advocacy, truth-telling and counter-conduct. We illustrate how these tools can support leaders to work in socially just ways – ways that pursue both the private (academically focused) and public (socially focused) goals of schooling. For us, socially just leadership must be more than focused on improving academic results; it must be about removing the barriers and structures (be they economic, cultural or political) that constrain students’ lives and their capacity to participate in the social world on a par with others (see Fraser, 2009).

This book seeks to demonstrate explicitly the usefulness of Foucault’s work for thinking about leadership and school leaders’ work for social justice by making sense of the ways in which leaders come to be particular subjects through these processes and discourses. We are aware of the tensions between Foucault’s work and the particular understandings of social justice and alleviating inequality that have been put forward by more normative frames (for example, Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional model of justice; see Fraser, 2009). Foucault’s work has been criticised as lacking a normative base in determining the differences in acceptable and unacceptable forms of power (see Fraser, 1999). We are also aware of the long history of research in the field of education that draws on a broad array of perspectives to address social justice issues. For example, issues of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and socio-economic status have all been identified as key markers of discrimination and marginalisation of educational experiences and outcomes (Ball, 2003; Gerwitz et al., 1995; Gillborn, 2008; Keddie, 2012; Kenway et al., 1998).

Using Foucault’s work, and other post-structural ideas, is often seen to be in tension with the notion of social justice for he was very much against offering normative understanding and solutions to problems. His critics have charged his work with being relativistic, self-indulgent, lacking in a normative base (Habermas, 1987; Fraser, 1999) and even reinscribing of conservative sets of power relations in the form of neoliberalism (Behrent, 2009). We are not arguing that Foucault’s work tells us all there is to know about education, power and social justice. However, we feel it seeks to show how historically knowledge is intimately linked to power, and that subjects are understood as being constituted through discourse in a way that is not pre-existing and continuous. This allows an understanding of how leaders are understood in terms of constraints and possibilities for action, to constitute themselves differently as they work towards aims of social justice (see Youdell, 2006).

A useful way of helping to explain the approach used in the book is through the notion of non-normative critique (Hanson, 2014; Triantafillou, 2012). Hansen draws upon the work of Foucault and the pragmatic sociology of Boltanski to argue that non-normative critique is required to be able to abstain from any normative judgement in order to re-politicise the modes of governing and power relations, to make them contestable, to develop an openness at the level of analysis and to refuse to take up the role ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front Other
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Index