The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Leadership

Duncan Waite, Ira Bogotch

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118956700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Research in Education

A provocative and authoritative compendium of writings on leadership in education from distinguished scholar-educators worldwide.

What is educational leadership? What are some of the trends, questions, and social forces most relevant to the current state of education? What are the possible futures of education, and what can educational leadership contribute to these futures? To address these questions, and more, editors Duncan Waite and Ira Bogotch asked distinguished international thought leaders on education to share their insights, observations, and research findings on the nature of education and educational leadership in the global village.

The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Leadership brings together contributions from authors in twenty-one countries, spanning six continents. Topics examined include leadership and aesthetics, creativity, eco?justice, advocacy, Big Data and technology, neoliberalism, emerging philosophies and theories, critical democracy, gender and radical feminism, political economies, emotions, postcolonialism, and new directions in higher education.

A must-read for teachers, researchers, scholars, and policy makers, this Handbook:

• Champions radical pluralism over consensus and pseudoscientific or political solutions to problems in education
• Embraces social, economic, and political relevance alongside the traditions of careful and systematic rigor
• Challenges traditional epistemological, cultural, and methodological concepts of education and educational leadership
• Explores the field's historical antecedents and ways in which leadership can transcend the narrow disciplinary and bureaucratic constraints imposed by current research designs and methods
• Advances radically new possibilities for remaking educational leadership research and educational institutions

1
Educational Leadership for What? An Educational Examination

Gert Biesta

Introduction: Educational Leadership for What?

If it is granted that educational leaders should lead, then the obvious question is what they should lead for—which can also be phrased as the question what they should lead towards. Although the question seems obvious, it is easily forgotten in the maelstrom educational leaders find themselves in, being caught up with administration and management rather than leadership, and often just trying to keep up with bureaucratic demands and desires. This means that the question of direction, the question what educational leadership ought to be for, is often only answered in the concrete and short‐term language of targets, outcomes, and Key Performance Indicators, with little attention and often simply just not enough time for considering the longer‐term aims of education and the underlying purposes that direct, give meaning, and justify such aims. Also, in the world of targets and Key Performance Indicators it is quite likely that the answer to what educational leaders should lead for is already decided for them, with little scope for interpretation and negotiation, let alone for critique.

Yet the relative absence of sustained attention to questions of purpose is not just a practical matter; it is not just a matter of lack of time, but also has to do with the presence within educational policy, practice, and its wider discourse, of powerful but nonetheless rather unhelpful ideas, theories, framings, and assumptions of what education is about, what the task of education supposedly is, of how education works, and what this means for the administration, leadership, and improvement of education. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a detailed overview of all these discussions, but—one step removed from this—raise a number of more fundamental questions about education, including questions of its discourse, its purposes, its theories, and its improvement. The intent partly is to have a perspective from which problems can be identified and can appear as problems, and partly to provide building blocks for a more informed, nuanced, and politically astute discussion about education and its leadership.

The chapter is structured in the following way. I begin where many would argue education should begin, that is with the question of learning, but I will argue that learning—and specifically the language of learning—has become a problem for education rather than just its obvious starting point and frame of reference. From here, I address the question of purpose in education, suggesting that, unlike what is the case in many other domains of human practice, the question of educational purpose is a multidimensional question, which raises some particular issues for the conduct of, and research about, education. These issues, as I will discuss, call for pragmatism at all levels of education, where pragmatism means that the question about what ought to be done can only ever be answered in relation to what it is we seek to bring about or let emerge. This also has to do with our understanding of the dynamics of education—the question of how education “works.” Although there can be no doubt that education does work and should work, much of what is being discussed in relation to this starts from quasi‐causal assumptions about the dynamics of educational processes and practices—assumptions that also play a key role in discussions about educational effectiveness. As an alternative to quasi‐causal thinking about education, which actually is a cause of many practical and political problems in education, including in the domain of educational leadership, I suggest a complexity‐oriented approach, which not only provides a more accurate account of the dynamics of education but also provides a significantly different way into questions about educational change and improvement. In the final section of the chapter I bring these threads together in a discussion about the position of the school in contemporary society, arguing that in an “impulse society” (Roberts, 2014) there is an important duty for schools to resist (Meirieu, 2007) rather than just satisfy the desires that societies project onto their schools.

The Learnification of Education

It seems obvious to start any discussion about education with the question of learning, and many would indeed argue that education is “all about learning,” even to the point that education without learning—or in my own phrase: education beyond learning (Biesta, 2006)—remains an option that not many would immediately want to consider. As one of the editors of this handbook formulated it recently: “(W)hat underlies and distinguishes educational ideas is that in each and every case, learning must happen” (Bogotch, 2016, p.1; emphasis added). While I still consider it important to consider the possibilities of education beyond learning, also in order to free teaching from learning and to free teaching from the politics of learning (Biesta, 2013; 2015a; on learning see also Stables, 2005), the point I wish to discuss in this section does not so much concern learning itself as its discourse and the ways in which this discourse has influenced (and in my view: distorted) thinking and acting in education.

The starting point here is the (remarkable) rise of the language of learning in education over the past two decades or so (which is not to suggest that learning was not part of the educational conversation before, but had a different position and status in the discourse). The rise of this “new language of learning” (Biesta, 2006; Haugsbakk & Nordkvelle, 2007) is visible in a number of discursive shifts, such as the tendency to refer to pupils, students, children, and even adults as learners; to redefine teaching as facilitating learning, creating learning opportunities, or delivering learning experiences; or to talk about the school as a learning environment or place for learning. The new language of learning is also visible in the ways in which adult education has been transformed into lifelong learning in many countries (Field, 2000; Yang & Valdés‐Cotera, 2011).

The rise of this new language of learning has to be seen as the outcome of a number of only loosely connected developments in the theory, policy, and practice of education. These include the critique of authoritarian forms of education that focus solely on the activities of the teacher and see education ultimately as a form of control (see, e.g. Freire’s critique of “banking education”; Freire, 1972); the rise of new theories of learning, particularly constructivist theories (Richardson, 2003; Roth, 2011); and also, particularly in the shift towards lifelong learning, the influence of neoliberal policies that seek to burden individuals with tasks that used to be the responsibility of governments and the state (see Olssen & Peters, 2005). The language of learning has not only dramatically affected research and policy, but has also become part of the everyday vocabulary of teachers in many countries and settings (Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson, 2017).

What is the problem with the rise of the new language of learning in education? Perhaps the quickest way to express this is to say that the point of education is not that students learn—and it is remarkable how often this is what is being claimed in policy texts or research about what education is for, what teachers should do, and what research should investigate—but always that students learn something, that they learn it for particular reasons, and that they learn it from someone. Education, to put it differently, always raises questions about content, purpose, and relationships. The language of learning, viewed in this way and used in this way, is therefore at least insufficient for expressing what education is about and ought to be about. Just saying that students should learn, that teachers should make students learn or should support their learning, or that research should investigate how all kinds of factors affect student learning, simply doesn’t say enough.

Learning, to put it differently, is a process concept, so that it is only when we specify the “of what” and the “for what” of learning—its content and purpose—that we begin to get into a meaningful discussion, both about learning and, more importantly, about education, where the ambition can never be that students will just “learn.” A slightly different way to make the point is when we look at examples in which the word “learning” is used correctly, such as learning to ride a bike, learning that two and two equals four, learning the second law of thermodynamics, learning to be patient, learning that there are things that you are not good at, and so on—all examples of learning, and even of things that, in principle, can be learned in school, we can see that just to refer to “learning” is not enough. With this comes the fact that, at least in English language usage, learning is an individual and individualizing concept—you can only learn (for) yourself but cannot learn for someone else—which also makes the language of learning inappropriate if we wish to highlight that education is always in some way about relationships, such as the one between the student and the teacher.

There is not only a problem with the language of learning—that the language is insufficient to articulate what education is about—but also with the discourse of learning, that is, when this language becomes the main way in which educational practitioners, policy makers, and researchers speak, think, and act, as it is a language that, in itself, runs the risk of neglecting to ask the questions that ought to be asked in education about the content and purpose of learning, and about the particular relationships that are at stake in education. This is one of the main reasons why the rise of the language of learning in education is actually quite a problematic development—which was the main reason I coined a “problematic” concept for this development, namely that of “learnification” (Biesta 2010).

All this is of course not to suggest that when the only or main discourse available in education is the discourse of learning, that there is no content and no direction. On the contrary, the rise of the language of learning may have actually made it easier for particular forces to take control of what education should focus on or bring about. In this regard, it is interesting that the rise of the language of learning has coincided with the rise in education policy of a focus on a narrow set of “learning outcomes” (note the term) which, in recent years, have become the main “currency” of the global education measurement industry (Biesta 2015b). And it is not only policy who is to blame here, as the language of learning has also been promoted in research and scholarship, with a similar lack of attention to content and purpose, the “of what” and “for what” of learning. This is both the case in general scholarship on education¹ and in scholarship in the field of educational leadership, where leadership and learning are often seen as closely connected—see, for example, the occurrence of this connection in Boyle & Charles (2010), Collinson (2012), and Dempster (2012)—or the rise in leadership of the phrase “lead learner” in discussions about educational leadership.

The Question of Purpose in Education: A Threefold Issue

Having established that learning is not “enough”—that the language of learning is insufficient as an educational language and that the discourse of learning may actually distract educators from asking the questions they should be asking about their practice—the question that needs addressing, then, is what is needed to transform the language of learning into a language and discourse of education. I have suggested above that in education we always need to engage with questions of content, purpose, and relationships. Of these three, the question of purpose is the first and, in a sense, the most important ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Working Within Radical Pluralism
• 1 Educational Leadership for What? An Educational Examination
• 2 The Question of Creativity for the Field of Educational Leadership
• 3 Educational Leadership and Emotion
• 4 Leading With Consistency
• 5 Rethinking Gender and Socially Just Leadership in the Sociospatialized Context(s) of Global Edu‐Capitalism
• 6 Politics, Activism, and Leadership for Social Justice in Education
• 7 From “Data‐Driven” to “Democracy‐Driven” Educational Leadership
• 8 Educational Leadership and Environmental Justice in a Climate‐Challenged World
• 9 Resisting and Reclaiming the Global Discourse of Leadership
• 10 The Political Economy of Leadership
• 11 Freedom to What Ends?— School Autonomy in Neoliberal Times
• 12 Higher Education Leadership in Universities, Colleges, and Technical Schools Around the World
• 13 Educational Leadership for Teaching and Learning
• 14 Leading Schools Down Under
• 15 Administrative Matters for African Educational Leaders
• 16 Privatizing Leadership in Education in England
• 17 From Welfarism to Neo‐Liberalism
• 18 The Importance of Leaders’ Discursive Positioning in Neocolonial Education Reform Aimed at Closing the Disparities for Indigenous Peoples
• 19 The Characteristics of Educational Leadership in the Middle East
• 20 Asian Geographies of Educational Leadership
• 21 Managing to Lead? Contemporary Perspectives on Principals’ Practices in Russia
• 22 Advances and Challenges of Educational Leadership in Latin America
• 23 Contexts of Canadian Educational Leadership
• 24 US Contexts of/for Educational Leadership
• Index
• End User License Agreement