Critical perspectives in educational leadership: a new ‘theory turn’?

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that we are witnessing a new phase or ‘theory turn’ in the field of educational leadership. These more critical perspectives in the field of educational leadership have typically been marginalised by the larger body of orthodox approaches due to a perceived lack of focus on best practice and ‘what works’ discourses, and especially in recent years with the rise of the school effectiveness and improvement movement. However, critical perspectives in educational leadership constitute an essential and vibrant part of educational leadership scholarship and discourse. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of discourse, through this article, I examine how critical perspectives have been constituted historically, with some of the main themes of research. This foregrounding also highlights a number of limitations with more orthodox and hegemonic leadership discourses. I identify a number of key writers in the field and situate them in the current theory turn, that is, an emphasis of theoretically informed research that have been prolific over the last 5–10 years.

KEYWORDS:

• Educational leadership
• critical perspectives
• theory
• discourse
• Foucault

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Richard Niesche is currently Deputy Head of School (Research) and senior lecturer in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He received his PhD from The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests are in the areas of educational leadership, social justice and poststructuralism. He has published a number of books and articles in these areas and his latest book is Leadership, Ethics and Leading for Social Justice, co-authored with Professor Amanda Keddie and published by Routledge (2016).

Notes

1. I use the word ‘field’ throughout this paper but acknowledge the issues doing so. I recognise the problem with identifying a field of educational administration and or leadership as a stable, coherent phenomena or body of work. Some important critiques of this notion occur in Culbertson 1988, Donmoyer 1999, English 2002).

2. This is of course highly selective as it is not possible to cover all of the various writings and research in the area of critical scholarship. My apologies to those whose works I am not able to cover.

3. I have chosen to focus on gender and social justice in this section due to space restrictions, however, there has also been work in postmodern analyses of educational leadership (see Maxcy 1994, English, 2003), as well as explorations of culture (for example Dimmock and Walker 2005) and race and ethnicity (Brooks 2012, Ma Rhea 2014). A variety of different perspectives can be found in some of the edited collections cited in the next section.

4. And this is certainly a limitation of what I am proposing in this article, a Western dominated set of approaches to critical scholarship in educational leadership. I am also conscious of Connell's writing in ‘Southern Theory’ on this issue (Connell 2007).