New and alternative metaphors for school leadership

Metaphors in educational leadership research

Metaphors are devices that help us connect new information and experiences to that which is already known to us (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Research suggests that metaphors are an important aspect of processing new concepts (Boxenbaum and Rouleau 2011) and that metaphors are used more widely in education than one might initially realise (Guilherme and Souza de Freitas 2018). We connect new experiences to those that help us make sense of the unknown and we often absorb metaphors for knowledge, experience, and practices unconsciously (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Metaphors abound in education, and in educational leadership. Metaphors can be seen as neutral descriptors but, in reality, are anything but neutral. Paetcher (2004, 460) describes the ideological force behind metaphors and notes that metaphors steer us into ways of thinking about, and going about, the process of education.

While metaphors condense complex ideas into familiar ones (Paranosic and Riveros 2017) and can thereby help to make meaning, the nature of metaphors needs to be critically interrogated to better understand the underlying assumptions and beliefs behind them. For example, dominant leadership metaphors are drawn from military and sporting contexts (Edmonstone 2016; Ashcraft and Muhr 2018) and such metaphors invoke ‘unflinching strength, toughness, and even brutality’ (Ashcraft and Muhr 2018, 208). Dominant metaphors draw heavily on the notion of the great hero leader (Woods and Roberts 2018) and on masculinist constructions of leadership; an ongoing issue in educational leadership (Wilkinson 2008) that is addressed by some of the papers within this Special Issue. Alvesson and Spicer (2010) suggest that critical scrutiny of metaphors can push us to examine the assumptions behind how we conceptualise leadership. We want to ask: Does this metaphor of leadership present the vision of leadership that we want to see enacted in educational settings? Does this metaphor move conceptions of educational leadership forward or unquestioningly perpetuate tired or harmful leadership paradigms?

Moving beyond dominant and traditional metaphors of leadership can provide more interesting, inclusive, and productive ways for us to understand leadership. Fairhurst (2010) suggests that leaders who can draw upon a wider variety of metaphors to enact their work will be better able to meet the varied demands of their jobs. Similarly, Guilherme and Souza de Freitas (2018) indicate that metaphors act as an enabler to bring forth a diversity of perspectives and possibilities. Hoyle and Wallace (2007) reason that the most productive starting point for metaphors is to find and develop the metaphors that leaders actually live by. The papers in this Special Issue draw upon metaphors articulated by research participants, as well as metaphors that appealed to the contributors when considering their work within the field of educational leadership.

The power of metaphors for educational leadership research and researchers

For social scientists, metaphors serve as a means for exploration, theory development, and empirical analysis (Alvesson and Spicer 2010). Hoyle and Wallace (2007) suggest that a countervailing set of metaphors could offer us broader understandings of educational leadership than the dominant discourses and narratives that currently exist, emphasising heroic leadership and a focus on management. They advance the idea that researchers could reinvigorate established metaphors as well as create new metaphors. The papers in this Special Issue contribute a range of new metaphors for leadership, and reflect comments from Guilherme and Souza de Freitas (2018) that a patchwork of metaphors can help to explain different aspects of leadership, at different times, in different contexts. Metaphors can assist in the development of new ways of theorising or understanding educational leadership and have been described as a fundamental element in the process of theory-building (Boxenbaum and Rouleau 2011; Larson, Hostiuck, and Johnson 2011; McCandless 2012). Metaphors can also offer researchers an effective avenue for communicating their findings. We can use metaphors to open up complex concepts (abstract, theoretical, nuanced, or contextualised work) to outsiders, making the unfamiliar accessible and familiar. In this Special Issue, we have amassed a collection of papers that seeks to show how this might be done. By theorising empirical research through metaphors, by developing metaphors for conceptual approaches to leadership, and by advancing new metaphors for educational leadership, we seek to highlight some of the possibilities for working with metaphors in this field.

New and alternative metaphors for school leadership

This Special Issue harnesses metaphor as a meaning-making frame and analytical tool for defining reality, structuring experience, and understanding intangibles like nuanced feelings, abstract beliefs, and complex human experiences. In this case, the focus is the lived experience of school leadership. Moving from the principal as central school leadership figure to leadership shared between middle leaders and coaches, the Special Issue draws together empirical and conceptual research, from various school sectors in Australia and the United Kingdom, in order to nudge at the boundaries of what is considered leadership and leaderly behaviours in schools.

Drawing from the ground up, from leaders and researchers themselves, this Special Issue advocates for diverse alternative metaphors for school leadership, including those that are contradictory and unexpected. It presents varied leadership approaches and ontologies, in action, providing education leadership researchers, school leaders, and would-be-school-leaders, with alternative ways of thinking about and enacting leadership in schools.

This issue continues the use of metaphor in educational leadership research as a feature of some of the scholarship featured in the Journal of Educational Administration and History. Eacott (2013) suggests that metaphor can provide new ways for thinking about leadership in line with the journal’s discourses and critical scholarship in this field and Youngs (2007) makes use of the metaphor of a quest or journey to represent his leadership experiences. We advance this notion of metaphor as a frame to rethink educational leadership research and challenge traditional perceptions of leaderly behaviours and contemporary practices in education. The collection of papers contained within this special issue proposes new ways of thinking about leadership. Together, they advance possibilities for thinking about leadership and leaders, and for the work of educational leadership researchers.

In Thinking about the school most of the time: studio as generative metaphor for critical reflection, Pat Thomson advances the metaphor of the studio as a way to explore leadership as a critically reflective practice. Thomson explicitly works through the process of generating a metaphor for leadership and invites readers to view the thought processes employed in doing so.

Meg Maguire and Annette Braun explore the interconnected nature of leadership and policy in Headship as policy narration: generating metaphors of leading in the English Primary School. They highlight the ways leaders make sense of their work through metaphor, and the way these metaphors can shift in accordance with policy. Maguire and Braun remind us that school leaders paint a story, and that leaders make use of metaphors to help make sense of their work and their schools.

In The ‘punk rock principal’: a metaphor for rethinking educational leadership, Amanda McKay proposes a metaphor that positions school leaders as supporting players in the larger ‘band’ of the school community. In doing so, McKay contributes a new metaphor that challenges discourses and dynamics of power inherent in traditional metaphors of educational leadership.

Katrina MacDonald provides an exploration of one principal’s leadership in Robinson Crusoe and the Island of Despair: Heroic Metaphors and Contradiction in Leading for Social Justice. In her paper, MacDonald proposes the metaphor of Robinson Crusoe and examines some of the contradictions between one leader’s practices and the dominant practices inherent in much of the literature relating to leadership for social justice.

Deborah Netolicky’s paper – Redefining leadership in schools: the Cheshire Cat as unconventional metaphor – marks a shift in this Special Issue by broadening the focus beyond the principal as a central figure in studies of school leadership. Netolicky focuses on the work of middle and senior school leaders, positing that leadership can be quiet, subtle, fluid, and even deliberately invisible. The well-known figure of the Cheshire Cat is employed as a frame for understanding the slipperiness, complexities, and tensions of school leaders’ work and processes of decision-making.

Christine Grice, in her paper 007 Spies, Surveillance and Pedagogical Middle Leadership:

For the Good of the Empire of Education, builds upon Deborah Netolicky’s examination of middle leaders and explores pedagogical leadership through the metaphorical lens of James Bond, 007 and the notion of spies. In the paper, Grice takes a critical perspective to the notion of spies, emphasising the contradictions inherent within the metaphor. Grice’s middle leaders needed to be tenacious, unobtrusive, and socially savvy and she highlights some of the practices that were evident in their approaches to pedagogical leadership.

We conclude the issue with a rejoinder from Eugenie Samier. In responding to the papers within this Special Issue, Samier demonstrates how the project of leadership research is never complete. There are always areas that could be probed more deeply, considered in different ways, and ideas that could be positioned in alternative perspectives or approaches. In this way, we position the papers within this Special Issue as part of an ongoing scholarly conversation about leadership and metaphors. As metaphors seek to open up the unspoken, and often abstract, practices of leadership for closer examination (Alvesson and Spicer 2010), so too do we seek to illuminate the methods and processes of educational leadership researchers working within these spaces.

Indeed, by taking an explicitly reflexive approach to the process of working with metaphor, the papers in this issue uncover some of the particular challenges for researchers seeking to think differently, to apply metaphors to empirical data, or to draw and extend upon metaphors that leaders live by (Alvesson and Spicer 2010). We hope that the papers within this issue open up space for researchers to think differently by showing how the authors have approached the task.

Where to from here?

These papers respond to calls to inject creativity into the methods and topics of focus in educational leadership research (Alvesson and Spicer 2010; Thomson 2017). This collection of papers contributes to critical leadership studies by exploring issues of power, gender, and relationships, and by problematising dominant discourses associated with leadership (Paetcher 2004; Hoyle and Wallace 2007; Ashcraft and Muhr 2018).

However, as Samier notes in her comments on the papers in this Issue, there is still more work to be done. As editors, we invite readers to build upon the work of the papers within this Special Issue, applying the metaphors amassed here in different contexts, and indeed challenging and problematising them through this application.