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This current issue of Journal of Educational Administration and History captures the breadth and depth of scholarship in educational administration and illustrates the power that an historical lens can bring to the field. Our aims and scope for the journal state that ‘work that is comparative and socially critical and which addresses issues such as power, authority, ideals, principles, diversity and difference is especially welcome’. The articles in this current issue illustrate these goals.
George Variyan’s article entitled ‘Teacher identity past and present: What can a genealogy of schooling tell us?’ employs a Foucauldian lens to provide a genealogical analysis of the evolution of teachers’ identities, drawing on a study of elite school teachers in contemporary Australia for its backdrop. In so doing, the author highlights the struggles between state and civic sphere over the control of schooling and the contingent nature of teacher identity. Most importantly, he suggests that little reckoning has been afforded to teachers’ agency within these social struggles.
Fiona Longmuir’s article entitled, ‘Resistant leadership: Countering dominant paradigms in school improvement’ examines the resistant practices of an Australian principal employed at a time of crisis for a school under threat of closure. Rather than succumbing to familiar mantras of school improvement, the principal chose a very different and far more radical path. However, her paper is not a ‘turn-around’ anthem to individual school leaders. Rather it provides insights into how a range of factors including the principal’s practices, the context of the school and the broader policy environment combined to open up spaces for resistance to discourses of accountability and performativity.
Izhak Berkovich and Ronit Bogler’s article, ‘DESCP factors: The ‘invisible’ impediments to reforms in education’ continue the theme of the less visible factors that impact education. Rather than focussing on educational success, they examine a poorly understood but crucial aspect of education – why reforms may fail. Drawing on case studies of educational reforms in Israel, they examine the influence of demographic, economic, social, cultural and political (DESCP) factors on reform success. In so doing, the article provides an ‘in-depth understanding of why factors in the action environment are as important as agentic players when aspiring to improve national education’.
Carl Bagley and Sam Hillyard’s article, ‘In the field with two rural primary school head teachers in England’ provides a rich ethnographic study of a neglected aspect of educational administration, the experience of rural headship. Examining two contrasting rural primary schools and their communities, they employ Bourdieuian concepts of habitus and capital to understand the complex and shifting social spaces rural schools occupy in a neoliberal education system.
We shift from the schooling sector to an historical mapping of higher education recruitment strategies and ideologies in ‘Higher education recruitment in the United States: A chronology of significant literature’ by Susan Adams-Johnson, Jeff Cranmore, Anna Holloway and Joel Wiley. As the authors rightly note, analysing the philosophies and perspectives that underpin these historical strategies and ideologies can provide a much needed insight into practices and language that ‘encourage or discourage under-represented populations in higher education’. This is a crucial goal which careful historical analysis can achieve as this article illustrates.
We conclude our issue with two book reviews. In the first, Christine Grice reviews Questioning Leadership: New Directions for Educational Organisations edited by Gabriele Lakomski, Scott Eacott and Colin W. Evers. She finds it a provocative and rewarding read. The book assembles an impressive collection of both expert and emerging scholars whom she notes, ‘question the field and consider the directions for future theoretical travel out of the set divisions within leadership, administration and management’. The second review examines Welcoming Practices: Creating Schools that Support Students and Families in Transition by Ron Avi Astor, Linda Jacobson, Stephani L. Wrabel, Rami Benbenishty and Diana Pineda. Izhar Oplatka finds the book an invaluable guide that sheds light on a frequently invisible area of education, i.e. supporting the transition of students and their families from one school to another. Given school mobility impacts more severely on students from more marginalised communities, he contends the book reveals ‘a new research arena whose relevance and importance to educational leadership is invaluable’.
Acknowledgement
We thank our reviewers for their continuing commitment to scholarly work in the field and commend this issue to you. We look forward to your thoughts and contributions as readers and/or potential authors: Tweet: @JEAH_Editors