Rethinking emotions and educational leadership

Abstract

The literature on emotions and educational leadership is in need of a viable conception of ‘emotions’. Recent studies of emotions and educational leadership have unwittingly inherited serious problems from current research on educational leadership and consequently misunderstand the political force of emotions. In this article we argue that a viable conception of emotions and educational leadership needs to understand emotions with two key conceptual shifts. First, emotions need to be understood as publicly and collaboratively formed, not as individual, private and autonomous psychological traits and states. Second, leadership needs to be seen as an enacted, emergent phenomenon rather than socially expressed or constructed. A sustainable and distributed model of educational leadership cannot be achieved without understanding how both feelings and leadership are ‘constituted and operate interactively at the level of both individual personal experience and wider social formations… [and] power relations’ (Harding and Pribram 2004: 863). This article summarizes recent research that has pioneered new space for emotions within educational leadership studies, and analyzes how this research could extend analyses to engage questions of power and cultural hierarchies that are embedded into cultural norms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Diane Zorn

Diane Zorn is a Course Director at the School of Arts and Letters, York University, Toronto, Canada. Email: [email protected]. Her areas of research interest are philosophy of mind and consciousness, philosophy of the body, philosophy of education and philosophy of emotions. She is currently developing an educational theory and pedagogy called ‘Enactive Education’, as well as a cultural theory of the Imposter Phenomenon that challenges the current understanding of this phenomenon as a psychological trait.

Megan Boler

Megan Boler is an Associate Professor at University of Toronto and earned her Ph.D. at the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California Santa Cruz. Her book Feeling Power: Emotions and Education was published by Routledge in 1999, and she recently published an edited collection Democractic Dialogue in Education: Troubling Speech, Disturbing Silences (Peter Lang, 2004).