Educational leading as pedagogical love: the case for refugee education

ABSTRACT

From a normative perspective, education serves a double purpose, that is, to prepare students to live well in a world worth living in. The practices of educational leadership are crucial elements in achieving this telos. In this article, we reimagine leading practices as pedagogical love, orchestrating conditions which enable refugee students’ academic achievements and overall school wellbeing. The article draws on a large, parallel case study which examined refugee education in Finland and Australia. The data used for this article consists of interviews with a leadership team in an Australian primary school. We argue that educational leading as pedagogical love needs to be reimagined as a co-constructed praxis between refugee children and educators, and that it can be enabled by a well-thought through combination of philosophy and practice. We suggest leadership practices as pedagogical love may disrupt the drive toward standardized curricula with its emphasis on performativity and testing. Exploring leading as pedagogical love allows us to show how love as a practice unfolds within the practice architectures of specific educational sites. As these practice architectures can be explored and theorized, they can also be transformed.

Acknowledgments

The researchers would like to thank the Finnish Cultural Foundation, Post Doc Pooli and Monash University Faculty of Education Small Grant Scheme for their support in allowing us to conduct this study. We would like to thank the students, leaders and teachers of Urban Primary School for showing us what education for a world worth living in looks like.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names employed in this paper are pseudonyms. For confidentiality purposes, identifying details have been removed.

2. In Australia, children attend primary school from the ages of five-twelve years. They then transition to secondary school which encompasses the ages of twelve-eighteen.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Post Doc Pooli, Finland [0];Monash Faculty of Education Small Grant [0];Suomen Kulttuurirahasto [00171202].