A Dilemmatic Approach to Democratic School Leadership and Governance

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a dilemmatic approach to democratic school leadership and governance (DSL). Rather than viewing dilemmas and inner tensions as debilitating democratic governance, a dilemmatic approach views tensions between core values as a defining feature of DSL. A dilemmatic approach differs from central views in the field by regarding DSL as a variable mode of democratic governance, characterized by a dynamic movement across democratic models. After discussing prominent views in the DSL literature, the paper concludes with a discussion of the principles that assist in elaborating the mechanism activating the movement among different modes of DSL.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For the sake of simplification alone, I shall be using throughout the paper the term Democratic School leadership (DSL) to refer to a wide range of concepts such as democratic schooling, democratic management, democratic leadership, democratic governance in various educational contexts that are not necessarily restricted to school contexts.

2. Woods centers on democracy’s bivalent structure that allows for the “movement between tighter to looser structural frameworks” (Woods, 2004, p. 18), or between democracy as a rule and democracy as freedom. While certainly insightful, there are differences between Wood’s dialectical notion and a dilemmatic approach particularly, the idea that democracy is essentially conflictual, and that movement is triggered and activated by dilemmas. Moreover, the structure is not simply bivalent but rather moves in different directions (the tension between freedom and rules being only one among various tensions discussed here).