Leading and learning as a transcultural experience: a visual account

Abstract

Leaving one's own territory in research by taking part in an international project is like learning a new language: it's not just learning a new vocabulary and grammar, but is a total human experience which is best learnt in everyday activity. Social scientists like Jean Lave argued that ‘knowledge‐in‐practice, constituted in the settings of practice, is the locus of the most powerful knowledgeability of people in the lived‐in world’. Different scientific communities have culture‐bound discourse norms, therefore, differences in discourse patterns sometimes operate as a barrier to the exchange of scholarship between two related cultures. ‘In view of the importance of international communication between scholars, it is vital for scholars to understand the cultural basis of many discourse patterns.’ This article gives an insight into how individuals and schools involved in an international project struggle to find new understandings of their own attempts at leadership and learning. Throughout the project the interconnectedness between places, rooms, areas and feelings during the journey of the ‘Carpe Vitam: Leadership for Learning’ project was a cooperative endeavour to extend and deepen the understanding of one's own theories and practices in relation to that of others, on both the individual and organizational levels. A collaboration of this kind can help in understanding the cultural bias of one's own research approach and that of the other cultures involved. The visual account is a narration of collegial development between educators from universitites and schools struggling for clarification, experience and evidence of leadership for learning.

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