School leadership for the future: heroic or distributed? Translating international discourses in Norwegian policy documents

Abstract

School leadership as a key for school reforms has become a dominant theme in education, as demonstrated by a growing body of research during the last 15 years. Still, little attention has been paid to how changing international discourses on school leadership are translated into national public policy documents during the last decade. As such, this study provides additional insight into this field by analysing how Norwegian policy documents translate international discourses and re-contextualise national constructs of school leadership. Inspired by a critical approach, the authors address this issue by identifying discursive shifts in ideas about school leadership roles and practices. Based on an examination of four recent white papers on Norwegian education and school leadership, the authors argue that the policy documents constructed a tension between an international ‘explicit’ principal and a national ‘docile’ principal in 2003–2004, while recent documents construct a consensus-oriented, distributed leadership role for principals through the term ‘facilitating school leaders’. This may lead to contested interpretations as to how to perform school leadership in practice.

Keywords:

• education policy
• school leadership
• distributed leadership

Notes on contributors

Hedvig Abrahamsen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Teacher Education and Sports, Sogn and Fjordane University College. Her research interests include leadership in education and school reform.

Marit Aas is an Associate Professor at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo. Her research areas are school leadership and management and school development.

Notes

1 Municipalities are portrayed as ‘the owners’ of the majority of schools in Norway. They finance their schools and they employ teachers.

2 In our translation of the Norwegian term ‘stilltiende enighet’, we lean on Berg's (1999) concept of an ‘invisible contract’ which is described as follows: Administration is left to school leaders on the condition that school leaders do not interfere with the content and form of teaching.