A social epistemology for educational administration and leadership

ABSTRACT

As a field of knowledge production, educational administration and leadership scholars do a substantial amount of talking past one another. These parallel monologues are a major issue for the advancement of knowledge. Original contributions can only be made in relation to others. That is, the innovation or significance of scholarship is an act of (social) scientific distinction. This means purposely engaging with the other. In this paper, I argue that the knowledge frontiers of educational administration and leadership are highly fragmented and siloed. I do not, however, see diversity of scholarship as a fatal flaw nor do I argue for a form of knowledge centrism. Rather, my intervention is to propose a social epistemology for moving knowledge claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Social epistemology
• knowledge production
• educational administration
• educational leadership
• research

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Helen Gunter and Tanya Fitzgerald for the invitation to contribute to this special issue. Their ongoing support of scholarship that does not fit the norm of educational administration and leadership research is much appreciated. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of an earlier version of this paper and the questions they asked which sharpened my thinking. That said, all errors and omissions remains my fault alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Scott Eacott is currently senior lecturer in the School of Education, UNSW Sydney. His research interests and contributions fall into three areas: i) advancing relational theorising; ii) Bourdieusian theory; and iii) knowledge production in educational administration and leadership.