Towards cognitive justice in higher education: rethinking the teaching of educational leadership with international students

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I describe my theoretical and experience-informed re-conceptualisations of teaching educational leadership within an Australian Masters of Education program. I describe three phases of topic (subject) re-design, across four years, initiated by me, to respond to my discomfort in my first year, with the realisation that I had initially assumed, learning about ‘leadership’ in education, for the majority of international students, meant applying Western theories of leadership to their context. For the last stage of redesign of the Masters of Education topic, I draw on the work of Connell (2006), Santos (2016) and Zembylas (2017) in reflecting on my own assumptions and understanding other possibilities for supporting and teaching international students. Zembylas (2017) identifies three pedagogical openings for scholars and educators in considering cognitive justice. I adopt these as possibilities for reframing teaching of ‘leadership’ in the Masters program.

KEYWORDS:

• Teaching educational leadership
• cognitive justice
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the reviewers for commenting on earlier drafts and their insightful comments which have improved the paper significantly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Bev Rogers http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4365-7603