School leadership and intercultural understanding: school foyers as situated spaces for doing diversity

ABSTRACT

Internationally, Intercultural Understanding (ICU) is increasingly prevalent in the field of education. The recent evidence base includes a growing academic literature and examples of specified education policy and curricula. In regards to leveraging ICU, research suggests a multi-level and longitudinal approach is needed to ensure effective and sustainable school change. Significant gaps exist in the literature about the contextual factors across all school levels that facilitate or impede the development of ICU. These gaps include research and action pertaining to school leadership. This paper draws from interviews and visual data generated in a large Australian study and focuses on the centrality of a single architectural feature of the school, the school foyer, and how principals grapple with the (re)design of these spaces to assert themselves as interculturally capable schools. Discourses of educational leadership have historically relied on well-worn leadership models of operational practices rather than explicitly framing an understanding of diversity to support intercultural capabilities. During a period of mandated Australian curriculum reform and assessment, this paper offers another way of ‘Doing Diversity’ of interest to policy makers and school leadership keen to embed ICU in their schools while highlighting the significant role school leaders have in progressing ICU.

KEYWORDS:

• Intercultural understanding
• school leadership
• school architecture

Acknowledgement

Sincere thanks are due to the students, teachers, and principals from the 12 schools in the study for their involvement in the Doing Diversity project. The study would not have been possible without their generous commitment of energy, thought, and time. The proactive engagement of our partner organisations, Department of Education and Training Victoria (DET), Together for Humanity Foundation (TFH), Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), and Pukunui Technology project, provided valued insight into government schools and priorities in Victoria. Your roles as critical friends on issues of research design, method, and analysis were invaluable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Julianne Moss is the Director of REDI (Research for Educational Impact) Deakin University’s Strategic Research Centre in Education. She holds a personal chair in Pedagogy and Curriculum and is a past President of the Australian Association for Research in Education. Her research interests lie in visual research and the intersection of these methods with student diversity, professional knowledge, and social change.

Associate Professor Joanne O’Mara specialises in Language, Literature and Literacy Education at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her research and scholarship focuses on emergent literacies and new textual practices; digital games; drama pedagogy; and the spatial, social, and temporal dimensions of teachers’ work. A hallmark of her research program has been the focus on establishment of ongoing strategic partnerships with inbuilt benefits to all parties, working in collaboration with key education authorities, professional associations, schools, teachers, and students.

Trevor McCandless is a Research Fellow completing his doctoral studies in the School of Education at Deakin University on the sociology of school marketing materials, focusing on the ethnicity, gender, and social class of school populations. His research uses visual and critical discourse approaches.

ORCID

Julianne Moss http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3086-0066

Joanne O’Mara http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3511-1125

Trevor McCandless http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6604-2308

Notes

1. All schools and individuals are de-identified with pseudonyms.

2. ICSEA is a scale that details the socioeconomic status of each school to enable numerical comparisons of the average level of educational advantage of the school student population. It is a more finely tuned proxy for socio-economic status (SES) used by education systems in Australia. The Australian Curriculum and Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) calculates the ICSEA score for each school in Australia using variables that include the family background of each student, including parental education and occupation, the proportion of indigenous students, and number of students with a language background other than English, and the school’s metropolitan, regional, or remote geographical location (ACARA, 2013b).

3. NAPLAN is the acronym for the National Assessment Plan for Literacy and Numeracy, the high stakes standardised testing that occurs for all Australian School Students each year for students who are in Yr 3, 5, 7, and 9.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council; Victorian Department of Education and Training (DET); Together for Humanity (TFH), the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), and Pukunui Technology.