The metaphorical department head: using metaphors as analytic tools to investigate the role of department head

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a study that examined the ways a group of department heads in Ontario, Canada, describe their role. Despite their ubiquity and importance, department heads have been seldom investigated in the educational leadership literature. The study uses the metaphor as an analytic tool to examine the ways participants talked about their role. It was found that while department heads seem essential to the policy implementation, their role is rarely acknowledged. In the analysis, we use the term ‘Fifth Business’, originally coined by Robertson Davies, to refer to the actors in a play who were never assigned the role of heroes or villains, but whose work was to incarnate a role that was nonetheless essential to the play. The study concludes that by building on the complex ways department heads understand their role, school leaders and policy-makers could clarify their role and develop strategies to support them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names of places and people were changed in order to protect their confidentiality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nikola Paranosic

Nikola Paranosic is currently a department head of History within the Thames Valley District School Board in London, ON, Canada. Email: [email protected]. He has been teaching for more than 15 years and has been a department head for more than 10. His research interests are department heads, the relations between subject expertise and leadership, and the history of department heads in Ontario.

Augusto Riveros

Augusto Riveros is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education Western University, 1137 Western Road, London, ON N6G1G7, Canada. Email: [email protected]. His research interests include leadership theory and the intersections between philosophy, leadership and policy analysis. Gus’ work has been published in The Canadian Journal of Education; Educational Philosophy and Theory; Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education and Studies in Philosophy and Education, among other journals.