Context and agency in educational leadership: framework for study

ABSTRACT

This essay argues for the utility of a sociohistorical theoretical perspective on culture and agency in the analysis of context-specific educational leadership. First, we review literature that addressed the importance of context, frameworks that richly described context, and we discuss research that purposefully documented principals’ interactions with their context. Through this review, we show that the literature lacks a clear theorization of how one engages their agency through the context. Next, we describe how the anthropologists Holland and colleagues used the concepts of figured worlds and authoring selves to outline the way a person’s agency is developed. We therefore argue for the utility of a sociohistorical theoretical perspective on culture and agency in the analysis of context-specific educational leadership. We test the utility of these concepts by applying them in a secondary analysis of published case studies of context-specific educational leadership. We argue that the concepts of the figured world and authoring selves highlight the processes of context-specific leadership and that the framework is, therefore, useful if one wants a description of not only ‘what’ school leaders do but also ‘how’ they do it.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Curtis Brewer

Curtis A. Brewer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at The University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include political action by educators, the utilization of democratic theory in educational arenas, and critical policy studies

Nathern Okilwa

Nathern S. Okilwa, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include educational and life outcomes of disadvantaged or underserved or marginalized students; preparing school leaders that serve diverse learners; sociocultural contexts of education; and educational policy and politics.

Bryan Duarte

Bryan J Duarte is a Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include teacher turnover and retention, teacher agency, and school improvement in high poverty schools.