The particularity of practice: superintendents’ agency for school development

ABSTRACT

This article details the nature of superintendents’ agency/influence over school development within their districts under current conditions of educational reform. The research draws upon interview data with five superintendents from a Swedish-speaking minority region in Finland and analyzes their understandings of their work in light of theorizing of agency and social practice and workplace learning. The research reveals superintendents’ capacity to ‘evidence’ their agency, including through detailed accounts of how they have sought to enhance school development. However, we also reveal that such ‘evidencing’ was often characterized by considerable concern about the morality and ethics of their practice – praxis – within their districts. We refer to such morally informed concerns as an ‘ethics of agency’. This work was undertaken via very particular practices, involving specific discussions (‘sayings’), actions (‘doings’), and interactions (‘relatings’). The research reveals that even as superintendents’ feel constrained by the conditions within which they work, they do so in ways that give hope for the cultivation of alternative conditions for practice. Further inquiry is needed into the nature of the specific conditions and particular practices essential for fostering enhanced agency, especially an ‘ethics of agency,’ on the part of superintendents and educational practitioners more broadly.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. While the English translation for the geographic region for which the superintendents were responsible is closer to ‘municipality’ (and this term is frequently used in English translations of literature pertaining to the Nordic countries), we use the term ‘district’ here to enable engagement with research using this term in other national contexts (including the United States).

2. All names are pseudonyms.

3. By this comment, this superintendent meant that, traditionally, this district did not satisfy the demographic indicators used to allocate funding to lower socio-economic communities; as a prosperous community, it did not satisfy the criteria necessary to tap into funds allocated for communities with high rates of unemployment, and low rates of engagement in formal education.

4. Helsinki is the capital of Finland, where the Ministry of Education is located.

5. The term ‘gymnasium’ refers to upper secondary school for students aged 16 to 19 years.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant No. FT140100018.

Notes on contributors

Ian Hardy

Ian Hardy is Associate Professor in the School of Education, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Dr Hardy researches and teaches educational policy and practice, with a particular focus upon teachers’ learning under current policy conditions. He is author of The politics of teacher professional development: Policy, research and practice (New York: Routledge, 2012). He has recently been researching the nature of teachers’ learning in relation to curricula policy practices, and globalized educational reform practices more generally, in Australia, Canada, Finland, Sweden and the United States.

Petri Salo

Petri Salo is a Professor of Adult Education at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Åbo Akademi, Vaasa, Finland. Professor Salo researches and teaches in adult education and action research, as well as school development and school leadership. He is a co-editor of Nurturing Praxis: Action Research in Partnerships between School and University in a Nordic Light (Rotterdam; Sense Publishers, 2008) and Lost in Practice: Transforming Nordic Educational Action Research (Rotterdam; Sense Publishers, 2014) He is currently researching trust in school development and development of principals’ professional practices