Theorizing Educational Leadership Studies, Curriculum, and Didaktik: NonAffirmative Education Theory in Bridging Disparate Fields

ABSTRACT

Recent neoliberal policies and societal trends point toward new and perennial tensions for nation-state education, including curriculum/Didaktik and leadership thereof. These challenges affect governance/leadership and curriculum with changes in aims and values together in ways that demand coherence, yet the traditionally disparate fields of educational leadership and curriculum/Didtakik have developed separately in terms of approaches to theory and theorizing that have informed empirical studies over time. This article draws upon an analysis of theory/theorizing in these fields, as well as modern education theory and its core concepts, and discursive institutionalism to frame this issue and a larger project.

Recent developments, both in Europe and in the U.S., have forced us to witness populist resistance to neoliberal policies and their effects (e.g., Brexit, the U.S. election of Donald Trump). At the same time, we can observe new and perennial tensions between recent policies and demographic changes from classrooms and schools to transnational levels. These policy and societal trends are both organizational and ideological (e.g., neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist, new middle class, and neo-nationalist), simultaneously concerning governance and curriculum in ways that demand theoretical and practical coherence that does not exist in the unfortunately disparate fields of curriculum/Didaktik and educational leadership studies.

Initiatives guided by new public management or governance policy, including shifts from a “social welfare state” to a new public-management driven “market state,” have both been significant indicators and shapers of educational policy (e.g., Gunter et al., 2016). We can observe increasing competition, choice policies, and marketization in many countries worldwide. Although increasingly questioned, privatization features many reforms around the world that are visible in the increasing number of charter schools in the U.S. or the OECD-driven discourse of educational excellence.

In the education sector, the presence of an interstate or cosmopolitan dimension (Beck, 2004) is visible both in terms of increasing global harmonization regarding core curricula but also through growth evaluation procedures (e.g., Program for International Student Assessment [PISA]). The globalization process inevitably leads to a restructuring of the role of the nation-state in relation to the global scene. The nation-state and its education must be thought anew in the light of new forms of, and previously unseen, versions of cosmopolitan practices. These changes have made it clear that the question of school leadership cannot be solely understood as internal to schools, districts, or even states (Uljens & Nyman, 2013; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a, 2015b, 2017). The same is true for curriculum work. Moving from input-oriented educational leadership and curriculum work, focusing on formulating aims and selecting contents, toward a practice of directing schools by the help of results and indicators has reduced the validity of traditional curriculum work. An evaluation and outcomes based school development policy assumes the aims as given, thus reducing educational leadership, on all levels, to a question of technical efficiency and efficacy (Gunter et al., 2016). On the other hand, ongoing centralization of curriculum as a policy document reemphasizes curriculum work, but increasingly so on a nation-state level and increasingly framed by transnational performance- and competence-oriented policy discourses like PISA. These tendencies are worldwide.

The influences of transnational institutions have also definitely challenged a nation-state perspective that has been prevalent in curriculum research. Curriculum research and theorizing has partly transformed into investigations of how policies travel horizontally between polities and how meaning translate between levels (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004). In addition, to an increasing degree, all this is studied more within public administration and educational policy research, while educational leadership studies and curriculum research have served different purposes. It appears that there is a question regarding the extent to which contemporary curriculum research is equipped for the increasing need to understand curriculum as policy and governance at different levels (Wraga, 1999). However, the same holds true for large parts of the European tradition of Didaktik. Although Didaktik traditionally provides a perspective for studying aims, contents, and methods at both the state level and school level, it is mainly focused on studying teaching-studying-learning interactions, staying silent regarding principals’ leadership. It is thus worth observing that the increasing popularity of educational leadership research in Europe is related to the ongoing policy shift (Uljens, Möller, Ärlestig, & Fredriksen, 2013).

Given the state of the art in curriculum research, Didaktik, and leadership research, and the limitations of these to provide coherent responses to challenges of the contemporary era, this special issue reports results of a cooperative Finnish-American project initiated in 2013 by the co-editors, aimed at bridging educational leadership research and curriculum theory and European Didaktik (Uljens, 2015a, 2015b; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a, 2015b; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017; Ylimaki, Fetman, Matyjasik, Brunderman, & Uljens, 2016). This project draws on the co-editors’ different experiences—on the one hand North American leadership research, on the other Nordic-German research into Didaktik and general education theory (Allgemeine Pädagogik). To this end, this article opens with identifying three questions or dilemmas that we argue are fundamental for any education theory and theorizing that may explain disparities and even incoherence between the two fields. We then propose a coherent framework that goes beyond these two largely disparate fields (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a, 2015b; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017) and frames the remaining articles in this issue.

Education theory and theorizing: Core dilemmas and questions

For our theoretical framing of this issue and our research program, we consider three dilemmas or questions as central to any theory of education that explains curriculum, teaching, or educational leadership. For this article, we will elaborate on answers to the first two questions from educational leadership studies, models, and grounding theories and then from the perspective of curriculum theorizing/Didaktik. For a discussion of the third question, see Uljens and Ylimaki (2017).

1. How is the relation between education and society defined?

2. How does an educational theory or theorizing process explain the relation between individuals in terms of pedagogical interaction and influence?

3. How does a theory explain cosmopolitanism and education?

Educational leadership and curriculum/Didaktik theories and theorizing

Contemporary educational leadership theories (forms, models, approaches) are primarily empirically based, constructed from research findings as well as extant models or approaches (e.g., transactional, transformational, instructional, transformative/social justice) and/or various macro social theories, including most often organizational theories, systems theories, or critical social theories. By contrast, curriculum theorizing and Didaktik have influenced each other over time but there are clear conceptual distinctions. Further, curriculum/Didaktik scholars frequently take a different approach to theorizing than we see in much of the educational leadership field, and these distinctions in theorizing traditions explain some of the differences between the educational leadership and curriculum fields as well as the difficulties in merging them. The next two subsections further explain these points.

Educational leadership and theory

In the educational leadership literature reviewed below, we will make two points. First, recent educational leadership studies have developed in an empiricist direction and, second, while useful in many ways, theories of leadership are rather free-floating from theory of education that drives our project. In the 1970s, there was an elaborated discourse about organizational theory that informed empirical educational leadership research; however, our impression is that the connection has been weakened over the past three decades. Thus, our intention in the following is to return but expand on the theoretical base in order to re-theorize educational leadership.

Social theories, including organizational theories and critical theories so prevalent in framing educational leadership studies, are based upon a philosophy of science and a theory of society, considering ontology, epistemology, and axiology, all of which are related to methodological assumptions as well as assumptions about human nature (relationships between the individual and his/her environment). In other words, social scientists approach their subject (e.g., organizations) via explicit or implicit assumptions about the nature of the social world and the way in which it may be investigated. To begin, assumptions of an ontological nature concern the very essence of reality in general, such as whether the “reality” to be explained is external to the individual, imposing itself on individual consciousness, or the product of individual consciousness (Burrell & Morgan, 2003). Further, social theories are based upon a second set of assumptions of an epistemological nature, about how one might begin to understand the world and communicate this knowledge to others. As examples, we can distinguish between rational organizational theories as those theories that conceptualize organizations as material realities that can be observed objectively from the outside through a singular view of “truth” and those that consider organizations as socially constructed based upon a vision of reality which holds no greater truth than alternate views. Here so-called natural organizational theorists seek to understand different individual realities in order to make generalized statements and provide a link between social experience and reality. In a third category, many organizational theories conceive of organizations as open systems that combine both rational and natural system assumptions about reality. Closely related, an axiological dimension of organizational theories whereby the ”organization” identifies its internal valuing systems and the ways in which values and ethics influence its decisions and actions.

The emphasis on how we view and come to know organizational reality and values is, of course, very relevant for leadership in schools and districts/municipalities as educational organizations/societal institutions. The poststructuralists remind us, however, that a dichotomy or even a continuum of what is true and what is false presumes a certain epistemological stance and indeed challenges the very notion of a paradigm. We further argue that organizational ontology, values, and assumptions about how we come to know these cannot be conflated with educational ontology, epistemology, and axiology as in modern education theory and related assumptions about the Other, freedom, and the role of education. We will return to this point in theorizing curriculum/Didaktik and more broadly in our presentation of non–affirmative education theory.

Closely related to all of these assumptions about human nature are the relationships among human beings and their environments and between schools/education and society. That is, all social theories are predicated upon a view of how humans individually and, in this case, within organizations like schools, respond to their environment (as an instrument and subordinate to society or as one with agency and superordinate to society). In one key relation within organizations, many theorists make references to “authority” and “management” with early descriptions of authority often informed by scientific management (Taylor, 1947) and formal hierarchical organizations of modern society in bureaucracy (Weber, 1978). The word authority is important here as it gave rise to early conceptions of transactional leadership in classical educational administration literature grounded in functionalist organizational theory and positivistic approaches (Bass & Avolio, 1990; Forsyth & Hoy, 1978; Leithwood, 1994). Here authority can be given and taken away; managers and followers can make transactions or deals to accomplish organizational goals and manager-worker relationships are connected to transactions. Interestingly, in organizational theory from which much of the early leadership literature emerges, the term leadership is rarely used. Further, we do not see the use of the term transforming leadership (Burns, 1978) or transformational leadership; rather Leithwood (1994) and others (Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1999) developed these models from a combination of organizational theories and empirical generalizations. Although not always explicitly articulated in educational leadership studies, assumptions about knowledge, reality, and values have important consequences for the ways in which researchers attempt to study and obtain knowledge about the social world, including leaders and education (with curriculum/Didaktik as key aspects of it) in schools.

We recognize that functionalist organizational theory, related systems theory, positivism, and their inherent assumptions are also grounded in a long history of functionalist sociology, and we do not go into full detail on the roots here. Briefly, elements of functionalist sociology can be traced to the Greeks and in many analyses to Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, Pareto, Simmel, Weber, and Mead. Because most references to organizational theory informing educational studies of schools/districts, and leadership therein, date back to various systems theories (Follett, 1918; Merton, 1968; Simon, 1976; Weick, 1976), we use examples from these latter theories frequently cited in leadership literature to illustrate our arguments.

According to Merton (1968), organizational theory approximates interrelationships between the external environment and the organization; it is firmly rooted in the sociology of regulation and approaches ontology in terms of assumptions about the reality of the system and its relations to organizations (educational and otherwise). Ontologically, then, from Merton’s (1968) perspective, the organization exists as an observable reality with concrete boundaries within the larger societal/cultural/political environment, which corresponds to a version of representational epistemology. The environment influences organizational outcomes by imposing constraints and demanding adaptation at the price of survival, all of which affect the organizational behaviors, values and ethics, and the assumptions under which social scientists understand and communicate organizational behaviors.

In a related strand of organizational theory, drawing on Simmel and Mead, Follett (1918) theorized organizations in relation to understanding how social groups organize as interpreted by the social actors who are actually engaged in the experience; that is, in terms of interpretation as the mode by which we live and interact with others in social organizations. Importantly, she acknowledges different individual uses of power operating within social interactions, gesturing closer toward an ontological dimensions of individual human relations. Follett’s (1918) theorizing is important, as she opens the door for the human-relations approach and later scholarship. Here we also see some influence of movements such as phenomenology and hermeneutics; however, in the wake of Follett’s (1918) theorizing, there is largely a white spot with regards to these perspectives in educational leadership studies. Further, we also argue that Follett (1949) does not consider ontology in terms of individuals’ assumptions about the Other’s freedom and intersubjective relations as educational problems. Merton and Simmel, among others, also make distinctions among macro, disciplinary theory of societies (and organizations within them) and models of organizations developed from empiricism, even when these empirical models are framed by macro, disciplinary theory. Empirically developed forms or models are later subject to further empirical testing, but such testing does not make an empirical model a theory nor, according to Weick (1976), does such testing equate with the process of developing theory (i.e., theorizing). Here Weick (1976) echoes Merton and Simmel in arguing that theorizing is, of course, important but the ultimate goal in organizational theory is to produce a theory.

Critical social theorists, whose work heavily influenced contemporary educational leadership studies of social justice and culturally responsive leadership practices, have similar goals for theorizing (to produce a theory) but here the aim is to change society. Critical intellectual traditions and perspectives trace back to the tenets of German idealism and complex ontological views of the world as a product of individual consciousness or radical humanism, as well as an objectification of the social world or radical structuralism (two views representing epistemological breaks of Marx).

Critical theorists’ epistemological beliefs are largely based upon critique; the best way to know something is through criticizing it. Critical social theorists, thus, share a sociocultural-transformation perspective on relations between the individual, systems (e.g., schools) and the environment with differences in ontological and epistemological positions. Critical theories, albeit through different epistemological perspectives, seek to explain social (dis)order and social change, differing largely in terms of whether the world is an objective reality (radical structuralism) or a subjective, constructed reality (radical humanism). Further, the axiology of critical theory stresses the importance of being up-front with values; values should guide research and theorists should strive to change the social construction that is the subject of their critique. From what has been referred to paradigmatically as radical humanism (Burrell & Morgan, 2003), objectifications encountered in the social world are humanly created, pointing the way toward an emancipatory philosophy which stresses how individuals, through self-consciousness, could create and thus change the society in which he/she lives. In essence, in the work of theorists located within the radical-humanist paradigm (as it relates to education, including curriculum/Didaktik and leadership), there is an aim toward setting human consciousness free and, thus, facilitating the growth and development of human potentialities.

In later works, beginning with The German Ideology, Marx (1946) moved away from the idealist perspective to one rooted in a more realist interpretation of the nature of the social world in what some paradigmatically refer to as the epistemological break toward radical structuralism (Althusser, 1970/2006). Radical structuralism holds that modern social structures (and conflicts between them) exist in an external reality and can be investigated objectively. In other words, clear, observable superstructures legitimize power and domination such that radical social change can only be achieved through conflict (defined as crisis and revolution), placing much more emphasis on deep economic and political structures in their theories. Radical structuralism, then, is a view which focuses upon the essentially conflictual nature of social interactions and the fundamental process of social change this generates. It is a sociology of radical change, but in contrast to the radical-humanist paradigm, one which tends to place relatively little direct emphasis on “man” as an individual human being. Importantly for some educational leadership scholars, in the context of radical structuralism, including the so-called radical Weberians (e.g., Rex, Dahrendorf), we see a focus on bureaucracy, power, conflict, and authority as points of concentration for theoretical analysis as a means of understanding important aspects of social life, including social life in schools and districts (e.g., Ylimaki & Brunner, 2011). Other critical social theorists have later, in varying ways, developed critical, emancipatory social theories that emphasize social transformation (e.g., Gramsci, 1996; Freire, 2000; Rousseau, 1979/1762), inspiring scholars in many fields, including educational leadership, to, for example, study the potential counter-hegemonic role of leaders (e.g., Brooks, Jean-Marie, Normore, & Hodgins, 2008; Shields, 2010; Theoharis, 2007). We will return to these empirical examples in the later section exploring answers to the three core questions of education theory in educational leadership and curriculum theory/Didaktik. One main observations, though, is that these general ontological and epistemological positionings only indirectly indicate what education should aim at, but do not explain in any great detail the nature of educational activity.

Theory and theorizing in curriculum studies and Didaktik

In curriculum and Didaktik fields, scholars often write about theorizing, as well as theories, albeit with somewhat distinctive areas of foci. Curriculum as a policy document, as syllabus, and Lehrplan (since the 17th century in Europe) have been regarded as vehicles for governing the school as a state-driven public institution (Dolch, 1965; Tenorth, 1988) and for providing schools with the general aims of education and subject matter. Didaktik, in turn, was originally initiated both as a theory about teaching (how to select contents, how to work with method to support learning) and as a tool for planning teaching (Comenius) (Uljens, 1998). Such an understanding of a state or federal core curriculum is more recent in the U.S., with a tradition of more state independent schools. Theoretically, Didaktik, in a narrower sense, has been limited to questions of aims and contents of curriculum policy documents, while Didaktik in a wider sense also captures methods of teaching. The decisive selection, formulations, and decisions regarding aims and contents of teaching in the European tradition of curriculum making is typically made on the nation-state level far above each single school. Methods, in turn, are regarded primarily a topic to be decided by the teacher on the school or classroom level. While Didaktik as a field of research traditionally tries to keep together questions among aims, contents, and methods of teaching as they occur different levels, in Anglo-American research curriculum theory more often is discerned from instructional theory and its base in psychology (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017).

To elaborate, Didaktik is central to teaching and teacher education in continental Europe but is much less familiar in the North American context. In some contrast to Tyler and other classical Anglo curriculum theorists, Didaktik always treats contents as related to the methods of teaching as well as the aims of teaching, and very often the students’ sociocultural background and school as organization, as is done in school Didaktik (Uljens, 1998). As Menck (1995) reminds us, based on a historical analysis of german Didaktik, the core of education, or Didaktik as an academic discipline, is, in the end, about reflecting upon the ethical responsibility of teaching. In reference to Bildung, Didaktik suggests that teaching and education are about dealing with how to live out our responsibility to support the student’s stepwise development toward becoming an independent cultural being and citizen able to participate in common tasks of the society, culture, politics, and economy. This also means that a theory of Didaktik is expected to answer how the question of pedagogical responsibility is answered. For a more complete discussion of Didaktik, see Hopmann (2015) and his reflections on the Curriculum Meets Didaktik project of the 1990s. The birth of European tradition of Didaktik is closely connected to establishment of a public school system in which a new professional group, teachers, were expected to work for the reproduction of society.

Classical North American curriculum theorizing and theories, when compared to Didaktik, featured a control-managerial perspective, one that was formalized in the Tyler Rationale (Tyler, 1949) and its psychology-based instrumental applications (Westbury, 2000). In both classical American and European curriculum theory, answers to curriculum revolved around technical rationality connected to the idea of building systems of public schools with an authoritative agency directing teachers’ curriculum work (i.e., implementation) with a written curriculum document (i.e., the syllabus) containing statements of aims, prescribed content (e.g., textbooks) and expected methods (Westbury, 2000). Such control perspectives were not without early criticism, however, including most notably Dewey’s (1938) charge that control theories masked value positions, giving the appearance of being value free when they clearly were not.

The managerial or control approach to curriculum (e.g., Tyler, 1949) focused on practice, providing conceptual frameworks which were intended to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the educational process, an intention that dominated much of curriculum theorizing until the 1970s. Since the 1970s, curriculum theorizing in North America has been focused around subjectivity, Bildung, and currere in the reconceptualist movement (e.g., Macdonald, 1971; Pinar, 1978, 2011, 2013) and critical education studies in a parallel movement in the new sociology of education (Apple & Weis, 1986; Arnot & Whitty, 1982; Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 1980), and, most recently in a post-reconceptualist era, cultural studies (e.g. Dimitriadis, 2009; Helfenbein, 2010). According to Pinar (2012), “Always academic, curriculum is also subjective and social. As a verb—currere—curriculum becomes a complicated, that is, multiply referenced, conversation in which interlocutors are speaking not only among themselves but to those not present, not only to historical figures and unnamed peoples and places they may be studying, but to politicians and parents alive and dead, not to mention to the selves they may have been, are in the process of becoming, and someday may become” (p. 43). Across these strands, curriculum theorists have challenged the control or managerial perspectives of classical curriculum theory, such as the Tyler Rationale (1949).

Across these reconceptualist movements, the object of curriculum theorizing has been, on the one hand, critical studies of the marginalizing impact of policies or policy discourses and, on the other hand, a relationship between identity construction (e.g., race, class, gender) and schooling. In the former, curriculum theorizing features the development of official knowledge emerging from societal structures, power, ideology, and schooling as exemplified in the work of Michael Apple (2004, 2014) and similarly articulated by others (e.g. Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Giroux, 1980). According to Apple (2014), schools preserve and distribute what is perceived to be “legitimate knowledge,” meaning they confer cultural legitimacy on the knowledge of specific groups. Here the ability of a group to make its knowledge legitimate is related to that group’s power in the larger political and economic area. In a related strand, more recent cultural studies scholars remind us that such hegemonic processes create what Bourdieu termed symbolic violence, eradicating particular cultural identities from official curriculum documents and materials, all of which have a critical impact on identity construction. In other words, for critical education and cultural studies scholars, theorizing is cultural critique, engaging a counter-hegemonic dialogue about the underlying ideological bases of curriculum as well as what happens with people’s identities as a result of dominant curriculum/policy discourses and knowledge legitimation. Such critical education theorizing also dates back to Bernstein’s theories of codes (1975) that heavily influenced the curriculum studies field in the Nordic countries/Europe, including Forsberg et al. (this volume), and is likely to increase with rise of neo-nationalism and authoritarian populism as well as increasing pluralism due to internal cosmopolitanism, population migrations, and refugees.

Pinar’s complicated conversation or Bildung-centered “understanding curriculum” approach to curriculum theorizing took steps toward the German-Nordic tradition of understanding curriculum not only as a field of research among many, but as a discipline in its own right, comparable to psychology or sociology, aiming at theorizing curriculum (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2017). Pinar gave little attention to institutionalized schooling in his curriculum theorizing, and in fact rejects the need to focus on it early on (Pinar, 1978), while Apple has frequently critiqued the inequitable societal structures that schools as sociocultural institutions reproduce. During the same timeframe, MacDonald (1995) took steps toward a more hermeneutic approach to curriculum theorizing but did not explicitly consider organizations/institutions or leadership therein. Grounded in hermeneutics, MacDonald’s (1995) curriculum theorizing pushed beyond development frameworks to propose the importance of ongoing attempts to interpret curricular reality.

Across Pinar’s (1978, 2004, 2011) curriculum theorizing, critical education studies (Apple, 1992, 2004, 2012) and various cultural studies literature (e.g. Dimitriadis, 2009; Helfenbein, 2010), we see important work dealing with contemporary political struggles, and we do not mean to question the importance of such identity issues as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other -isms. Rather, we point out that theorizing identity in relation to sociopolitical struggles is not the same as theorizing education or curriculum/Didaktik as key aspects of it. At the same time, cultural studies–oriented curriculum scholars also connect with those who write about inequitable power structures (e.g., Apple, 2004, 2012) as well as related postcolonialism (Rizvi, 2007) and critical race theories (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000), opening the door for a consideration of internal and global cosmopolitanism as an empirical reality.

Perhaps as a result of these combined curriculum studies movements in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as increasing emphasis on postmodern and poststructural approaches of the 90s, we see fewer references to systems and institutional dimensions of education, and indeed curriculum as policy itself, in these later North American curriculum turns. Curriculum and related evaluation policy documents are studied in the U.S.; however, this research is often carried out by political scientists or policy scholars, not curriculum scholars. Critical policy studies of U.S. policy has been increasingly relevant, with trends including policy appropriation (Sutton & Levinson, 2001), policy enactment (Braun, Maguire, & Ball, 2010), and policy networks or assemblage (Koyama, 2010).

Moreover, unlike recent educational leadership studies and the many empirically developed leadership approaches or “theories” (e.g., instructional leadership; transformative leadership) in which curriculum is often an object of leadership influence on organizational or social interactions in schools, curriculum scholars, including those who emphasize cultural studies or critical education studies, are less interested in developing frameworks or approaches emerging from empirical realities of work in various educational systems. Moreover, in curriculum theorizing as cultural critique, we do not see explicit connections with educational ontologies and epistemologies.

In some connection to leadership early on, a few educational leadership scholars explained leadership as innate or internal to leaders and, thus, distinct from organizations. Here leadership is a function of a particular set of personal traits or characteristics, such as dependability, assertiveness, and adaptability (e.g. Stogdill, 1948). Trait theories have made a resurgence in the wake of the need for so-called heroic leaders who have the internal capability to turn failing schools around; however, such approaches do not theorize the leader as a subject in formation and/or one that invites or prokes others in ways that influence others pedagogically in the midst of their own self-formation. More recently, some scholars (Crow, Day, & Møller, 2016) have examined leadership identity, considering how leaders construct their identities as leaders in relation to how they see and are seen by others. While trait theories and more recent leadership-identity scholarship could relate to the ontological dimensions of subjectivity in curriculum theorizing and Bildung, these literature bases never crossed, perhaps due to the differences in approaches to theory and theorizing describe here.

Theories, theorizing, and answers

In the next two large sections, we further consider how educational leadership and curriculum theory/Didaktik have answered two of the core questions essential for any education theory that we posed at the beginning of this article–namely, relations among education and society and relation between individuals in terms of pedagogical interactions and influence. This section follows with answers from non-affirmative education theory that we argue extends and goes beyond answers provided in educational leadership theories and curriculum theorizing described above.

Relations between education and society

In considering relations between education and society or individuals and their environments, much of the scholarship in educational leadership studies and curriculum theory/Didaktik has been either functionalist with a rational technical perspective toward sociocultural reproduction where schools are subordinate to society or critical (normative) with an orientation toward sociocultural transformation where schools are superordinate to society. For our project, we acknowledge the distinctions made by Durkheim (1997) and Parsons (1963), who consider sociocultural reproduction in education as those perspectives and approaches, including curriculum/Didaktik processes and leadership thereof, that support the reproduction of existing social relations, maintain the status quo, and socialize students/citizens into the values and norms of existing society (Uljens, 2007; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a; Ylimaki et al., 2016). Sociocultural transformation views on education are grounded in the perspective that education should not replicate problematic aspects of society; rather, education should prepare students with a particular set of values and skills to create an idealized (e.g., socially just) future (Rousseau, 1979). Across educational literature (e.g., leadership, curriculum theorizing/Didaktik), sociocultural transformation theories aim at explaining social change by the help of education. Yet there are distinctions and similarities in how these two fields have answered the question of relations among education and society, and we briefly describe those comparisons here.

Educational leadership answers from sociocultural reproduction perspectives

While not always explicit, mainstream educational leadership literature grounded in organizational system theories (e.g. Callahan, 1962; Fayol, 1949; Merton, 1947) often explain schools as rational, natural or open systems located within society. Social interactions within schools/systems (including leading, teaching, studying, learning) are grounded in an organizational ontology (how it becomes an effective system and meets designated goals) with administrative leaders considered agents of the system whose primary functions include organizational goal attainment.

For example, many empirical educational leadership studies have been grounded in various organizational theories (e.g., rational, natural, open), including particularly a wide body of research which examined principals’ practices in so-called “effective” schools that were successful with teaching all children regardless of socioeconomic status. Effective schools studies most often considered schools as open systems whereby the organization exists in an environment (society) which continually shapes, supports, and infiltrates the organization, yet importantly open systems theories consider organizations as subordinate to the environment (society). Findings from the effective schools research indicated the importance of similar correlates of school/organizational effectiveness, including safe and orderly environments, management of the curriculum, instructional leadership, and frequent monitoring of student progress, that mitigate but do not seek to explicitly transform or change societal influences (e.g. Edmonds, 1979; Hallinger & Murphy, 1985; Lezotte, 1983; Purkey & Smith, 1983; in the U.S.; and later Harris, 1992; Day, 2005; in the UK; and Hoog, Johansson, & Olofson, 2005; Møller, 2005 in the Nordic countries). In conceptualizing effective schools as micro “open systems,” Lezotte and others argued that the school organization always maintain equilibrium (defined here as effectiveness and efficiency) through its formal structures, functions, and objects of these (e.g., curriculum and instruction) while concurrently acknowledging and serving the various aspects of the external society (Hoy & Miskel, 2005). In other words, there is an implication that effective schools function as open systems that utilize environmental resources to prepare students for the aims of an existing society.

Effective-school and -district studies have dominated educational leadership literature in a North American context, as well as forming a major strand of leadership literature in the Nordic countries and Europe (e.g., Bass, 1985; Day, 2005; Harris, 1992; Hoog et al., 2005; Leithwood, 2005; Huber, 2004; Ylimaki & Jacobson, 2012). Similarly, MacBeath (2012) and others from the UK (Harris) and Australia (e.g., Caldwell, 1998; Gurr & Drysdale, 2007) have considered how principals’ and lead teachers’ practices influence teacher and student learning in effective school organizations. Across these studies, we find an intention to examine the formal leader’s contributions to school success, most recently at least in part defined by student outcomes on externalized evaluation measures. While not explicit, again, these international successful school-leadership studies and individual (formal) leadership for learning studies identify the role of schools (and leadership thereof) in attaining school success as defined by existing societal norms, values, and expectations for student learning outcomes.

In two classical examples, Bass (1985) and then Leithwood (1994) drew on organizational theory and psychology, and as well as Burns’s (1978) empirically developed theory of “transforming” leaders to frame their empirical studies of school leaders’ behaviors. Bass (1985) extended Burns’s (1978) transforming leadership but used the term transformational, explaining the psychological mechanisms that underlie transformational leadership work in school organizations as open systems (Forsyth & Hoy, 1978). Bass’s (1985) aim was to measure transformational leadership in terms of influence on followers (we will come back to how influence is defined here in the next section). Bass’s findings indicated that the followers of such a leader feel trust, admiration, loyalty, and respect for the leader and because of these qualities are willing to work harder than originally expected, with leadership practices organized in four elements: individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence. Later in the article, Bass (1985) clearly noted that the function of leaders and teachers revolved around school improvement in order to meet existing societal needs. Many others have followed Bass’s example, drawing on functionalist organizational theory as well as Bass’s empirical methods and tools to verify the use of transformational leadership with its four elements (e.g. Leithwood, 1994).

In probably the most frequently cited example, Leithwood (1994) further studied Bass’s (1985) transformational leadership elements with his own research of principals in effective schools. He later conducted a meta-analysis (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003) of additional effective leadership studies and a North American research project (Leithwood & Seashore-Louis, 2011), indicating that four leadership practices were necessary but not sufficient for effectiveness in any context: setting directions, developing people, redesigning the organization, and managing the instructional program. Leithwood and Seashore-Louis (2011) concluded, based upon a mixed-methods study with a large North American sample, that the effects of leadership influence on student outcomes is indirect. Teaching or instruction and related classroom practices have a direct causal effect. Further, while these and similar research studies have been widely cited, we argue that these transformational leadership approaches have become free-floating from the original roots (organizational theory, political science, and psychology). We can make similar examples from other empirically based leadership approaches or forms. But this is why Schmidt’s (2008) discursive institutionalism from political science is so important, as she offers an analytical tool for connecting leadership within and between institutional levels grounded in a root of institutional theory that focuses on governance in different polities. We return to a discussion of Schmidt (2008) in relation to our theoretical framing of this project.

In another frequently cited example specific to instructional practice, Hallinger and Murphy (1985) constructed an “instructional” leadership model from earlier effective-schools research (Edmonds, 1979) and then tested that model with mixed methods on so-called outlier schools that exceeded expectations in neighborhoods with few resources. Edmonds (1979) conceived of instructional leadership as a role carried out by the school principal, a definition that was quickly adopted and utilized for successive studies of effective schools research (e.g., Bossert, Dwyer, Rowan, & Lee, 1982; Hallinger & Murphy, 1985; Leithwood & Montgomery, 1982). In this literature of the 1980s, it is important to note that relatively little reference was made to teachers, department heads, or assistant principals as instructional leaders; there was little emphasis on instructional leadership as a distributed construct or a function to be shared. Instructional leaders were described as strong, directive leaders who had been successful in “turning their schools around” (Edmonds, 1979; Hallinger & Murphy, 1985); relatively few case examples of instructional leaders were conducted in schools with average or high performance. Drawing on results across this literature as well as their own empirical findings using survey methods, Hallinger and Murphy (1985) identified three dimensions of instructional leadership: (1) defining the school’s mission, (2) managing the instructional program, and (3) promoting a positive school learning climate delineated into ten instructional leadership functions, including framing the school goals, supervising and evaluating instruction, coordinating curriculum, monitoring student progress, protecting instructional time, providing professional development, maintaining high visibility, providing incentives for teachers, and providing incentives for learning. While Hallinger and Murphy’s (1985) instructional leadership model has been widely tested and utilized worldwide since the 1980s, we argue that this model is grounded in empiricism and a language of the organization, and administrative functions therein, with little language of education and pedagogy.

More recently, still considering organizational elements of instructional leadership interactions but adding social capital theory, other scholars (e.g., Kelley & Halverson, 2012; Klar, 2012) have considered instructional leadership as a distributed construct, drawing on Spillane’s (2002) research to consider how social networks affect such objects as curriculum and instruction. A distributive view of leadership recognizes that leading schools can involve multiple individuals in addition to the school principal—“the leader-plus aspect”—and that leading a school is fundamentally concerned with social interactions around curriculum/instruction and other important objects of group leadership influence rather than about the actions of individual leaders—“the practice aspect” (Spillane & Healey, 2010). According to Harris (2007), this view of distributed leadership also rests on an idea of leadership as cognition as well as on the idea of leadership as mediating social networks and the capital needed to develop them. Thus, the democratic features are specifically taken into consideration, and they have also been the focus of several studies on educational leadership within the Nordic context (Moos, Møller, & Johansson, 2004; Møller, 2009). While perhaps not intentional, many of the recommendations from an organizational perspective (transformational, instructional, collaborative, or distributed) on schools result in a technical or even instrumental approach, recommending leaders utilize a particular set of practices in educational organizations.

In sum, much of the classical educational leadership literature reflects an interest in how organizational efforts and social interactions within them contribute to student learning and well-being. The educational content of organizational efforts (e.g., aims translated into content, methods, the student/subject and teacher relations) are undertheorized from a curriculum/Didaktik standpoint yet firmly grounded in an organizational ontology of social interactions, largely objective views of reality, and implicit views of schools (and leadership thereof) functioning to prepare citizens for an existing society. Further, in organizational theories and empirical applications, the individual or subject (leader, teacher, student) disappears in the larger view of the system and its social interactions and influence relations within. Even in a natural-systems approach, now emphasized along with open systems approaches in distributed leadership, human relations are considered in relation to system productivity and desires to reduce uncertainty (McGregor, 1960; Roethlisberger, Dickson, & Wright, 1943). We appreciate that these educational administration scholars theorized leadership as a function of broader organizational systems, as schools are organizations. At the same time, we argue that schools are societal institutions that operate as a multilevel project, a limitation which has been recently addressed in institutional theories (e.g., DiMaggio & Powell, 1983, 1991; Meyer & Rowan, 1977).

Across institutional theory literature, leadership becomes a multilevel construct beyond the school or district level to include state and national levels of leadership and to consider the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., revolutionary, evolutionary); however, there is no explicit aim to transform existing society and its aims, norms, and values. At the same time, we note that organizational and institutional theory literature does not explicitly consider what norms are selected and on what grounds, nor how existing norms, values, and aims are translated into content (curriculum). Also, very little attention is given to how schools should work around norms and contents with the students so that they may make up their minds in order to act as future reflective citizens culturally, economically, and politically. In other words, we still do not see a language of education theory in answer to relations between education and society; rather (and not surprisingly) we see a language of the organization.

Educational leadership answers from sociocultural transformation perspectives

In another educational leadership literature strand inspired by critical theory, other leadership scholars worldwide situate their scholarship in explicit social-transformation aims as defined by Rousseau, Marx, Gramsci, Althusser, and others. In this literature strand, there is a strong infusion of critical influences characteristic of the sociology of radical change or sociocultural transformation perspectives in various forms of transformative leadership as contrasted with transactional and transformational leadership approaches (Shields, 2010). Going back to the theory discussion earlier, in much of the social justice leadership literature, then, we see references to critical theories from a range of epistemologies, including more subjective, radical humanist views of Paulo Freire as well as more radical structuralist views from Peter McLaren, Michael Apple, and Henry Giroux. Such critically informed, transformative scholarship includes leadership for social justice (e.g. Brooks et al., 2008; McKenzie et al., 2008; Theoharis, 2007), culturally responsive leadership literature (e.g., Johnson, 2007; Scanlan & Lopez, 2012), democratic leadership literature (e.g., Møller, 2008), and leadership preparation studies (e.g., Boske, 2014; Jean-Marie, Normore, & Brooks, 2009; Theoharis, 2007). For example, educational leadership scholars conduct empirical studies of principals and teacher leaders who attempt to transform social inequities through the creation of inclusive instructional programs that account for race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation and other historically and currently marginalizing conditions (e.g. Dantley & Tillman, 2006; Frattura & Capper, 2007; Marshall, 2004; McKenzie et al., 2008; Theoharis, 2007). Across these empirical studies, there is an implicit and sometimes explicit recognition that schools have a superordinate position to society; schools function to prepare citizens to transform existing society, often toward a more socially just and equitable ideal. Educational leaders of all kinds have a transformative or counter-hegemonic function and role in societal change or transformation. Here we often see a clear idealized future articulated in this literature; in other words, there is a normativity problem inconsistent with democratic norms and values.

Social justice leadership literature has become a dominant strand in the educational leadership field over the past decade or so in the U.S. and elsewhere, including Australia, the UK, and Norway. While there is no singular, agreed-upon definition of social justice leadership with regards to ontology, epistemology, and axiology within or across national contexts, we can see a number of commonalities, all of which promote sociocultural transformation aims and consider schools (and human relations within them) as superordinate to society. As examples, Dantley and Tillman (2006) draw on Paulo Freire to frame their qualitative study of school restructuring efforts aimed at transforming social inequities in urban schools across the southern U.S., concluding that educational leaders should seek to create a more socially just and equitable society. Similarly, in a Nordic/European context, Møller (2009) and Kalantzis and Cope (1999) wrote about leadership for democratic education arising from research at the intersection of educational leadership research, critical education studies, and critical multiculturalism.

While epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies differ across this literature, we see a critical (normative) perspective with a more socially just ideal future clearly known in advance, and a counter-hegemonic role for leaders in supporting that future. Moreover, we see that much of this social justice leadership strand is also largely empirically based. In broad recommendations, for instance, Marshall and Oliva (2009) argue that social justice–oriented leaders are those who seek to change the status quo through building a critical consciousness about social inequities, creating inclusive and equitable schools and classrooms, promoting some form of critical pedagogy, working with and through others to improve academic achievement for all students, actively supporting teachers and students to be critical citizens with the knowledge and critical tools to change social inequities. Such recommendations echo and extend recommendations promoted by McKenzie and colleagues (2008), who took a clear position regarding the need for educational leaders to be prepared with a critical consciousness, a social justice–oriented vision, skills to lead counter-hegemonic efforts, and even overt resistance. Here we see recommendations following an epistemological continuum of subjective to objective practices aimed at social transformation, indirectly drawing on Gramsci’s (1996) notions of hegemony and critical consciousness or Apple’s (2004) neo-Marxian perspectives on the role of conflict in the curriculum to disrupt structural inequities). Social justice requires both an internal emancipatory perspective as well as overt practices for social transformation.

As Bogotch (2000) put it, social justice leadership is a deliberate intervention that requires the moral use of power to create a more equitable future for all citizens. Theoharis (2007) continues this line with more specificity in praxis, taking a position on a future ideal for which educational leaders must exhibit agency and develop students and teachers’ agency to create inclusive schooling practices with a vision of equity according to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other historically and currently marginalizing conditions. Although Theoharis does not explicitly draw on social theorizing regarding relations between schools (education, leaders) and society, there is a clear idealized future as a norm for which praxis efforts should be aimed. Essentially, across this literature, social justice leaders in schools are actively trying to right wrongs that have been inflicted on groups in the past by the dominant society and trying to focus all attention on a future defined by equity. Leaders who create equity, which is different from equality, move beyond making sure that all children are treated the same, to ensuring that all students are succeeding academically the same (Larson & Murtadha, 2002). In other words, according to empirical research inspired by critical education theorizing, school leaders with this orientation are activist leaders who work to create justice in schools for all students (Bogotch, 2000; Dantley & Tillman, 2006; Jean-Marie, 2008, 2008; Marshall & Oliva, 2009; Shields, 2004).

While we appreciate the intentions to emphasize human relations and equity in this research strand, we see that like the organizational theory–inspired models described above, critical social theory–inspired models are also free floating from a theoretical base. Moreover, in this strand, we see a clear position taken toward an idealized future and even a prescriptive orientation toward how to realize that ideal future. Across this literature, scholars take a clear position that social justice leaders must have a clear vision of a social justice ideal in which they ground their work and the work of others in schools. From a democratic general-education standpoint, this is problematic and normative; however, we appreciate the pedagogical relations that are characteristic of curriculum theorizing/Didaktik.

Curriculum theorizing/Didaktik answers from sociocultural reproduction perspectives

More broadly, curriculum/Didaktik theorists also tend to fall between one of two dominant perspectives on relations between society and education but with more explicit ways of understanding education as subordinated to or located within existing society or superordinate to or located above existing society, socializing students into the values and norms of the organization and its goals to prepare students for an existing society or preparing them to change or transform society itself.

Curriculum theorizing and Didaktik scholars whose work is grounded in a sociocultural reproduction perspective explain curriculum in terms of a control function or paradigm, meaning that curriculum functions to prepare all students with existing important societal knowledge, values, and norms (Molnar & Zahorik, 1977). Here, often drawing on Tyler (1949) and his followers, curriculum is a technical, rational system for planning and management. Dewey’s (1916/2008), philosophy regarding relations among individuals, education, and society was not as widely utilized for curriculum development and planning in the U.S.; however, his influence continues for many other contemporary curriculum theorists, including Henderson and Gornik (2007); Kesson and Henderson (2010); and Castner et al. (this issue).

Dewey (1916/2008) emphasized the idea of educational and social connections throughout his theories. As he described,

In directing the activities of the young, society determines its own future in determining that of the young. Since the young at a given time will at some later date compose the society of that period, the latter’s nature will largely turn upon the direction children’s activities were given at an earlier period. The cumulative movement of action toward a later result is what is meant by growth. (pp. 29–30)

In other words, education has no greater end than to create the capacity for further education in students; a democratic way of life is not a means to some larger end or outcome. It is in itself the realization of political, social, and educational ends supportive of growth (Ylimaki, 2012). According to Dewey (1916/2008), such a democratic society must have a type of education that gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control, and the habits of mind that secure social change without introducing disorder. From this more or less sociocultural reproduction perspective along with a Darwinian influence, Dewey (1916/2008) writes about curriculum subjects, arguing that the subject matter of education consists primarily of the meanings that supply content to existing social life. Here the continuity of social life means that many of these meanings are contributed to present activity by past collective experience. Dewey’s rich pragmatic philosophy had a major impact on education in the early part of the 20th century with many schools, including his own Chicago lab school, applying his ideas (results of which were reported in the Eight Year Study with Ralph Tyler as the primary evaluator).

Decades later, following in a neopragmatist and reconceptualist tradition of curriculum theorizing, Englund (2006) considered curriculum work as deliberative practice and communication. This deliberational and sociopolitical take on curricular dialogues in schools acknowledged how meaning was negotiated and constructed around subject matter in institutional settings, preparing the learner for a self-determined participatory and deliberative democratic citizenship. In the U.S., between Dewey and later reconceptualist theories (Pinar, Macdonald), Schwab (1969) similarly drew on pragmatism to conceptualize curriculum making as deliberation in the “arts of the practical.” Schwab considered the “practical” as a mode of inquiry or a way of dealing with the kinds of problems philosophers called uncertain (Gauthier, 1963). To deliberate, according to Schwab (1969), is to examine, within a specific context, the complex interplay of means and ends in order to choose actions wisely and responsibly. While there are similarities with regard to a focus on environment or context and authority, these curriculum theorists did not explicitly consider organizational ontology, epistemology, or the role of leadership in these contexts.

Dewey’s scholarship and later neopragmatist work (e.g., Englund, Schwab) notwithstanding, according to Westbury (2000), authority and management were central to Anglo curriculum theory in the U.S. with its decentralized system; authoritative agencies for public school systems, including district and school leaders, were necessary to direct and institutionalize curriculum work and teaching in documents specifying objectives, experiences, and evaluation processes, such as in the system popularized by Tyler (1949). And while the role of district and school leaders is not explicitly considered here, classical Anglo-American curriculum theory was heavily influenced by behavioral psychology as well as the same rational perspectives and instrumentalism grounded in an underlying sociocultural reproduction perspective that informed classic educational leadership approaches reviewed earlier. In one illustrative curriculum example, Bobbit’s (1918) The Curriculum and its rational approach to curriculum development and planning were later popularized with Ralph Tyler’s (1949) Rationale, identifying four broad, open, but fundamental questions concerning curriculum and instruction: (1) What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? (2) What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? (3) How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? (4) How can we determine whether these purposes are being met? Tyler (1949) clearly disconnects ends and means; the question of objectives or aims must be identified first because they are considered “criteria by which materials are selected, instructional procedures are developed and evaluations are prepared” (p. 3). Values and morals are not an explicit part of curriculum planning as articulated in the Tyler Rationale (1949) Tyler, R. 1949 and subsequent more instrumental models (e.g., Taba & Taba, 1962).

In this control paradigm, the notion of human interactions around academic subjects (or the role of the student/subject) requires a rational approach to self-regulation, one that conflates morals and values with methods. From a classical curriculum theory standpoint, then, the success of rationalistic regulation of individual selves is dependent upon the behaviorist and cognitive-measures tools of scientific psychology (i.e., curriculum). Subsequent scholarship regarding Tyler’s Rationale tended to apply this system to very instrumental curriculum approaches grounded in behavioral psychology and learning theory, approaches that by design emptied the subject from consciousness. Pinar’s critique of this grounding and underlying intent to empty the subject is explicit throughout his curriculum theorizing and that of his followers in the reconceptualist movement.

While U.S. educational leadership students and faculty members may not have read Ralph Tyler’s (1949) Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, John Dewey’s (1916/2008) pragmatic philosophy providing some counterarguments regarding the curriculum, the child, and democracy, or Pinar’s (2004) contemporary curriculum theorizing as part of their leadership preparation courses, the above principles are very familiar in practical, mechanistic terms as the scientific procedures of Tyler’s Rationale have been synonymous with U.S. curriculum work for decades. We can find a number of new practical models for curriculum planningthat were developed and popularized in the wake of externalized evaluation policies connected to state and now more centralized (national Common Core) curriculum standards, with Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) probably among the most widely utilized example. Understanding by Design (UBD) is a curriculum-planning approach to “backwards mapping,” looking at the outcome in order to design curriculum units with objectives (big ideas), performance assessments, and classroom instruction. Such curriculum planning also follows guidelines often promoted in practical workshops using divisional categories, such as the written curriculum, overt curriculum, recommended curriculum, and learned curriculum among others (Porter, 2002). While Wiggins and McTighe clearly consider “understanding” as a primary goal for curriculum work, we cannot consider this model as curriculum theorizing in the same way as Pinar’s (2004) notion of curriculum as understanding and complicated conversation. In our view, these approaches to curriculum development and planning are also control oriented in that the subject (both content and student) require a rational approach to regulation of learning from understanding self to the world. In other words, curriculum development models from Tyler (1949) and Taba and Taba (1962) through Wiggins and McTighe (2005) are also grounded in various learning theories. We do not go into all of that here but do recognize that there is an underlying realist ontology and related epistemology at work in, for example, behaviorist theories that suggest knowledge is finite; learning is said to be overt, observable, and measurable, all of which aim for changes in behavior through some form of regulation and (implicitly) aim toward reproduction of existing society. We acknowledge that UBD and similar curriculum-planning models now popular in the U.S. are not curriculum theories or theorizing as accepted in the curriculum field. During the same time, in the U.S. and elsewhere, we also see a number of critical education scholars writing about the ideological conditions (e.g., neoliberalism) of social reproduction that influence schooling, including all kinds of curriculum work (e.g., Anyon, 2006; Purpel, 1989). Across this work, we also find more attention to a critique of ideology and sociocultural reproduction than curriculum theorizing toward sociocultural transformation aims.

Curriculum theorizing/Didaktik and answers from sociocultural transformation perspectives

Much of the more recent curriculum theorizing in the North American context answers the question of relations among individuals, education, and society in terms of societal change. In contrast to sociocultural reproduction theories, sociocultural transformation–oriented theories seek to critique the status quo and explain how radical change occurs in society. In the U.S. and elsewhere, this strand of curriculum literature takes its point of departure from either a subjective, radical humanist, psychoanalytic, or objective, radical structuralist position. Disputes between the more subjective, existential, even psychoanalytic perspective (exemplified by William F. Pinar), and a more objective structural perspective (exemplified by Michael Apple), have in many ways defined recent curriculum theorizing in North America and elsewhere. Regardless of epistemological and ontological differences, when applied to education, sociocultural transformation theorists argue that education is superordinate to society (Uljens, 2007; Ylimaki et al., 2016). Curriculum functions in a superordinate position to society with planning, methods, and content functioning to liberate citizens from existing, oppressive social norms and values. The aim of this scholarship is around liberation; however, according to Pinar and his followers, liberation begins with subjectivity Bildung and then moves outward, whereas for Apple, liberation is structural and overt from the beginning. Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubman (1995) observe, “Curriculum is a provocation to reflect on and to think critically about ourselves, our families, our society” (p. 267). Specifically, Pinar et al. (1995) introduced eleven curricular subtexts: historical, political, racial, gender, phenomenological, poststructural, autobiographical/biographical, aesthetic, theological, institutional, and international. Here Pinar and colleagues draw on critical social theory as well as poststructural approaches to draw attention to a dual conception of the subject, content in texts, as well as the individual subject and his/her development through a journey of self-understanding (currere) and a complicated conversation with a range of texts. Reality is a social construction, meaning that becoming a person is a social act and that social meanings which sustain and organize a collectivity are created by the continuing pattern of interactions of increasingly diverse individuals in society.

Closely related, Freire (2000) and his followers describe and critique what he calls “banking” education as a term to describe the traditional education system. Similar models have followed, including funds of knowledge, defined as the historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992).

Other social change–oriented curriculum scholars draw more explicit attention to connections among hegemony, ideology, power relations, official knowledge, and economic inequity (e.g., Whitty, 1974; Apple, 2004). Apple (2004) argues that curriculum must see as its task today the identification of moral, political, and ethical conflicts connected to social inequalities, including class structures, gender, race/ethnicity, and intersections thereof. In Apple’s (2004) view, the subjective, psychoanalytical principle of the social construction of reality does not explain why certain social and cultural meanings and not others are distributed through schools, nor does it explain how the control of knowledge preserving and producing institutions may be linked to power, particularly with regard to the ideological dominance of powerful groups in a social collectivity. Rather, Apple (2004) draws attention to the subtle connections among hegemony, ideological stability as raised by social reproductionist critics (e.g., Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Bernstein, 1975; Bourdieu, 1977), curricular knowledge, and economic inequality. Across this critical education literature, curriculum decisions are political acts that contribute to social inequities, including class structures, gender, race/ethnicity and intersections thereof. Epistemological differences notwithstanding, pedagogical influences are not, however, explicitly discussed in much of this literature; however, others have applied the tenets of these critical education theories to various versions of critical pedagogy.

In the German Didaktik, Wolfgang Klafki (1994, 1995) would be the most well-known European researcher representing a “critical-constructive” approach. As in critical curriculum and pedagogy in North American literature (e.g., Apple, 2005; Freire, 1970), this critical dimension is value laden in the sense that his critical-constructive Didaktik accepts self-determination, codetermination, and solidarity as aims for education. Klafki’s (1995) critical-constructivist approach to education considers objective, institutional dimensions of schooling as well as the possibility of critical consciousness for eliminating barriers and changing society.

Dominant perspectives on influence relations or interactions among individuals

In this section, we examine influence relations in educational leadership studies and curriculum theory/Didaktik as these relations are informed by different theoretical logics and traditions. We conclude with our analysis of the strengths and limitations of this literature and why we need to go beyond to consider pedagogical relations and core concepts of modern education theory (Benner, 2001; Uljens, 2002).

Educational leadership studies and answers to influence relations

In broad strokes, we note that educational leadership studies most often posit influence relations in terms of: (a) organizational ontology and relations among organizations and the external environment whereby organizations seek equilibrium, or (b) critical perspectives on the role of leaders in resistance to sociocultural reproduction and/or teaching students, through cultural pedagogy, to transform society in more socially just ways. According to Burns (1978), transforming leadership can be seen in leader-follower relations, when leaders and followers influence each other to advance toward a higher level of morality and motivation. Burns studied political leaders and their influence relationships; however, his leadership approaches (transactional and transforming) have been frequently cited and applied to leadership studies. At the same time, neither Burns nor those educational leadership scholars who applied his work (e.g., Avolio, Bass, & Jung, 1999; Leithwood, 1994; Yukl, 1981) defined the term influence in educational or pedagogical terms.

Yukl (1981) and Leithwood (1994) provide the most explicit links between leadership-influence relations and methods in one of four transformational leadership components, managing the instructional program; however, they do not discuss educative qualities of influence relationships. Rather, as in earlier systems theories, curriculum, pedagogy, school culture, organizational designs and decision making, and professional development are objects of leadership influence. In certain respects, such approaches to influence make sense since Leithwood’s study is grounded in classical organizational theory with its organizational ontology as well as psychology and previous empirical findings. In other words, as a framing for Leithwood’s empirical study, organizational theory defines an organizational ontology and perspective on influence relations.

In other studies, focused specifically on instructional leadership approaches (e.g., directive, shared), the literature is replete with the term influence to describe leader-follower relationships. In this strand, scholars describe practices like supervision that influence classroom improvements, with student outcomes most often identified as the indirect objects of influence (e.g. Berman & McLaughlin, 1976; Caldwell, 1998; Edmonds, 1979; Hallinger & Murphy, 1985; Harris, 1992). Across early literature in this strand emerging from the effective schools movement, instructional leadership is an individual and often directive construct (Hallinger, 2005). Another more recent and collaborative leadership approach considers principals’ instructional leadership in relation to other informal leaders and their social interactions within schools (e.g., Hallinger, 2005; Marks & Printy, 2003; Jackson, 2000), defining instructional leadership as a shared capacity to influence changes in classroom practice. Here the principal models appropriate leadership behaviors and invites teachers and others to join their efforts toward school improvement (e.g., Hallinger, 2005; Marks & Printy, 2003; Sheppard, 1996; Jackson, 2000). Like earlier effective leadership studies that focused on individual principals, these scholars emphasized leadership roles in school changes/improvements but defined leadership more broadly (teachers as well as head teacher). At the same time, researchers examine the ways in which principals, teacher leaders, and others (e.g., district leaders) as a group influence changes in classroom practices and ultimately student outcomes.

Various collaborative forms or approaches emerged from an increased state and district policy emphasis on devolution or site-based management in the 1990s, focusing on ways in which groups can influence classroom practice (e.g., Jackson, 2000; Murphy, 1999). Here, drawing on qualitative methods from phenomenology, scholars focused more explicitly on how individuals influence school reforms, including those focused on the curriculum defined in varying ways by individuals and groups involved in the process, from selection of content objectives and strategies for instructional work in classrooms to the political and social intentions that are translated into content in K–12 schools (e.g., Norberg & Johansson, 2010; Ylimaki, 2012; Young, Lambert, Roberts, & Roberts, 2014). In this strand, the intention is to affect changes in curriculum work, and in some studies, the macro influences on the work, from individuals and groups involved in that endeavor. The intention is not, however, to critique the broader macro-influences on the work. Importantly, influence is also defined with an organizational ontology, most often at the micro-level of assumptions about curriculum and instruction-related social interactions in schools.

Other educational leadership scholars, who draw on critical education studies and its grounding in various critical theories (e.g., Freire, 1970, 2004; Giroux, 1980), critique broader macro-influences and explain leadership in terms of agency and advocacy (e.g., Anderson, 2009; Foster, 1986). While social justice leadership literature seeks a social transformation aim, the notion of influence tends to rely on classical organizational theory perspectives whereby researchers study how principals and other leaders’ practices influence or contribute to critically oriented curriculum and pedagogical practices in schools. We do not find the influence of curriculum theorizing/Didaktik here; however, recent social justice leadership preparation literature gestures toward educational ontology in supporting leaders to be and become social justice leaders.

Curriculum theorizing/Didaktik and answers to influence relations

The question of what it means to say that individuals influence or have the right to influence each other belongs to the core questions of, for example, social and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of education. From the above we understand that it is reasonable to assume the existence of different kinds of influence. Naturally a theory of education has been, and should be, occupied with what is meant by educational or pedagogical influence. In essence we ask: (a) What is teaching? and (b) What does education aim at? While the first question refers to the ontology of teaching, the second points at axiology, or value questions of teaching. As in the discussion of educational leadership literature, only for analytical reasons these may be kept apart. A theory of teaching relevant for public institutional education always aims at answering both.

To begin, Smith (1987) regards teaching as an intentional activity—“While teaching may not logically implicate learning, it can be anticipated that it will result in learning. A teacher may not succeed, but…is expected to try to teach successfully” (Smith, 1987, p. 13). Some see teaching primarily as normative behavior. Teaching is here regarded as a generic term—“It designates a family of activities: training and instruction are primary members and indoctrinating and conditioning are near relatives while propagandizing and intimidation are not family members at all” (Smith, 1987, p. 14).

If educational leadership, regardless of how it is otherwise defined, includes the idea that leaders influence others, with the intention to support somebody else’s learning, or at least efforts to learn, then also educational leadership may be expected to provide an answer that structurally is close to that of teaching. However, we know well that intentional leadership and teaching does not always lead to what was intended (Smith, 1987, p. 13). Nor does an individual’s own intentional study activity necessarily lead to what was striven for. Given this we can exclude an idea that leadership and learning would be causal.

Therefore, as teaching and leadership intends to support the Other’s activities aiming at reaching some competence, insight, or knowledge through learning, it may be asked how teaching and learning are related more precisely. It is not surprising, from a European perspective, that the Middle English term lernen can mean both to learn and to teach. In Swedish the same term can be used both for teaching and learning, but the derivation of teaching from Old English pointed out by Smith (1987) is interesting. He writes:

It [teaching] comes from the Old English taecan which is in turn derived from the Old Teutonic taikjan, the root of which is teik, meaning to show, and is traceable to Sanskrit die through pre-Teutonic deik. The term “teach” is also related to “token”—a sign or symbol. “Token” comes from the Old Teutonic word taiknom, a cognitive with taikjan, Old English taecan, meaning to teach. To teach, according to this derivation, means to show someone something through signs or symbols; to use signs or symbols to evoke responses about events, persons, observations, findings, and so forth. (p. 11)

In this derivation, “teach” is associated with the medium in which teaching is carried on. The conclusion drawn above points to teaching as a symbolic communicative process, i.e., communication directed toward “evoking responses” by using signs or symbols representing something else. In this “teaching as taecan” tradition, instruction seems to go back to the activity of a person being able to handle symbols (a priest, a shaman), i.e., a mediator. The emphasis is put on the syntactical aspect of the symbol, i.e., the method of teaching or the how of teaching, not on the content of teaching. It may therefore be interesting to know that the roots of the Finnish word taika meaning “magic” and the related word taikuri (magician) also go back to the Old German taikna and Gothic taikns, meaning sign (Itkonen & Joki, 1969, pp. 1196–1197).

It is useful to contrast this view of teaching with the Middle English lernen, German Lernen (learning), German Lehrer (teacher), German Lehre (knowledge). The point is that in the German Lehren as well as in the Swedish lära and the Finnish opettaa, the content, i.e., the what of teaching, is prominent. The Icelandic word for teacher is in line with this; it is kennari, literally meaning a person who knows, a knower. In this “teaching as lernen” tradition, instruction appears to be more strongly related to the teacher’s personal insight into the content than to knowledge of methods.

A main demarcation line between the Anglophone and the German-Nordic traditions regarding how teaching as influencing differ can be taken back to the above roots—teaching as skill or teaching as mastery of the cultural contents. While the first tradition does away with the contents, the second does so with the method. This last, in essence hermeneutic, tradition of enculturation as personalization and socialization is seen as a process Bildung constitutively bound with cultural contents. Teaching and curriculum is here connected to selecting and working with such exemplary content that is perceived relevant by the learner now, and assumed relevant for learner’s future (Klafki, 1995). The Anglophone tradition more often seek answers to how educational influence should be carried out in theories of learning or ethics. Learning theory and results from empirical learning are then prescriptively related to pedagogical practice in that principles or recommendations for teaching are to be deduced or developed starting from learning theory. The dilemma in this tradition is that education conceptually is reduced to a set of principles or recommendations for practice, while a theory of education beyond this is unreachable. In turn, curriculum theory may be related to pedagogical practice in an analytic way, and does not necessarily state how teaching should be carried out but restricts itself to arguing what curriculum is about, for example, a “complicated conversation,” as Pinar (2004) has proposed. Although an education theory is never devoid of values, it can be centered around pointing out fundamental constituents of pedagogical practice and it may actualize questions requiring prescriptive or normative decisions to be taken (Uljens, 1998).

In a brief concluding point, drawing on the above answers to two fundamental questions about relations among humans, education, and society, and influence relations from educational leadership studies and curriculum theory/Didaktik, as well as our discussion of theory and theorizing, we argue that merging these two fields would be difficult and insufficient for coherence. Rather, we argue that while these two fields would benefit from a closer dialogue, we need to move beyond a mere merging toward a non-affirmative education theory framework.

Between and beyond fields: A non-affirmative education theory framework

In this section, we aim at presenting a conceptual framework that will bring curriculum theory/Didaktik and leadership studies closer together to improve educational practice in the wake of a growing critique of neoliberalism. Our point of departure is, first, that any successful accomplishment of educational practice, be it teaching or educational leadership on different levels and of different kinds, is partly guided by prevailing conceptual frameworks and theories, dominating policies, and cultural and historical traditions. However, if the undertakings are informed by theoretical positions that conceptually highlight only disparate if important activities and processes of the educational system, and even in conflicting ways, their guiding power may be limited. Observing the research traditions and paradigms approaching curriculum, evaluation, and leadership, it is obvious that they are not developed in any closer connection to each other, but rather are quite disparate from each other.

Curriculum theory typically starts from a societal and philosophical perspective, operating nationally and on an interstate level, while leadership research has had a tendency to approach schooling on an individual, interactive, and practitioner level, concentrating on the school (organizational) issues, effectiveness, and social dynamics between professionals. And while globalization and internationalization have been recognized in recent curriculum theory/Didaktik (Pinar, 2001, 2004) and educational leadership studies (e.g., Day, 2005; Spillane, 2002; Hallinger, 2005), curriculum and leadership have not been explicitly connected in theoretical logics.

In the education sector the presence of an interstate or the cosmopolitan dimension (Beck, 2004) is visible both in terms of increasing global harmonization regarding core curricula but also through growth of neoliberal transnational evaluation procedures (e.g., PISA) (Nordin & Sundberg, 2014). Both contemporary European and U.S. education policy reflects the neoliberal turn in public education, with an emphasis on accountability, standardization, and the comparative high-stakes testing of learning, rather than on curriculum and pedagogy. Transnational institutions of different kinds have definitely challenged the nation-state perspective that has dominated curriculum research (Robertson, 2006). The emergence of a “European policy space” or the European Union as new “transnational state” (Lawn & Grek, 2012) has naturally challenged the idea of the nation-state as the ultimate location for curriculum work or for any public policy making. Still, especially school leadership is mainly perceived as a “within-state” dilemma (Clarke & Wildy, 2009). Curriculum research and theorizing has partly turned into investigations into how policies travel horizontally between policy systems and how meaning translates between levels. Curriculum and related evaluation policy documents are studied in the U.S. and Europe; however, this research is often carried out by political scientists or policy scholars, not curriculum scholars. In particular, in critical policy studies on U.S. policy we can identify emerging trends, including policy appropriation (Sutton & Levinson, 2001), policy enactment (Braun et al., 2010) and policy networks or assemblage (Koyama, 2010). In Europe, a transnational perspective on educational leadership is emerging within sociological policy research rather than within educational theory or curriculum theory (Gunter et al., 2016).

Given the developments described above regarding curriculum making and the renewed role of evaluation, we can see that understanding how schools are governed and led requires that we do not limit ourselves to those system-internal approaches dominating contemporary educational leadership research. This not to dismiss this research as unnecessary. It is only a reminder that the object of research cannot be limited in this way if our aim is to understand how schools are led. In addition, to understand leadership as distinct or separate from, e.g., curriculum policies restrict our way of understanding leadership. School leadership and teaching are obviously not private activities but public ones. Leaders and teachers must adhere to curriculum policies regardless of whether these are aimed at social reproduction and cultural unity or social transformation, i.e., toward transformative (equitable) social justice norms and values that disrupt the status quo toward an idealized, predefined future that goes against existing societal norms and leadership traditions. In both cases, leaders’ professional identities are formed in the tension between, on the one hand, their personal values and identity and, on the other, the institutional position they have accepted to be appointed to. Modern education systems typically operate along contradictory intentions—on the one hand schools are expected to adapt teaching to given needs and evaluate each student according individual progress, on the other hand schools are expected to evaluate each individual in relation to all other students. The principle of qualification stands in contrast to the principle of selection/stratification. Further, curricular policies often expect schools to fulfil both reproductive and transformative aims.

Viewing leadership as an object of study internal to the education system limits the attention to continuous reform, irrespective of whether the aims of the education system are reproduction or transformation oriented. In other words, a system-internal, reform- and betterment-oriented perspective on leadership tends to turn leadership initiatives primarily into questions of effectiveness. If research shares such a view of a system with internal leadership practice, then such research quickly turns into effectiveness research. In contrast, leadership, as well as leadership research, may also be aware and sensitive of cultural and societal dimension of education and break with a system-internal perspective. In this case, a counter-hegemonic transformative view of leadership theory and practice is often adopted. When leadership scholars take a position on the role of leaders and schools aiming at creating a future more equitable, this is guided by an interest in trying to understand how leadership activities influence and support pedagogical practice in revolutionary or reformatory ways, creating a new, more socially just society through education. In leadership for social justice literature (e.g., Bogotch, 2000; Ryan, 2006), practices focus on future opportunities for student success. It is never enough to merely transmit existing knowledge to students. Exactly the same may be noted regarding curriculum theorizing. Such a change-oriented interest constructs leadership and leadership research into a culturally critical voice. This may be perceived as problematic if such leadership research is presenting a competing or alternative ideal, compared with a politically agreed-upon curriculum regarding the aims of education.

The dilemma of how how educational theory may be related to educational practice goes back to double expectations of education theory. On the one hand, educational research is expected to provide trustworthy or convincing descriptions of educational practice. On the other hand, this theory or research is expected to provide guidance for regarding how teaching should be practiced. The question is what role educational leadership theory and research should have and aim at. Should it present alternative views for the education system, or should it be focused on understanding the function of the system?

A second step in approaching these challenges will be the observation that although globalization/cosmopolitanism forces nation-states to restructure themselves regarding the ways in which political, cultural, and economic unity and plurality is established and sustained, the dilemma of dealing with unity and plurality is not new. In fact, the stepwise movement from a premodern to a modern world corresponding to the establishment of modern nation-states (18–19th centuries) in similar ways required a new approach to establish and sustain a relation between national and cultural collective unity (sense of belonging) and individual and regional plurality. The modern liberal nation-state, framing previously unseen forms of liberalisms (freedom of speech, religion, politics, owning of property), required a corresponding educational philosophy, policy, and organization able to meet and conceptually make sense of the new situation. Although many differences may be identified, the solutions in U.S. and Europe were close.

In other words, the demonstrated need to conceptually and practically rethink nation-state education in a cosmopolitan light is reminiscent of the process modern nation-states lived through when establishing the prevailing educational systems and philosophies. There is a question of continuity and discontinuity. To what extent are we able to keep to fundamental concepts of education developed as a response to the modern nation-state? And to what extent are we forced to rethink citizenship, as well as educational research, philosophy, policy, and practice, in the light of globalization? Accomplishing this task will contribute to a reconstruction of fundamental tensions, issues, and features of modern educational thought, with a focus on post-Kantian educational thought as developed by Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Herbart (Uljens, 2002).

A non-affirmative education framework for leadership and curriculum/Didaktik

We ground our framework in a non-affirmative theory of education. The approach draws on Dietrich Benner’s theory of education (Benner, 2001, 2005, 2015; Oettingen, 2016; Siljander, Kivelä, & Sutinen, 2012; Uljens, 1998, 2002, 2015; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a, 2015b).

This non-affirmative approach is developed as general education theory aiming at theorizing education on a foundational, philosophical-theoretical, level (Benner, 2001). Typically, a general education theory answers questions regarding the nature of education, what it means to become, and grow as, a human cultural being and citizen (Uljens, 2002). Also how individual learning is related to societal change is at the fore, as are questions around educational support, teaching, and influence. Due to its foundational character, this approach to education offers a point of departure for understanding curriculum, Didaktik, and educational leadership amidst globalization processes.

We are fully aware that a non-affirmative theory of education is more or less unfamiliar in a North American context. In this respect, the present project contributes to supporting an intercontinental dialogue on theory of Bildung and related concepts of education, now including educational leadership. In the beginning of the 1990s, a dialogue on curriculum theory and Didaktik was established (Hopmann, 2015; Hopmann & Riquarts, 1995). Later on this dialogue extended towards Bildung (e.g., Lövlie, Mortensen, & Nordenbo, 2003; Siljander, Kivelä, & Sutinen, 2012). We consider this theory to more broadly encompass and frame curriculum/Didaktik and educational leadership, as its starting point is to understand the role of institutional education both from an individual and societal perspective¹. In this article, we elaborate on and use a non-affirmative approach because it not only explains the reflective nature of educational activity but also provides a language of education to bridge curriculum theory/Didaktik from the classroom to transnational levels in democratic societies.

Education—A field of research or a discipline of its own?

It may be necessary to observe that while education typically is defined as a field of research in the U.S., it is defined as a discipline of its own in the German-Nordic tradition (Uljens, 2001). As education is seen as a discipline of its own, there is a debate if education is one and only one discipline or if it can or should be divided in sub-disciplines, based on if theorizing starts from the perspective of population, contents, institution, or something else (e.g., special education, adult education, mathematics education, higher education). In any case, general education (Allgemeine Pädagogik) is the most foundational or general field². Contrary to philosophy of education, general education (GE) typically aims at developing a foundational theory of education, trying to keep many different questions and perspectives together in a coherent system. If Didaktik has a similar ambition starting from the school as an institution, GE goes beyond activities within the school and sees the school as only one way that the relation between generations can be organized educationally in a society. While Didaktik focuses the aims, methods, and contents of education, GE often include the relation between politics and education, or ethics and education, to be solved. However, the dividing lines are not clear once and for all: some approaches in Didaktik, like the one represented by Wolfgang Klafki, is indeed broad, while some approaches to GE are mainly focused on the school as an institution (Lundgren, 2015; Uljens, 1998). This may partly explain why it makes sense, from a Nordic-German perspective, to identify GE as a level of analysis beyond Didaktik and curriculum theory. GE has not debated educational leadership as it is understood in most contemporary research. To our knowledge, any such attempt has not been made anywhere before.

A second preliminary observation may be helpful for some readers. In the German-Nordic tradition, a distinction is made between theory of education (Erziehung) and theory of Bildung. In the literature, theory of Bildung refers at times to the content and aims of education, and sometimes Bildung refers to the process of human growth in the broadest sense of the word, trying to explain what it means to become a person and a citizen. In its processual perspective, Bildung is an enduring phenomenon—we learn continuously during our whole life. In turn, education, as an intentional activity, is something we may meet at a younger and at an older age, but this is not an enduring process. Educational activity (Erziehung) has a beginning and an end, or, many beginnings and ends. Theory of Bildung is therefore not the same as theory of education (Erziehung). Neither can be reduced to, deduced from, or explained with the other. The challenge for a theory of education is to explain how these two phenomena, the process of Bildung and the activity of education, are related to each other.

In the German-Nordic tradition of GE, or simply education, there are many initiatives and ideas regarding how to structure the field. The debate is ongoing (Wimmer, Ruhloff, Lenzen, etc.). Consequently, choosing a so-called non-affirmative position is one of several alternatives. One of the reasons to make this choice is that it stands out in terms of staying in a direct dialogue with the original thinkers and theorists of seminal modern education (1760–1830). One could say that contemporary non-affirmative positions represent a reconstructionist approach to the classical theorists of modern education theory, as seen in the works of Rousseau, Fichte, Herbart, and Schleiermacher. These classics are reinterpreted and new positions are formulated (Uljens, 2016, p. 125). Dewey seldom make references to these sources regarding a theory of education and Bildung, but it is obvious that his ideas, expressed for example in My Pedagogic Creed (Dewey & Small, 1897), i.e., that “education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience” reflects a view of Bildung developed by Herder, Schleiermacher, and others. He also is very modern in acknowledging the difficulty for education following from a non-teleological societal development, according to which we have to educate for a future we do not, and cannot, know. He thus concludes that the aim of education is personal autonomy, in German, Mündigkeit: “To prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means so to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all his capacities…” (p. 445). That Dewey concludes that “education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living” is here taken to mean that education cannot prepare for a future living as it is not known. Yet, here Dewey comes to equate life, processes of learning, and education, which we will return to. It is not unproblematic to say “the process and goal of education are the same thing” (Dewey & Small, 1992/1897).

Epistemology or ontology?

Much research in education, including curriculum theory, Didaktik, and educational leadership, can be structured according to which research paradigm it primarily represents epistemologically—critical, functional, pragmatic, or hermeneutic—or some combinations thereof. The paradigm debates are no longer as engaging as they were back in the 1970s or 1980s. A reason for this is that, first, the main paradigms have influenced each other. Second, prominent positions have lost their paradigmatic position, while new approaches like postmodernism, post-humanism, and others have developed. The “linguistic turn” (Rorty, 1967) brought new dimensions to interpretative, contextual, or hermeneutic approaches through discourse-analytic approaches. Recent post-humanist ideas have aimed at redefining relations between mind and matter, merging what is subjective, socially shared, manifest, represented, and material.

A paradigmatic division among positivism, critical theory, and hermeneutics reflects a theory-of-science perspective, focusing on ontological and epistemological positions valid for any discipline. Such argumentations regarding the epistemological nature of human knowledge are also valid for educational theory, but epistemological theory is not theory of education or theory of learning. The dilemma in structuring educational research following epistemological theory is that conceptually human growth as Bildung and educational activity stay underdeveloped.

This critique can also be directed regarding more recent epistemologies regardless if they are discursive, critical, phenomenological, or post-humanist. Seldom do these argue for or against previous theories of curriculum, Didaktik, or education. In contrast, non-affirmative education theory does not start the journey from an epistemological perspective but from theorizing education as such, ontologically, asking questions like these: What is educational interaction? How can it be identified among all other human activities? As learning does occur all the time, as well as intentional activity aiming at learning, then what is teaching and leadership about? Teaching is to lead, and leadership can be about teaching. In what ways, then, are these activities interfering with other individuals’ relations to themselves, to others, and to the world?

Three questions as core topics

In adopting non-affirmative education theory as a point of departure for understanding curriculum, educational leadership, and Didaktik, then, we asked three questions as core topics. Methodologically, in order to bring together and merge object-theoretical discourses on Didaktik, curriculum theory, and leadership in (and of) schools as historically developed societal institutions, we see it necessary to move the analysis onto a metatheoretical level. Therefore, the point of departure is taken in core questions and concepts originally developed for a modern society within classical or modern continental education theory and philosophy.

By a systematic focus on foundational questions we point out how a uniting discourse may be grounded and merge the previously mentioned valuable but disparate approaches and research initiatives. Finally, in light of the contemporary situation, we move the meta-analysis beyond the nation-state level to consider the pedagogical dynamics and relations between states as well as networks and states. Here we add discursive institutionalism (Schmidt, 2008) that complements a non-affirmative approach and the language of education in modern education theory with an analytical method for understanding relations within and between levels. Again, for this article we focus on the first two questions; answers to the third question are provided in Uljens and Ylimaki (2017).

1. How does an educational leadership theory, curriculum theory, and Didaktik explain the relation between individuals in terms of pedagogical interaction and influence? That is, if leadership and teaching is to influence somebody else, then what kind of influence are we addressing?

2. How do we define the relation between education and society, i.e., the relation between institutional education and other societal forms of practice (e.g., politics, economics, and culture)? How are the dynamics between, e.g., education and politics explained?

The first question concerns how a theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy, and culture, respectively. Through what processes do societal interests transform themselves into practices of schooling? What are the mechanisms and degrees of freedom involved in these translational processes at different levels? For curriculum theory, questions such as these are frequent. More generally, the question concerns the reasons and aims for which (liberal) education is promoted by the political system. But the converse perspective is also crucial: what kind of education is considered necessary or valuable in order for Western democracies to survive and develop? In essence, we focus here on how societal reproduction and transformation should be understood, organized, and directed as a relation between generations. It is difficult to think of educational leadership theory neglecting such a question, especially when the previous levels are widely identified as relevant. In this respect, not only educational curriculum theory but also educational leadership theory must communicate how the role of the school as a societal institution is defined with respect to politics, economy, and culture.

The second question refers to nothing less than to the classical issue of individual’s freedom in education. What does this mean? Few would accept that education would not be about influencing the Other or intervening in somebody else’s experience of the world. But, how do we explain theoretically the kind of influence education has, in terms of leadership or teaching? Obviously, few would consider leadership to have causal effects, for the reason that typically the individual being influenced is considered as being able to interpret impressions, i.e., free. However, if we accept that the subject is radically free, then in what sense is influencing really possible? A radical interpretation of freedom would mean that everything was in the hands of the individual, so to speak. The individual alone would determine the extent to which leadership has an influence. In educational theory, this problem is not new. In fact, it belongs to the fundamental core questions in any educational theory and many attempts have been made over the centuries to establish a position between external determintion and internal freedom from influence (Uljens, 2002).

So, according to, e.g., Kantian transcendental philosophy of freedom, the individual is free to establish her relation to the world alone. The theoretical problem which arises from such a position is that it does not seem possible to influence somebody from the outside, rendering leadership and teaching impossible in principle. Instead, the individual would be radically free to determine the meaning of her dynamic and open relation (Bildung) to others, to the world, and to herself. In this subjectivist, or subject-centered, or Cartesian tradition, it becomes theoretically difficult to explain why the presence and activity of the Other would be necessary for learning to occur, for example. The alternative approach has been to decenter a subjectivist approach and start from a pure intersubjective position, meaning that the individual, from the beginning so to speak, shares something (language, practices, values) before an empirical self is established, i.e., that the subject not only comes to share the world through the process of education, but that the subjects from the very beginning share something. The problem following from such a radical intersubjective position is that to the extent the world is intersubjectively shared in some sense of the word, reaching a shared world cannot be something education aims at. For example, educational theories could not start from subjects being linguistic, as this is something we learn to become. Philosophical anthropology may explain that being human is to share a language and be linguistic, that thinking is not possible without language (Herder), but educational theory must explain how we come to share the world (Uljens, 2016). To the extent the world is shared, education is not a necessary activity.

A Non-Hierarchical relation between education and politics, economy, and culture

The first question also concerns how a theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy, and culture, respectively, as nonhierarchical. In the attempt to understand how education (and leadership thereof) is related to politics, economy, and culture, we must first negotiate a path through the various extant explanations in the history of education. First, a premodern mode of thought understands education as being located within the existing society or culture (see Uljens, 2007; Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a; Ylimaki et al., 2016). This socialization-oriented model of education emphasizes the task of education as preparing the individual for an existing society and culture wherein societal practices and norms function as the guiding principles. In this model, educational leadership is subordinated to societal practices. Here education is not expected to have any particular developmental or transformative role with respect to the existing society, but rather education is preparatory in character. The power of societal transformation lies beyond education, and as a consequence, education is reduced to socialization.

Second, as described above, in contrast to the reproduction-oriented model, since Rousseau education theory has learned to conceptualize education as a revolutionary force with respect to societal practices (Uljens, 2007). In its most radical or critical form, revolutionary or transformation-oriented education is not only disconnected from society, but also allows itself to be positioned as superordinate with respect to societal interests (Benner, 2001). According to Rousseau, there is not much point in educating individuals for an existing society, since education would then only reproduce unacceptable constellations. Rather, the role of education would be to develop something new, something that does not yet exist. Education would work toward ideals, which may, in the future, become realities as a new generation enters society after having undergone education. In this model, education is superordinated with respect to societal interests. More specifically, social transformation theories critique the status quo and seek to explain, either through “subjective,” (e.g., Lukacs; Frankfurt School) or “objective” (e.g., Althusser) ontologies, how radical change occurs in society. These “critical” theories do not place any critical distance between the values and norms they themselves represent. The similarity between these three positions is their normativity, meaning that a predetermined set of values guides educational practice. In addition, these values are defined irrespective of the educational leader’s own interests.

A third line of reasoning opposes the above-mentioned ones by criticizing them for for subordinating or superordinating education in relation to society and societal development (Benner, 2001). Both the reproduction- and the transformation-oriented models are prescriptive—while the first accepts existing norms of the society as arguing for educating, the second starts from an ideal for the future, an ideal that education should strive for.

Uljens (2016) points out that,

from a curriculum theory perspective the question is how such a (curriculum) theory may avoid being identical with the prevailing ideology or representing an ideologically opposite position to a politically agreed curriculum. In either case, curriculum theory would function as an instrument for either positive socialization or as a counter-hegemonic ideological discourse. Although educational theory is never value neutral there is reason to keep up the difference between politics and educational theory. (p. 123)

Another problem with the previously described models is that they runs the risk of not leaving room for the principals, teachers, or learners to decide upon what is to be considered valuable and meaningful. In this third position, since the future is thought to be undetermined and the question of morality is something that cannot ultimately be decided in advance, the individual’s reflective ability—self-awareness and self-determination—is seen as an ability that must be developed.

In this last model, education is seen in a nonhierarchical relation to politics, culture, and economy. Education is not solely placed either “outside” or “inside” the society and is thus not either super- or subordinated with respect to society, but attempts to mediate between the two. In this nonhierarchical conceptualization, educational institutions are given relative independence with respect to societal and other interests. It is this space that both allows for and requires reflective, professional educational leaders on each level of the education system.

It should be observed that a nonhierarchical understanding acknowledges that hegemonic political interests influence education, but recognizes that if educational leadership were to be reduced in the service of some political ideology, it would be in conflict with democratic principles. Thus, political democracy requires a certain form of critical educational leadership, that is, relative independence should be guaranteed by the political system itself. As Uljens (2016) observes,

from a non-affirmative education theory perspective, a theory of how deliberative democracy works is something else than a theory of educational preparing for participation in such a democracy. If this distinction is not identified there is a risk of ending up in socialization pedagogy again, now with deliberative democracy as the directing norm. Education theory would then be about drawing implications and developing prescriptive recommendations for how teaching should be organized (p. 126).

From a nonhierarchical perspective, educational leadership is leadership that sustains democracy, related to an image of citizenship. From this point of view, education is allowed to critically examine the political system within which it operates, but it also leaves room for politics to be reflective and critical about contemporary education and educational leaders. The same relation occurs between education and economics: education must prepare individuals for an existing working life, but in such a way that the individual may transcend existing ways of working. In sum, the nonhierarchical position regarding the relation between school and society accepts that: (a) School prepares individuals for an existing world—though it does so in a problematizing, non-affirmative fashion, not confirming a present state of affairs; (b) Democratic ideals are defended: education prepares individuals for participation in societal political practices and change; (c) Human freedom is assumed—from provocation (intervention) to self-activity; (d) The question of the good life remains an open question; and (e) A relative degree of freedom is guaranteed for the state, district, principal, teacher, and ultimately, for the student. The valuable or ideal in society is decided upon in advance. Therefore, it is supposed that the previous models, taken seriously, in fact run the risk of indoctrination and of turning educational leadership into a technological profession.

Understanding influence in educational leadership

The first question concerns what kind of influence educational leadership has and how this influence is related to the person being influenced. In order to answer this question, we draw on classical (modern) education theory as well as educational leadership studies.

In modern thought, education is often viewed as invitation or provocation to self-reflection and autonomy. However, in order for the individual to reach autonomy in self-reflection abilities, he/she must, according to this line of reasoning, already be perceived as autonomous, free, and self-reflecting. The act of educating, thus, seems to presuppose the very existence of that which is a necessary condition of education (i.e., autonomy). In other words, in order for education to be possible, there must be a free subject whose reflection is provoked, but simultaneously it is thought that the individual becomes a free subject through the process triggered by a provocation.

So, in order for education to be possible the individual must be free and self-active, and simultaneously, in order for the individual to become free and self-active, education seems to be necessary. Using this argument for developing an understanding of educational leadership, it is assumed that the individual can reach cultural, productive freedom (the ability to act) only by being recognized and treated as if they are already free (or reflective, capable, trustworthy). Educational leadership is, therefore, understood as a recognition-based invitation, intervention, or provocation, a disturbance or expectation concerning the Other’s relation to himself/herself, the world and others. Educational leadership is, then, to recognize somebody as if they are already capable of doing what they are supposed to become capable of—and to act accordingly (Fichte, Herbart, Schleiermacher).

To elaborate, we find three concepts particularly relevant: (1) recognition, (2) summoning to self-activity, and (3) Bildsamkeit (Benner, 2001; Uljens, 2002).

Recognition

This Fichtean and Hegelian concept has been interpreted differently by different philosophers, and holds an unquestionable position in contemporary social philosophy (e.g., Fraser & Honneth, 2003; Honneth, 1992; Taylor, 1994; Williams, 1977). Here recognition, in short, refers to how the Self is and becomes aware of herself and the Other as being free (ontological assumption), to an awareness of the Other’s situation or reality (epistemological relation), but also to a moral relation in terms of the Self’s responsibility for the Other’s worth, dignity, and inviolability as person and individual (ethical relation). The position we develop here draws on the seminal studies of German, modern educational theory and later developments thereof (Benner, 2001). A crucial step was taken in that Fichte (1796/1992) developed a critique of Kant’s way of explaining self-consciousness of freedom by referring to consciousness of the moral law, thereby assuming a priori an intersubjective life-world (Fichte, 1796/1992). Fichte’s innovation was to see consciousness of freedom as intersubjectively mediated by the Other, as the self becomes aware of itself as free, experiences herself as free, only by being recognized by another (Uljens, 2002; Williams, 1977). The concept of recognition was developed further by Hegel and has influenced much later developments in education theory, especially Mead and Dewey.

In Charles Taylor’s (1994) interpretation, to recognize another person with regard to a certain feature (e.g., race/ethnicity, gender), as a free or autonomous agent, you not only admit that he/she has this feature but you embrace a positive attitude toward him/her for having that particular feature. Such recognition implies that you bear an obligation to treat him/her in a certain way. In other words, you recognize the normative status of the other person as a free and equal person, but recognition transcends normativity. Misrecognition is the opposite, a relation that hinders or destroys persons’ successful relationships to themselves (Fanon, 1963; Honneth, 1992). Fanon (1963), for instance, demonstrated the ways in which victims of racism and colonialism have suffered severe psychological harm by being demeaned as inferior human beings. Taylor and others have recently applied theories of recognition to struggles for particular identities (e.g., politics of difference around gay rights, ethnic or religious recognition, women’s rights, rights of differently abled individuals). Here justice is not primarily concerned with material goods but rather what kind of standing other persons deserve (Young, 1998). Forms of recognition—respect, esteem, love, and friendship—influence how subjects develop self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem (Honneth, 1992).

How influence is explained—summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit

From a pedagogical perspective, it is difficult to see self-respect and self-esteem as categories to be accepted as sufficient methodological constructs. In order to identify pedagogical and educational leadership actions among all possible mediating instances, we draw on the concepts of summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit (Benner, 2001; Mollenhauer, 2014; Uljens, 2002, 2015a). These concepts refer to a modern tradition of relational theory of education and form core concepts for educational acts in terms of summoning (inviting) the Other to self-activity (Bildsamkeit); and summoning to self-activity (Aufforderung zur Selbsttätigkeit). The concept of summoning explains how a teacher or a principal has a mediating role with respect to the Other in the maintenance and development of the Other’s self-relations.

According to Fichte, summons should be understood in a very specific meaning; we cannot summon somebody to gain the state of consciousness. Rather, summons should be understood only as an invitation to the Other’s self-activity. An act of summons is the impulse to self-reflection made on the part of a reasonable human being. In terms of school leadership, the act of invitation or summons is directed to toward a teacher or student’s potentiality and forces the latter to become aware of his own freedom and ability to realize his own aims.

Bildsamkeit

While “summoning” may be seen as the leader’s or teacher’s invitation of the Other to become engaged in a self-transcending process, Bildsamkeit refers here not only to the individual’s learning capacity of plasticity, the ability to change or learn, but to the individual’s activity directed at making sense of the world and her experiences. Bildsamkeit, in effect, structures the relationship between a growing person’s process of self-formation and an educator’s educative action: self-formation (Bildsamkeit) is an open possibility that can be realized in very different ways, depending on how the experiences of learner take shape. In sum, the very same core concepts may be laid out as foundational for both teaching and educational leadership as human interpersonal practice. In fact, educational leadership as culture building or curriculum management, for example, is a process of intentionally creating professional working conditions and circumstances for colleagues to reconstruct their professional identities and capacities.

Consequently, non-affirmative approaches to educational leadership would be focused on creating a professional school culture where individual learners learn about what it means to find a voice of his/her own and what it means to develop toward democratic citizenship. Here the learner learns to make use of his/her own productive freedom. Insofar as district leaders and school principals act accordingly, they mediate between governance mechanisms, interpreting and translating them in dialogue with teachers. In such a process, the use of positive knowledge of, e.g., new legislation or curricula may be focused toward not only understanding them as such but also toward reaching the questions or interests to which existing policies, norms, or practices are seen as answers or responses. An educational leader in this case invites (summons) colleagues or even the public to engage in reflective self-activity (Bildsamkeit) in order for them to transcend what is given. A non-affirmative summons to self-activity highlights that the educational process is dependent on an experiential address, but that when this provocation is pedagogical, the pedagogue consciously refrains from naively confirming either a prevailing or ideal future condition. With such a self-reflecting pedagogical discernment the pedagogue is thought to be better able to create a space for an educational process that recognizes the learner’s self-activity and right to exercise conscious independence of thought. In Uljens (2016) words,

Non-affirmative education that seeks to allow the learner to identify and deal with those problems to which existing knowledge is the answer (and also to assess the value of the existing problems), thus aims at preventing or restricting learners from unreflectingly dedicate themselves to cultural content, practices, specific skills or concepts. In this limited sense education is about hindering learning. A pedagogical activity which is educationally reflective presupposes that the school as a social institution is allowed enough free space for the establishment of necessary pedagogical fields of action in relation to other social interests. (p. 129)

An educational leader who supports the identification of questions behind provided answers may result in the development of an ability to formulate alternative questions and agendas. Finally, it is to be observed that “summoning to self-activity” operates within (horizontally) and between (diagonally and vertically) in institutional settings. Thus, we consider leadership as occurring within and across multiple institutional levels.

Introducing the remaining articles in this volume

With this framing in mind, the remainder of this special issue features articles from U.S. and Nordic/European scholars who write about leadership and curriculum. We open with two articles that consider the contemporary situation for leadership preparation and development in the U.S. and Germany. The first one is written by the University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Executive Director Michelle Young and her colleagues. In Europe there exists no organization equivalent to the UCEA in the U.S. To find a parallel, well-established European scholar in educational leadership we turned to Prof. Stephan Huber in Switzerland. Huber and his colleagues are the founders and organizers of the Zug Educational Leadership Symposium. Young et al. set the stage for how educational leadership preparation has been driven by a standards-based curriculum in the U.S. In essence, Young et al. remind us that preparation standards are the “de facto” curriculum and how UCEA has played an important role in mediating the use of an underlying research base, as well as providing guidance for its use in preparation programs and certification efforts across fifty different state systems. Following an analysis of the extent to which the standards are supported by empirical research as well as strengths and limitations of the standards movement, Young and colleagues illustrate the ways in which some standards can become normative or even prescriptive in their application. Young et al. consider the framing provided in article one (Uljens & Ylimaki, 2015a; Ylimaki & Uljens, this issue) and suggest several propositions to address this limitation of normativity. Beyond the consideration of normativity problems associated with the standards, we include this article as it also illustrates the central national leadership role of the UCEA organization in leadership preparation curricula amidst the contemporary policy situation in the U.S. (e.g., movements toward national curriculum standards in Common Core connected to externalized evaluation policies).

In what we see in some ways as a counterpart piece, Huber and colleagues describe the role of leadership with regards to curriculum in Germany, a European country with a similar state system for education. In this piece, Huber and colleagues draw on a review of leadership literature as well as the history of professionalism, teacher education, and Bildung that informs leaders’ work. We see changes in leaders’ work in response to the recent policy and societal trends described in the introduction to this issue, all of which are also grounded in leaders’ preparation in Didaktik and Bildung that have historically shaped leaders’ inherent professional identities. Huber et al. conclude with suggestions for bringing leadership research and curriculum theorizing/Didaktik closer together. Such a developmental line is most likely fruitful given the still centrally steered European education systems. The European Union has supported platforms and all-European programs for cooperation around school development and leadership. With the system of independent nation-states, a European curriculum for schools and for principal education seems very distant.

In the next article, Bogotch, Schoorman, and Reyes-Guerra (this issue) provide a deeper historical reconstruction of the relationship between educational leadership and curriculum in the U.S. Drawing on the noted U.S. curriculum historian Herbert Kliebard, philosopher John Dewey, as well as more recent scholars of curriculum in multicultural education, Bogotch and colleagues offer advice on how to reconstruct the profession as we reconstruct our conceptions and uses of education theory in bringing curriculum and leadership closer together. Interestingly, the Bogotch et al. argument is, in many ways, constructed as a currere, an approach promoted by the seminal North American curriculum theorist of our time, William F. Pinar. Moreover, Bogotch and colleagues implicitly address the current curriculum theorizing trend toward cultural studies and identity issues so prevalent in the U.S. today. The fifth article provides a concrete example of how leadership (primarily teacher leadership) may be developed with a base of curriculum theorizing. Here Castner and colleagues (this issue) draw primarily on action-research findings, curriculum theorizing from the U.S. reconceptualist heritage (e.g., Macdonald, Pinar), and their own conceptualization of curriculum development and planning in a constructive alternative to the Tyler Rationale. Castner et al. also provide us with an important explicit example of an educational ontology as well as the role of ethics in leadership development. In the remaining example article, Forsberg and colleagues (this issue) draw on classical Nordic curriculum theorizing, using Bernstein’s (1975) theory of curriculum codes to analyze the contemporary situation for curriculum and leadership. Specifically, Forsberg et al. describe the curriculum traditions in Sweden, as these have informed differing curriculum-making practices and arenas. Importantly, we note that Forsberg and colleagues illustrate the traditional conception of curriculum as a nation-state project and policy document, a notion that is substantively different from the curriculum theorizing that drives Henderson’s project and much of the recent U.S. curriculum theorizing.

From the perspective of the non-affirmative conceptual framework developed in this introduction, we appreciate both these perspectives and see obvious strengths in both. Henderson’s project addresses curriculum research and theorizing as crucial for understanding teachers’ professional reflection and development. To this end, Henderson and colleagues develop a phenomenological-hermeneutic, partly existential-humanistic touch to their theorizing. Such an approach is very European and Bildung centered. This take on theorizing is not least important in recognizing teachers’ professional identity as the ultimate locus through which policy intentions are transformed into materialized action in the classrooms. The interventionist, or action-research based, approach to leadership research is also welcome. In this respect, Henderson’s approach certainly is congruent with what the co-editors of this volume have in mind regarding non-affirmative education.

The value in Forsberg et al. lies in how they make visible educational leadership work with nation-state curricula, thereby discussing what is missing a topic in the contemporary U.S. tradition of curriculum research. As we see it, the non-affirmative approach deals with the dynamic relations between policies and education, as well as the interactional dynamics between subjects at different levels of the educational system.

We are then grateful to Carolyn Shields for further opening the dialogue with her commentary article on this issue. The issue concludes with our final reflections and thoughts about bridging educational leadership and curriculum theory/Didaktik with non-affirmative general education theory, a brief description of our future directions and plans for this work, including a comparative international empirical study, and an invitation to educational leadership and curriculum/Didaktik scholars who are interested in contributing to our dialogue and movement.

Notes

1 In previous publications, Uljens (1998) used “reflection” or “reflective education” to explain how theory of Didaktik may be used as a tool by the teacher, and the researcher, for reflecting on one’s experiences (Erlebnisse) of pedagogical practice (e.g., Uljens, 1998). Ylimaki et al. (2016) used “reflection” to indicate non-affirmative theory, as the concept of non-affirmative education was less known in the U.S.

2 It is, however, not only American research that treats education as a field where insights from other disciplines like sociology, psychology; subject-matter knowledge, or ethics are applied. In such an applied view on educational research, education would be about applying insights from psychology or ethics. It is indeed a widespread misinterpretation that even the founding fathers of education, like Johann Friedrich Herbart or Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, would have understood ethics providing the aims for education and psychology of methods. Especially given that Herbart’s idea indeed was to establish education as a discipline of its own during the first decades of the 19th century, it makes no sense that this initiative would start by drawing implications from psychology or ethics (Benner, 1995). In fact, chairs in sociology and psychology were established some 50 years after the first chair in education in Finland 1852 (Uljens, 2002). This instrumental view of educational knowledge as implicational and instrumental may be the reason why so many still today treat models of teaching as falling back on some ideals, some sociological theory or ethical-philosophical ideas that should be strived for.