Educative Leadership: A Practical Theory For New Administrators And Managers

199 Pages·1992·1.11 MB·English

by  P. A. Duignan

Educative Leadership
Acknowledgments
The Editors wish to record their sincere thanks to a number of people:
to those who contributed to this text, especially for their responsiveness to
our editorial feedback;
to Cindy Strahle and the staff of the University of New England’s
Computer Centre, who helped to assemble some of the chapters of this text;
to our one-time colleagues in the Department of Administrative, Higher and
Adult Education Studies, and to the University of New England for their
support and contributions to research in educational administration; and
to our loved ones who support us in our pursuit of new and trustworthy
ideas.
Educative Leadership:
A Practical Theory for
New Administrators
and Managers
Edited by
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
The Falmer Press
(A member of the Taylor & Francis Group)
London (cid:127) Washington D.C.
UK The Falmer Press, 4 John Street, London WC1N 2ET
USA The Falmer Press, Taylor & Francis Inc., 1900 Frost Road, Suite 101,
Bristol, PA 19007
© Selection and editorial material P.A.Duignan and
R.J.S Macpherson 1992
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published in 1992
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available on
request
ISBN 0-203-20973-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-26774-5 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0 75070 058 0 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0 75070 059 9 (Print Edition)
Jacket design by Benedict Evans
Contents
Chapter 1 1
Creating New Knowledge about Educative Leadership
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
Introduction to Chapter 2 18
Values and Valuable Leadership Action: A Synthesis and
a Commentary
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson

Chapter 2 21
Ethics and Ethical Theory in Educative Leadership—A Pragmatic and
Holistic Approach
C.W.Evers
Introduction to Chapter 3 44
Educational Leadership for Curriculum Development:
A Synthesis and a Commentary
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson

Chapter 3 47
A Philosophy of Leadership in Curriculum Development:
A Pragmatic and Holistic Approach
J.C.Walker
Introduction to Chapter 4 83
Educative Leadership for Quality Teaching: A Synthesis and
a Commentary
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
Chapter 4 85
Leadership to Promote Quality in Learning
J.Northfield
Introduction to Chapter 5 103
Educative Leadership and Rationalisation: A Synthesis and
a Commentary
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
v
Contents
Chapter 5 106
Reorganising the Delivery of Educational Services and
Educative Leadership
D.Pettit and J.Hind
Introduction to Chapter 6 132
Educative Leadership in a Multicultural Community:
A Synthesis and a Commentary
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
Chapter 6 134
Educative Leadership in a Multicultural Society
F.Rizvi
Chapter 7 171
A Practical Theory of Educative Leadership
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
Index 186
vi
Chapter 1
Creating New Knowledge about
Educative Leadership
P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
Introduction
It was not by accident that the first of the eight major recommendations of the
National Commission for Excellence in Educational Administration (1987) in the
United States of America was that educational leadership should be redefined. As
the Commission evaluated the quality of educational leadership in the USA, it
became particularly troubled by the absence of conceptual clarity throughout the
field of what constituted ‘good’ educational leadership. And while the Commission
courageously offered remedial strategies—a National Policy Board, the remodelling
and dramatic rationalisation of preparatory programs, the equalisation of selection
outcomes, the establishment of grounded and recurrent education for
administrators, and new ‘licensure programs’ for neophytes—it ended its work by
again posing the basic question: what is ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ educational
leadership?
The Educative Leadership Project (ELP) was mounted in 1986 by the
editors and three state education systems in Australia to attend to this very
question. Hence, while the ELP processes and findings outlined in this chapter
must be understood in terms of their Australian context, and therefore used
elsewhere with caution, they offer an approach whereby different yet
sociopolitically specific answers to the Commission’s basic question could be
generated.
It must also be understood that the ELP strategy and findings reflect a
research design based on a set of assumptions held by the co-directors of the
project (the co-authors of this chapter). The first assumption was that the wisest
approach to leadership in education should be educative in intent and outcome.
Another was that theory-building about educative leadership should come after
new syntheses of experience, research and theory on major dilemmas of
leadership had been generated afresh and tested through in-service activities and
analysis by postgraduate students.
A third precept was that the most trustworthy base for theory-building about
educative leadership was the refined collective wisdom of specialist theorists and
exemplary practitioners. A fourth precept was that if the practical and theoretical
products of the ELP were to be valued and applied widely the project would
require substantial support from education systems and should demonstrate an
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P.A.Duignan and R.J.S.Macpherson
uncompromising attitude to scholarly standards. The co-directors’ fifth precept
was that as schools are not natural systems, but cultures, educative leadership
should constitute both philosophical and practical action directed at cultural
elaboration. To prevent the ELP strategy being adopted uncritically, the
background to these precepts is now clarified.
The Theoretical Turmoil
Since Greenfield’s (1975a; 1985; 1988a) dramatic refutation of natural systems
ideology, and since Bates’ (1980; 1982; 1984) introduction of New Sociology into
educational administration, the agendas of researchers and theorists in educational
administration have diversified sharply. The simplisms of behaviourism have been
challenged (Gronn, 1982; 1983; 1984; Macpherson, 1986). But how
administrators might resolve the dilemmas of practice, and compromise in a
morally defensible manner when facing politically critical, socially critical,
economically critical, managerially critical and educationally critical imperatives,
remain as major new agendas largely unaddressed by the field.
Although the field of educational administration has been singularly lacking in
its use of philosophical machinery (Macpherson 1985), there are strong
indications that this deficit is being addressed (e.g. Rizvi, 1985a; Miklos, 1985;
Holmes, 1985; Hodgkinson, 1985; Greenfield 1985b; GREAT Conferences 1984,
1985, 1986; Greenfield, 1988b). Nevertheless, as these academic initiatives
unfold, there is also the need for projects that bridge the theory-practice gap.
This chapter explains the specifications of one such project (Duignan, Gaut and
Macpherson, 1986).
The purpose of the ELP was to generate a new synthesis of experience,
research and theory on leadership, and to develop complementary in-service and
postgraduate learning materials. This chapter presents an overview of the
purpose, design and procedures of the ELP. The chapter has five sections. First,
there is a discussion of the purpose of the ELP and a working definition of
educative leadership is presented. Second, the design for the project is described
and explained. Third, there is a discussion on the principles of adult learning
which underpinned the product-oriented approach adopted. Fourth, a number of
issues related to educative leadership are identified and discussed. Finally, an
outline of the project phases and workshop procedures is presented.
Purposes and Emergent Definitions
The ELP sought to break new ground in educational administration. It did this by
following the advice given over decades by many respected practitioners and
leading academics in the field—that the wisest approach to leadership in education
is that it be educative.
Unfortunately, as our own research has shown, the detail of this wisdom
remains elusive to many educational leaders today (Duignan, 1985; Duignan, in
Simpkins et al., 1987; Macpherson, 1986; 1987a; 1987b). The management
recipes in the literature usually apply to selected aspects of specific situations
whereas the problems faced daily by practitioners always seem far more complex.
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Creating New Knowledge about Educative Leadership
Indeed, management techniques are often of little help when a leader has to
choose between competing values. When it comes to solving new types of
problems in education, it usually means creating new types of understandings. To
add to the confusion, the political, economic and social contexts of education
continue to change rapidly. Two of the most difficult questions outstanding in
educational administration are therefore:
1 How should leaders in education decide what is important?
2 How will they know that they are morally right, when they act?
Unfortunately, administrative practice is often seen to be driven by non-
educational criteria, such as bureaucratic efficiency, political expediency and
economic constraint. While it would be naive to expect that these criteria will be
displaced in the realities of practice, it is time to inject a concern for values into
the administration of education, in a practical manner.
The purpose of the ELP was to provide a means by which a ‘practical’ theory
of educative leadership might be developed. We believe that the ideas discussed in
this project will be of immediate interest to all who wish to influence the nature
and direction of educational administration in the coming decades, simply
because educators in administrative positions will continue to prefer being
educative leaders, and academic educators will want to assist them in that
endeavour.
Our point of departure is that an emergent definition of educative leadership
should not just focus on the traditional elements of leadership emphasised in
the literature of educational administration, namely, attitudes, styles and
behaviours. Instead, we prefer to be concerned with ways of knowing
organisations and ways of leading that find expression in the cultural norms of
the group, the educational organisation or the system. We do not see
organisations as natural phenomena (Greenfield, 1985); instead, we see them as
cultures, that is, the concerted imaginations of organised people who share
assumptions, values, interpretations of their situation and meanings that they
give to their actions (Smircich, 1983; Sergiovanni and Corbally, 1984;
Duignan, 1986; Macpherson, 1986).
We believe that cultural elaboration is a dialectical process (Watkins, 1985) of
clarifying values and partly resolving inevitable conflict in a way that modifies
peoples’ patterns of assumptions and relationships. Educative leadership is,
therefore, central to the negotiation of what will count as important in education
and what will count as morally right. The direct consequence of this type of
concerned action is the development of professional values, intentions and
practices. Given this view of organisation, what then is our view of leadership?
Educative leadership appears to be a deliberate attempt at cultural
elaboration. What people actually attempt in the way of change is, of course,
mediated by the culture of their setting and by the wider context. Nevertheless,
actions taken by determined people to change the assumptions of others about
the situation in which they ‘find themselves’, inevitably lead to a redefinition of
the culture of the setting. As Smyth (1985) has proposed, the difference with
educative leadership is that it helps professional educators work with others to
shape their purposes and the meanings that they use to make sense of, and to
justify, their involvement in and contribution to education.
3