Leading from the Middle: A Praxis-Oriented Practice
Educational leadership has long been a focus of research and scholarship that focuses on effective education and school improvement. This has usually centred on the important practices of principals; but here we focus on the leading of those who are close
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Leading from the Middle: A Praxis-Oriented Practice Peter Grootenboer, Karin Rönnerman and Christine Edwards-Groves
Abstract Educational leadership has long been a focus of research and scholarship that focuses on effective education and school improvement. This has usually centred on the important practices of principals; but here we focus on the leading of those who are closer to the classroom—middle leaders. Middle leaders are those who have an acknowledged leadership position, but are also involved in teaching in the classroom. In this landscape, a prime role of middle leading is site-based staff and curriculum development. In this chapter, we discuss the features, characteristics and issues associated with leading from the middle, and we show how this is a mediated practice that is critical to educational development in school sites. It is mediated since the work of the middle leader is enabled and constrained by the cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements exuding from policy and school personnel that are brought to bear on their practices. To navigate these arrangements, we will argue that the complex relational nature of this role demands practical wisdom, and the enactment of praxis.
P. Grootenboer (&) Griffith Institute for Educational Research, School of Education and Professional Studies, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, QLD 4222, Australia e-mail: p.grootenboer@griffith.edu.au K. Rönnerman Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] C. Edwards-Groves School of Education, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, NSW 2650, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 P. Grootenboer et al. (eds.), Practice Theory Perspectives on Pedagogy and Education, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3130-4_13
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Introduction When consideration is given to effective education and school1 development, issues of leadership are inevitably part of the discussion. Indeed, it is hard to argue that ‘good’ educational leadership is not important for quality education in schools and other educational institutions. However, the vast majority of the literature and research in educational leadership focuses on the role and work of the ‘positional head’ or principal. We do not under-estimate the importance of these leaders,2 but we think there is a lack of understanding and perhaps even uncertainty about forms of leadership at other levels of a school. Specifically, in this chapter we depart from more typical notions of leadership to focus on a group of educators described as middle leaders. It is middle leaders who have some positional (and/or acknowledged) responsibility to bring about change in their schools, yet maintain close connections to the classroom as sites where student learning occurs. In one sense, middle leaders bridge the educational work of ‘classrooms’ and the management practices of the administrators/leaders (Grootenboer et al. 2014
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