“Being” an educational leader: Exploring and theorising professional identities.

Description

The illusion of free choice in international career progression

Educational leaders in international schools wield life-changing power in forming and shaping the lives and careers of international schools’ teachers. This is because of the dispersed and globalising nature of these schools, scattered as they are around the globe. These schools very often represent a petri dish of expat enclave sub-culture where personal and professional boundaries blur. Bourdieu highlights the onus on personality in areas where rules, regulations and systems are opaque. He points out how the narrative is central in amending and extending the professional profile of working individuals. This paper proposes that the other side of this coin is in how the narrative is in fact a co-constructed text. The globalising HR reality for international schools includes diploma mills, isolated or unknown schools

sometimes halfway around the world, with little point of reliable reference. In this field, the line manager’s personal reference has established itself as central seal of character, qualification and skill.

With such power seated in one individual, this paper draws upon original research into the professional identity of senior international educational leaders. It explores how social and professional identities manifest, to produce a strong globalising identity, based upon Anglo-Christian conceptions of individuality and free choice. Finally, the paper theorises on the illusion of free choice in this arena of globalising education. Using the professional recommendation as a diviner of career progression, it brings air to the social-professional fog of international schooling. It finds a discourse veneer of collegiality. This is reified Anglo-Christian power as moral leadership. It shows the dependence of teachers on the personality of educational leaders in this discourse, and the need to be morally and socially flexible in order to be 'authored' as value bringers for market driven international schools.

Overview of Symposium
Addressing the questions surrounding the BELMAS theme of educational leadership for social change requires the field to focus on the realities of who the professionals are that take on roles that are regarded having a leader, leading and leadership remit. In this symposium we present five papers based on empirical research and social science theorising where we begin by examining identities at a time of rapid change, and what this means for social change (Courtney and McGinity). We then present three papers where we report on the dynamics of identities at a time of localised social change (Rayner, McTaggart-Gardner, Hughes), and the challenges of doing this research. We conclude with a paper that brings together the idea of identities and the realities of identities in action with a critical analysis of how the ideology of eugenics is not only evident in the conceptualisation of ‘being’ an educational leader but is also intensifying in regard to educational provision. We use this as an opportunity to stimulate some important questions for the normalised assumptions of the field in regards to how we conceptual, research and practice leadership. Description of the topic and justification of relevance to theme “Educational Leadership for Social Change” (500 words max):The field of educational leadership is replete with adjectives – for instance, transformational or distributed – that signal positions and dispositions within and beyond the field. Where purposes are the focus of research into the professional practices of those heading up schools and universities, including such aims as leading for social change, it is implicit in much of the leadership literature that it is the label that is doing the conceptual as well as material work. For instance, social change through raising (perhaps minoritised) pupils’ attainment is constructed as a product primarily of instructional leaders(hip). Social change enacted by professionals (such as teachers) who do not have formal leadership roles is claimed nonetheless and constructed as a product of distributed leaders(hip).Members of the BELMAS Critical Education Policy and Leadership Studies (CEPaLS) Research Interest Group have long contested this position. We contend that leadership, particularly that for social change, is a product of human relations enacted by people engaged in practices out of diverse motivations, and is not primarily a product of adjectives. The field therefore requires a state-of-the-art exploration of what it means both to be and to understand oneself as an ‘educational leader’ who exercises agency, and whose agency is structured in ways that may be common or particular.Through this symposium, BELMAS CEPaLS scholars locate the phenomenon by first presenting a mapping of how professional identities have been represented in the literatures. This includes both those identities that professionals have reported about themselves and also those that have been imposed through scholarly conceptualisations of the field. The two are not mutually discrete, since labels such as ‘transformational’ and ‘distributed’ filter through to the field of practice and may be incorporated into how professionals understand who they are and what they (should) do in order to embody and give meaning to that identity. We then exemplify the myriad possible instantiations of leader identities through in-depth explorations of “being” in the field.We aim through this symposium to bring the field’s attention to how a focus on style has impoverished conceptualisations of leadership. We argue through the papers presented here that it is the intersection of disposition and identity, not style, which leads to social change. This proposition – that one’s identity influences one’s practice as a leader – is supported in the literature (e.g. Courtney, 2014; Fuller, 2013) and through established social theory (Bourdieu, 1990).ReferencesBourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.Courtney, S. J. (2014). Inadvertently queer school leadership amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) school leaders. Organization, 21(3), 383–399.Fuller, K. (2013). Gender, Identity and Educational Leadership. London: A&C Black

Period	16 Jul 2019
Event title	BELMAS Conference 2019
Event type	Conference
Degree of Recognition	International