Turning Water into Wine: Scripting Multi-Academisation Through Messianic Educational Leadership

In this chapter, we present as scripted drama our data from a case study on the features and functions of educational leadership in the process of multi-academisation. Our objectives are to realise the potential of drama, and specifically of a Brechtian-inspired aesthetic, to foreground rich truths about the phenomenon. We do this through materialising the symbolic, symbolising the significant insights and themes, embodying the reported tensions and emotions and puncturing the solemnity of multi-academisation. Our Brechtian approach moves us away from realism and towards a disruptive, challenging dramatic encounter with multi-academisation and its leadership, for example through our explicit characterisation of the MAT CEO as Jesus-like. This permits us to foreground charisma-based messianic educational leadership as the mechanism that we saw operationalising this project of multi-academisation. The CEO, David, inspires his followers through an extraordinary faith in his abilities and charisma to follow a mutable and relatively flimsy vision. This chapter makes contributions that are conceptual, through developing the construct of charismatic messianic educational leadership, and methodological, through widening the dramatic forms that have been used to present data and represent the social world in the field of educational leadership.