Leading School Improvement: Discourses with what schools know and can do
INTRODUCTION
How
much evidence is out there that could spark off “Discourses on Leading School Improvement”? For how much longer can
we in India afford to ignore questions related to - ‘What School Leaders
think’ (cognitive), ‘What school leaders say’ (linguistic) and ‘How
school leaders tend to behave’ (conative) that address, identity
orientation, legitimacy, justification, transparency, posture consistency and
commitment of School Heads.
Schooling
in India is a complex and diverse landscape.
The historic concept of public education as a way to level the playing
field has yet to be fulfilled. A vast majority - lacking cultural capital or
economic power to identify and gain access to better schooling choices for
their children - are condemned to grovel in the sordid systems that continue to
fail them. Reason and passion that is bold, unforgiving, strategic, and compassionate
are needed to make any real difference to interrupt the glaring inequities in
our classrooms and schools.
Despite
the depressing degrees to which school heads in India have been domesticated
often to managerial roles, a new optimism that schools
must transform is placing greater responsibility on School Heads as
managers and leaders and the significant roles they play in facilitating a
difference in the ways schools can be managed and led. Consequently, leadership
for school improvement is a central theme to current policy concerns both in
India and internationally.
Discourses
on Leadership for School Improvement (DLSI)
An awareness of the various
problematics this inchoate field of school leadership offers, Discourses on Leadership
for School Improvement (DLSI) calls on school heads and educators to explore
the fact that there is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept
like school leadership and therefore the need to relentlessly pursue a
radical reconceptualisation of school leadership as a contextually embedded and
physically embodied phenomenon.
The inchoate field of Leadership
challenges schools around the world and in India to rethink their missions and
to re-structure their courses, and life on campus. School Heads increasingly
exposed to notions of Leadership, which are emotionally, politically,
ethically, and scientifically charged would do well to explore collaborative
discourses on leading school improvement.
DLSI has the potential to facilitate
original and surprising explorations to perennial questions such as 'What is
leadership?' and 'How do leaders lead change?' Given the urgent need
for new voices amongst the crowded field of leadership advocates, DLSI could
set off not just new ‘answers’, but an entirely new way of thinking about
leadership and its role in contemporary schools and society.
DLSI could serve to initiate
leadership conversations to empower school heads to deal with conflicting
norms and values, uncertain outcomes and futures, and a changing knowledge
base. Aware of the need to be able to contextualize knowledge in an
increasingly globalized society, DLSI explores leadership not only as an
outcome and a process of learning, but as a catalyst for educational change and
institutional innovation.
Mindful
of the many emerging spaces and voices, DLSI provides
a space for educators, family members, students and community members to speak
their truths, push against the mainstream, and rattle the status quo. DLSI
could attempt to capture and weave stories, experiences, practices, and ideas
together and unleash the power that school heads, educators have to tell their
truth, to face what we do not know, and to learn together - how to transform
our schools for the sake of our children. DLSI practitioners are called and
challenged to move the discourse about school change beyond remedies that
address the symptoms to strategic thinking, planning, and action that address
what causes India to have a failing public school system.
With Aristotle we declare that
the ultimate test of understanding rests on the ability to transform one's
knowledge into leadership. Those who can,
do. Those who understand, lead.
