Conference Agenda

This symposium focuses on how school leaders handle values and ethics concerning policy. Values, valuation processes, and leadership in educational administration with a particular emphasis on the notion of community and professionalism are the bases for researchers active at the Consortium for the Study of Leadership and Ethics in Education (CSLEE) which was established as a University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA) Program Center in June 1996. More than twenty years later this UCEA program center continues its work and remains devoted to the support, promotion, and dissemination of theory and research on values and leadership. The CSLEE is a consortium of faculty and research associates representing eight international university-based centers and institutes. The papers in this symposium are all written by active members of the CSLEE and the empirical examples come from 4 different countries.

Values have traditionally been considered an important influence on administrative practices. Chester Barnard’s seminal work, The Functions of the Executive, proposes a definition of leadership, dating back to 1938, that highlights the moral dimension of leadership as essential to administration. More recent works by Don Willower (1994, 1999) and Jerry Starratt (2003) have reinforced the relevance of values as influences on administration and promoted active debate on the subject.

A practice-grounded and research-validated reinterpretation is presented of how values and ethics influence administrative practices in schools. The basic proposition is that acquiring administrative sophistication is a function of understanding the influence of personal values on the actions of individuals and the influence of values on organizational and social practices. A values perspective is used to link theory and practice to promote authentic leadership and democracy in schools. Authentic leadership may be thought as a metaphor for professionally effective, ethically sound, and consciously reflective practices in educational administration. This is leadership that is knowledge-based, values informed, and skillfully executed. With these notions in mind, values are formally defined and proposed as an influence on the actions of individuals as well as on administrative practice. The perennial challenges of leadership are discussed together with the special circumstances of our times. This requires the pursuit of personal sophistication, sensitivity to others, and the promotion of reflective professional practice. Examples of findings from recent research that demonstrate the utility and relevance of values and valuation processes as guides to educational leadership are presented.

The challenges between educational systems leadership and democratic ethical practices on various leadership levels and in different leadership positions in the educational system are covered in the four papers to be presented. All educational systems have several governing and leadership levels. Both within and between the levels are intervening spaces that interpret, transmit, and translate policy intentions. Our symposium will focus on how diverse values and ethics are understood and played out depending on the level and country context. We are interested in how relations and communication in the intervening spaces reflect values and ethics and how these are connected to policy and practice in the translation processes. All the papers in the symposium will analyze how values and ethics are understood and handled on different leadership levels. Especially, how diversity in values and ethical issues are understood and handled by school leaders on different levels in the system.

Leadership is more than making decisions and taking responsibility. It is also about facilitating and creating trust, engagement, motivation, and distributing power to others (Arlestig & Johansson, 2016; Shaked & Shechter, 2017). In Sweden, the number of leaders both above and beneath principals grows. This raises questions on how leaders interact and share their mission and responsibility. How are values, power, and interpretation of policy interacted and communicated between leaders? An important aspect of the governing chain is to contribute to how policy is understood, implemented, and challenged. In the rational model of the democratic governing chain, intervening spaces at all levels are neglected to the policy process. The meeting and forums between leaders on various hierarchical levels can be seen as intervening spaces where interpretations and negotiations take place. Places where ideology and rationality meet individual actors and various school contexts and organizations. Our research question is: How are democratic policy ideas visible in the intervening spaces of a governing chain in public schools? The study took place in two municipalities representing the 25 most populated cities in Sweden. The data is based on interviews with 66 informants with leadership roles on the district level and two schools in each municipality (Grimm, Norqvist & Roos, 2021). The interviews were semi-structured asking about relations, trust, responsibility, and assessment. All interviews were recorded and transcribed. The empirical data shows that even if leaders have continuous meetings there is various understanding of what is seen as important and good quality. There is also various intention and priorities depending on if the leader works on the district level as a principal or teacher. The communication between levels hides some of the problems if there is a risk to lose control. Instead, the language is used to encourage and show that there is continuous work towards higher academic student results. The findings indicate that intervening spaces and policy drift are vital to support, control, and use professional competence in the process to transfer political ideas to classroom practice. (Johansson & Ärlestig 2022a; 2022b).

Ärlestig, H., Day, C., & Johansson, O. (2016). A decade of research on school principals: cases from 24 countries. Dordrecht: Springer. Grimm, F., Norqvist, L., & Roos, K. (2021). Exploring visual method in the field of educational leadership: Co-creating understandings of educational leadership and authority in school organisations. Educational Management, Administration & Leadership, 174114322110307–. https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432211030747 Johansson, O. & Ärlestig, H. (2022a). Democratic governing ideals and the power of intervening spaces as prerequisite for student learning. Journal of Educational Administration, 60(3), 340–353. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-04-2021-0079 Johansson, O., Ärlestig, H. (2022b). Policy implementations in schools: the chain of command and its intervening spaces. In A. Nir (ed.) School leadership in the 21th century: challenges and strategies. (pp. 247–276). NY: Nova. Shaked, H., & Schechter, C. (2017). Systems thinking for school leaders: Holistic leadership for excellence in education. Cham.: Springer.

Educational leadership in the US context has increasingly focused on how communities engage each other, and how leaders navigate and lead diverse communities in just and equitable ways. This paper draws on research from three geographically distinct regions within the US, highlighting insights drawn from these cases situated in different levels of the US educational system. Using communicative intelligence (citation) as an organizing concept, the authors discuss cases involving educational leaders, university faculty and immigrant elementary school parents to illustrate how ethics and values evident in the actions of participants in each situation, amid different and overlapping crises, inform the development of a framework for leading within crisis situations combining relational literacies outlined by the five capabilities and four abilities of communicative intelligence (Zoller, Lahera, & Normore, 2015) with evidence of leadership practices and values characterized by compassion, trust and emotional integrity (Solomon, 2005). The three cases include a) a US West Coast university’s PK-12 school leadership preparation program focused on leadership dispositions, behaviors, knowledge and skills that honor social justice, equity, and individual culture while providing a space to foster personal growth, agency and leadership capacity of aspiring leaders for community/education transformation; b) a university educational preparation community in an urban setting on the US East Coast, in which participants navigated the various issues surrounding the COVID19 lockdown; and c) an immigrant parent organization, affiliated with a midwestern urban elementary school, whose aim it was to advocate for themselves, their families and their school-age children amid anti-immigrant policies and climate. By drawing on components of communicative intelligence, the authors identify how leaders in each context, contending with various threats and crises, engage with each other and their constituents (e.g. students, teachers, parents, peers) in ways that privilege humanizing principles of compassion, trust and emotional integrity, while navigating changing and sometimes threatening policies. As such, the authors develop a framework for leadership praxis that cultivates cohesive and educative communities in diverse contexts.

Solomon, R. C. (2005). Emotional leadership, emotional integrity. In The quest for moral leaders. Edward Elgar Publishing. Zoller, K., Lahera, A., Normore, A. (2015). It ’s not just what you say. Journal of Staff Development. 36(5), 34-38.

This paper reports the tensions between school principals’ values and interpreting and implementing new policy and rules during the pandemic in Victoria, Australia. Our research on successful school leadership has demonstrated the importance of values in shaping principal leadership (Day & Leithwood, 2007; Mulford, 2007). Successful leadership have a range of values that include basic values (respect for others and valuing others); general moral values (empathy, social justice, equity); professional values (personal responsibility, assumptions about student learning); and social and political values (all members of the school community need to be supported) (David et al. 2006) We all have values, but successful leaders can articulate them to their school community and demonstrate them through their behaviour and actions. To be authentic leaders, principals must show their values and behaviour are aligned. The pandemic created a new environment where technological, social, economic, and political forces combined to create new challenges for principal values. The impact of the pandemic in Australia was highly variable. Some states and territories were relatively unaffected while other states suffered significant disruption. In Melbourne, Victoria, the whole community were put under severe restrictions on movement and social interaction (Duckett, Stobart & Hunter, 2021; Macreadie, 2022). for long periods stretching over two years. Different authorities reacted by introducing new rules and policies that changed regularly. Unfortunately, authorities in each state of Australia developed their own rules, for example, closing state borders and restricting the movement of people. The Commonwealth Government also introduced new policies and rules that were often in conflict with state governments. In schools there were often inconsistencies of rules between government and non-government schools, and between school systems. Schools were closed and reopened depending in recommendations of different authorities. Principals became the main actors in interpreting the rules and guiding their students, teachers, and the broader school community through a new rules-based regime which was often in conflict with their values. The paper reports the tensions between values and implementation of rules more detail with numerous examples collected from interviews with principals.

Duckett, S., Stobart, A., and Hunter, J. 2021. What should be in Victoria’s school reopening plan. The Age, September 15, 2021 Macreadie, I. 2022. Reflections from Melbourne, the world’s most locked down city, through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond Microbiology Australia 43(1), 3-4, doi.org/10.1071/MA22002 Day, C. Leithwood, K. (2007). (Eds.), Successful Principal Leadership in Times of Change. An International Perspective. Studies in Educational Leadership Volume 5, Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Gurr, D., Drysdale., & Mulford, B. (2005). Successful principal leadership: Australian case studies, Journal of Educational Administration, 43(6), 539-551. Mulford, W. R. (2007). Overview of research on Australian Educational Leadership 2001-2005 Australian Council of Educational Leaders (ACEL), Winmalee, N.S.W.: ACEL. Mulford, B., & Silins, H. (2009). Revised models & conceptualisation of successful school principalship in Tasmania. In B. Mulford, & B. Edmunds (2009). Successful school principalship in Tasmania. Launceston, Tasmania: Faculty of Education, University of Tasmania. Moos, L., Johansson, O., Day, C. (2011). (Eds.), How School Principals Sustain Success over Time. International Perspectives. Studies in Educational Leadership Series 14. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. David G., Drysdale. L & Mulford, B. (2006) Models of successful principal leadership, School Leadership & Management, 26:4, 371-395, DOI: 10.1080/13632430600886921

What happens when an organization’s “fairness technologies” fail? When no matter the structures, policies, and procedures instituted, organizational fair play is undermined and the status quo reproduced? When management co-opts these structures and policies to maintain uneven relationships with employees? When management foments and exploits employee angst and insecurity to frustrate the collective pursuit of conditions conducive to well-being. This paper draws on experiences of scholar-administrators preparing educational leaders to “manage”—to facilitate work through the adoption and implementation of organizational policies and procedures, norms and practices—in an educational field re-formed through neoliberal policies and the politics of austerity. Through our programs, we seek to engender knowledge, skills, and dispositions allowing aspiring leaders to navigate pressures created by the “coercive laws of competition” (Marx, 1976) in ways that allow for individual and collective thriving. In our focus on management-employee relations, we incorporate insights from Capital brought forward in recent work by Lyng (1990; 2004; 2014), Sjoberg (1989; 1998; 2004), Mattei (2022), Chibber (2022; 2022) which offer insights into conditions of austerity and precarity, alienation and resignation, compliance and control. Centering material accounts and informed by insights from the cultural turn, these scholars enrich our understanding of how the politics of austerity impinge on social relations and the interplay of class, race, gender, etc. The academic literature on “edgework” is often referenced to Stephen Lyng’s (1990) theorization of individual risk-taking in response to experiences of alienation in late capitalism. Here, we incorporate Sjoberg’s formulation of “intellectual edgework” to consider corporate risk-shifting to individuals. We discuss “edgework as praxis” to: 1) Understand how conditions of precarity and austerity contribute to employee alienation and resignation expressed in workplace aggression, “quiet quitting,” “quiet firing”, etc. 2) Consider the possibilities and limits of managerial responses through the adoption and implementation of organizational policies and procedures, norms and practices. 3) Reconsider leadership as strategic engagement within intensely contradictory spaces that demand radical empathy. Edgework praxis is highlighted in the interrogation of fairness technologies encountered through our work with refugee communities in the U.S., program development in Uganda; and as administrators in a community-engaged urban university. We reflect on implications for ethical leadership and the preparation of ethical leaders within the academy, primary and secondary schools, and organizations generally. In this way, we seek to prepare the sort of ethical managers we would like to work for and hope to be.

Chibber, V. (2022). The class matrix: Social theory after the cultural turn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chibber, V. (2022). Confronting capitalism: How the world works and how to change it. New York, NY: Verso. Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A social psychological anlaysis of voluntary risk taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95(4), 851-886. Lyng, S. (2004). Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking. New York, NY: Routledge. Lyng, S. (2014). Action and edgework: Risk taking and reflexivity in late modernity. European Journal of Social Theory, 17(4), 443-460. Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy. New York, NY: Penguin. Mattei, C. (2022). The capital order: How economists invented austerity and paved the way to fascism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Sjoberg, G. (1989). Notes on the life of a tortured optimist. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 25(4), 471-485. Sjoberg, G. (1998). Democracy, science, and institutionalized dissent: Toward a social justification for academic tenure. Sociological Perspectives, 41(4), 697-721. Sjoberg, G. (2004). Intellectual risk taking, organizations, and academic freedom and tenure. In S. Lyng (ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk-taking. New York, NY: Routledge.