Towards educational change leadership as a discursive practice——or should all school leaders

1. Towards educational change leadership as a discursive practice——or should all school leaders read Foucault? PAT THOMSON, CHRISTINE HALL and KEN JONES (2012) Discourse analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lzSWsKvAqpQ&list=TL44SJfoYTiIg

2. Educational reforms and limitations on change Leadership discourses simultaneously: Implement Deconstruct Disrupt Old, existing dominant discourses that inhibit change http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcFBp8l1hO8 min2.28 domin discourse

3. What leaders Can and cannot change Why the change leadership cannot do Change leadership defined as a discursive practice

4. If educational history and reform policies in a country or school system is against the leaders’ desires for change, change will not be achieved

5. Leadership: formal designated positions or roles Practices are patterns of everyday activities that the leadership engages in (Practices can be described as the routinized ways in which ‘bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated and the world is understood’ (Reckwitz 2002: 250)on (p 157. )

6. Foucault (1972,1981, 1991), discourse can be understood as texts and utterances but also as ways of thinking and sense-making and as a behaviour, relationship, interaction and arrangement of signs and material objects. Discourses, therefore are not what is spoken, but they are also actions (p.157 of Thompson)

7. Dominant discourse: knowledge as fixed universal parcel of things Vs Knowledge as contestable, localized, re-contextualized, co-constructed Student as a vessel to be filled by teacher Vs Constructivist and negotiated pedagogies, includes creativity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE creativity 18min e.g.‘The contract is that everyone, including the teacher, agrees to cooperate, collaborate, consider and create. That’s something that the team have come up with and I think that is really key. It shifts the relationship between the teacher and the class: so it’s not something that the teacher delivers-- it’s learning that everyone can explore. This can be unnerving for some teachers because they don’t quite know where it is going…. notion of curiosity and social learning and understanding the world from the perspective of others’ p166

8. 1. Foucault suggested that people do not speak discourses, they and their actions are spoken by them. 2. it is problematic for leaders to see only policy as available for deconstruction, rather than also one’s own practices. It is equally risky to work as if discursive deconstruction is an event, rather than a practice p. 167 Dominant discourse is totalizing, if counter-discourses are not allowed to emerge Counter discourses disrupt and contradict the dominant discourse. But counter discourses cannot be simply made to take over from those that is dominant. Counter discourses need to confront the dominant that continue to exist and attempt to limit them. (p 168) Teaching using words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLje8QRrwg Counter discourses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQcE-ZDjZo (1.3min)

9. Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. What exists? epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. What is knowledge?

10. De- and re-construct a way of being in the world as a leader This would build a critical orientation to the educational work of leading, and develop this kind of thinking a habit as a part of one’s being.