Understanding Educational Leadership: Critical Perspectives and Approaches

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Understanding Educational Leadership guides you through critical perspectives and approaches across the world, taking in the global north and south, and explores the ways in which educational leadership is currently understood, theorised, researched, modelled and practised. The book also covers contemporary issues including gender, sexual identity and race, as well as topics such as governance, performativity and corporatisation. It brings together evidence and ideas that illuminate the power structures and relations in educational leaders, leading and leadership and helps you to consider the impact on policy and practice, and to think about changes needed to mitigate the issues identified. The book showcases a wide range of theorists, including Bourdieu, Foucault and Fraser. Its impressive scope includes analyses of collectivist, neoliberal and historical influences on educational leadership. It explores forensically leadership styles, with an explicit focus on distributed, instructional, democratic, autocratic, laissez-faire and organisational forms. Carefully curated by the editors, the world-leading contributors draw on their wealth of knowledge about research and practice to provide you with an overview of educational leadership today, looking at global research, evidence, arguments and conceptualisations. Each chapter is written in an engaging and inspiring way, following a consistent approach to help you to develop your understanding in each of the areas covered. Full pedagogical features throughout include chapter summaries, key questions, case studies, questions for readers and further reading suggestions with questions on key texts. A companion website provides links to open-access outputs, research-project outcomes, and networking seminars, conferences with links to local, national and global events and connections.

Reviews

Understanding Educational Leadership is exactly the kind of critically oriented book that is so necessary today. It is insightful, clear, and provides the reader with crucial ways of both understanding and interrupting the models of educational leadership that are dominant in too many places today. * Michael W. Apple, John Bascom Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA *
Essential reading! Understanding Educational Leadership: Critical Perspectives and Approaches is a must-read for anyone interested in school today, anyone and everyone. This book represents a major leap forward in our understanding of how schools work and who they best work for and why. This book brings together in one volume the best thinking of the best scholars in educational leadership today. Its comprehensive, deep and thorough. Itll likely be foundational in our thinking going forward, something solid upon which we can build. * Duncan Waite, Professor of Education and Community Leadership, Texas State University, USA *
A highly educational book, which really does promote a deeper understanding of educational leadership through critical perspectives. Its scope and contributions are impressive, offering insights from around the world, covering diverse historical and contemporary issues, while encouraging the reader to reflect critically on their own experiences and practices. * Phil Taylor, Assistant Professor in Educational Leadership and Management, University of Nottingham, UK *
This important book offers the first sustained attempt at a comprehensive account of educational leadership from a broadly critical perspectives stance. Among its many contributions is a deep challenge to leader-centric views of leadership with its associated focus on narrow views of leader agency. Instead, the books contributors highlight the importance of context as vital for framing the causal fabric in which leadership is enacted, a fabric that necessarily includes wider social forces. The book will be essential reading for researchers, students, policy-makers and practitioners in educational leadership. * Colin W. Evers, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of New South Wales, Australia *
Leadership is a contested concept that emerged along with neoliberal capitalism and the logic and language of the private sector. These international scholars explore leadership as a site of struggle over what it would mean for public schools to become truly public, equitable, anti-racist, caring, and democratic spaces and how we might reappropriate leadership toward these ends. * Gary Anderson, Professor of Educational Leadership, New York University, USA *

Author Bio

Steven J. Courtney is Senior Lecturer in Management and Leadership at the University of Manchester, UK. Helen M. Gunter is Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester, UK, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Richard Niesche is Associate Professor in Educational Leadership in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Tina Trujillo is an Associate Professor at UC Berkeleys Graduate School of Education, USA, and the Faculty Director of the Principal Leadership Institute.