Leadership in Educational Studies: Lessons from Established Leaders

Abstract

In this paper, I want to share some lessons that I have learned about leadership in educational studies— both from existing theory and research and from my work over the last fifteen years soliciting and publishing autobiographical personal statements of the leaders in many areas of educational studies including history, philosophy, sociology, curriculum, social education, critical pedagogy, gender studies and others. I offer these lessons as informal suggestions for further research on knowledge leadership in education and as useful guidance for young scholars aspiring to knowledge leadership roles. After focusing on knowledge leadership, I take note of some existing theories and suggest that they fail adequately to consider the temporal dimension—the conditions that make for leadership in particular time periods including the present. I then use Kuhn’s (1970) paradigm theory as a general frame to account for the temporal factor. I associate knowledge leadership with the shaping and carrying forward of emerging paradigms. I use existing theories and Kuhn’s paradigm theory as searchlights to explore recent leadership in two fields of educational studies: philosophy of education and curriculum studies. These explorations are preliminary, but could be readily extended as a useful database on contemporary leaders in these and other subfields of educational studies fields exists.1 Because educational studies as a field aims to add to the understanding and improvement of educational practice, work in the field can be conceived as researchers taking resources (theories, methods, empirical research results) from the research literature and bringing them to existing problems. These may be problems in current research, but unless the field remains isolated in its ivory tower, its cumulative work must eventually engage practitioners (teachers, supervisors, curriculum designers, policy leaders) and lead to practical improvement—resolving problems of practical life.