Towards educational change leadership as adiscursive practice——or should all school leadersread Foucault?Pat Thomson, Christine Hall And Ken Jones (2012)

Discourse analysis: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=lzSWsKvAqpQ&list=TL44SJfoYTiIg

Educational reforms and limitations on change

Leadership discourses simultaneously:

ImplementDeconstructDisrupt

Old, existing dominant discourses that inhibit change

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcFBp8l1hO8 min2.28 domin discourse

What leaders Can and cannot change

Why the change leadership cannot do

Change leadership defined as a discursive practice

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

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. )

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)

Dominant discourse: knowledge as fixed universal parcel of thingsVsKnowledge as contestable, localized, re-contextualized, co-constructedStudent as a vessel to be filled by teacherVsConstructivist and negotiated pedagogies, includes creativityhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE creativity18mine.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. Itshifts 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

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, ratherthan a practice p. 167Dominant discourse is totalizing, if counter-discourses are not allowed to emergeCounter 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: (8m)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VLje8QRrwgCounter discourses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXQcE-ZDjZo (1.3min)

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?

De- and re-construct a way of being in theworld 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.