School leadership: principals’ experiences of change and reward.
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Date
2009
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Abstract
This study explores principals’ experiences of school leadership. Through synthesis of varying
definitions of leadership, the conceptualisation of the three foci of leadership namely,
“person, practice and context” offers an initial organisational framework for this study. The
democratic South Africa provides the context of change which is operationalised around issues
of the pass rate, desegregation and democratic school governance. The existing landscape of
leadership theory is then grafted with the South African context of change to set up the
theoretical framing of this study. This study is positioned differently from dominant
leadership studies in that the leader (principal) is fore-grounded rather than the “practice”
of leadership. An interpretive paradigm is invoked to facilitate the acknowledgement,
activation and inter-woveness of the researcher’s dual positioning as researcher and as school
principal. This ambivalent positioning creates a methodological paradox that simultaneously
privileges and imprisons the production of knowledge. Coherent with the methodological choice
of narrative methodologies, an award winning literary play “Copenhagen” is used as a creative
representational device. This play highlights issues of “personal, political, moral and
scientific” challenges which become key pivotal points with which to connect all the chapters
of this study. Six principals of previously disadvantaged schools, facing similar challenges of
leadership participate in this study. Narrative methodologies guides both the data production
and data analysis strategies. It also intentionally focuses on “personal, political and moral”
challenges. Lengthy interviews produce richly detailed co-constructed mindscapes of leadership.
The voices of principals and their stories are represented as individualised “reconstructed
career narratives”. These provide complex, themed and descriptive understandings of leadership
at the first level. At the second level, the researcher’s voice becomes dominant while meshing
together data, theory and first level analysis to provide cross-case analysis providing deeper
insights into experiences of school leadership. These insights challenge the dominant
theoretical landscape of leadership. The main finding of this study suggests that principals
“personal” experiences re-define relationships between key components of the context of change
and in this way determine understandings of leadership. Principals consider the pass rate to be
most important at a systemic level. However, their “personal/biographic” experiences with
regard to “validation” and “professional experience” mediate that consideration and influence
particular understandings of leadership. Similarly, principals’ “personal” experiences together
with institutional histories play a significant role in understanding leadership in relation to
issues of desegregation (geography). Principals’ “personal” experiences also determine how
democratic school governance is understood with regard to accountability, consultation and
agenda constructions. Finally, leadership is understood to be intricately linked to the concept
of reward. The “scientific” construct of a Trefoil knot is used to develop an explanatory model
and posit the basis of a “Relational Reward Theory” of understanding leadership. The thesis
concludes with a discussion of the implications of pushing back contextual, methodological and
theoretical boundaries in understanding school leadership.
Description
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2009.
Keywords
School principals--KwaZulu-Natal., Educational leadership--KwaZulu-Natal., Theses--Education.