REIMAGINING EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP THROUGH MOBILIZING ARENDT’S “PUBLIC SPACE”
REIMAGINING EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIP THROUGH MOBILIZING ARENDT’S “PUBLIC SPACE”

Summary/Abstract: An accumulating body of scholarship argues that the prevailing model of school leadership has a pervasive instrumental rationality with an accompanying strong sense of ownership and identification of the principal with the school’s success or otherwise. Differing views are seen as resistance with the principal acting to promote harmony through contrived collegiality rather than opening up conflicting views. Such an understanding of educational leadership does not support spaces for teachers to engage in serious intellectual inquiry. Educational leadership can be reconsidered as cultivating the conditions for a dialogic teacher “public space,” which is linked more to working with teachers to theorize and critically examine what they do. In such a space, teachers are acting “in concert” as respected partners in the educational process, through the courage to exercise judgment, in a space where the views and contributions of each teacher matter. In this paper, I identify why the resources of Hannah Arendt are useful to consider an alternative vision for educational leadership. Hannah Arendt identifies the capacity for humans to make a difference in the world through awareness of other perspectives and the plurality of the human condition.

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