CIRCLE ExpandED | Dr. Gerald LeTendre | Evolving Conceptions of Teacher Leadership in World Culture

Evolving Conceptions of Teacher Leadership in World Culture

November 7, 2023, 12pm-1pm

Gerald K. LeTendre, Ph.D.
H.L. Batschelet Chair of Education (EDLDR)
Education Policy Studies
Penn State University

“Leadership” as a construct has played a central role in globally diffusing educational reforms of the last few decades. Both “accountability” and decentralization movements assume that more active and informed “leadership” in schools will result in higher test scores, e.g., better school performance. This vision of leadership has roots in a cultural logic of western individualism and rationalized educational environments dedicated to individual human capital development. In this institutional logic, teachers' roles as workers is taken-for-granted, and so movements to promote both teacher leadership, lifelong or workplace learning, and teacher professionalism become necessary. The role of the teacher leader is radically different in 1) older cultural logics that emphasize a diffuse outcome of education (e.g., bildung in Germany and shido in Japan); 2) national cultural logics that emphasize schools as engines of national identity formation. In these alternative logics, teachers are taken-for-granted “leaders” with far-ranging duties and authority that extends beyond classroom walls. Overtime, a preponderance of science has come to indicate the central role that teachers play in creating effective student learning environments as well as the impact of organizational routines and rationales that support workplace learning. This requires new reforms that attempt to reformulate schools as “learning ecosystems,” “learning organizations” or organizations that support “workplace learning.” In this evolving world culture of school reform, teacher leadership becomes a “floating signifier” that can take on multiple meanings depending on the context and aims of reforms.

ExpandED: Broadening the Understanding of Contemporary Issues in Education and Policy

The Texas Tech University Educational Leadership Policy faculty in collaboration with the Center for Innovative Research in Change, Leadership, and Education (CIRCLE) invite you to join us for our virtual brown bag series, “ExpandED: Broadening the Understanding of Contemporary Issues in Education and Policy.” Featuring researchers from the College of Education and various institutions across the country, the aim of this series is to bring together students, faculty, and researchers at Texas Tech and beyond to disseminate knowledge that is of immediate relevance to educational leadership and policy and facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas across multiple institutions.

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