Standing on the pavement talking critically about educational leadership

Introduction

Alan Bennett (1997) writes:

“13^th May, Colin Haycraft and I are chatting on the pavement when a man comes past wheeling a basket of shopping, ‘Out of the way, you so-called intellectuals’ he snarls, ‘blocking the ****ing way’. It's curious that it is the intellectual that annoys, though it must never be admitted to be the genuine article but always ‘pseudo’ or ‘so called’. It is, of course, only in England that ‘intellectual’ is an insult anyway” (218).

Education professionals internationally have demonstrated that a workforce educated to master's level is central to achieving world leading student experiences and outcomes (see Sahlberg, 2015), and short term breakthroughs have been made in postgraduate education in England (see Goodlad and Hull, 2014). However, teachers around the world have experienced ordinary and commentary criticism as verbal and physical violence (see Compton and Weiner, 2008), and in this article I intend focusing on the anti-intellectual kulturkampf evidenced in the condemnation of teachers by shoppers in No. 10 Downing Street through to homes in England. Educational professionals asking questions within localised policymaking in schools can be regarded as irritatingly unwelcome through to seditious luddites, and so teachers have been reformed (see Helsby, 1999) and disposed of (Courtney and Gunter, 2015). In addition, researchers have been labelled as: “the blob”, “enemies of promise” and “Marxists” (see Gove, 2013); and researchers who have criticised education policy have been labelled “woke” and excluded from policymaking (Malnick, 2021). Notably reforms have created a field of ‘educational’ leadership as a corporate brand that demands speedy functionality based on ordinary and commentator criticality regarding what does and does not work. Professionals are required to act as the annoyed shopper who asks themselves/others to get out of the way in order to enthusiastically deliver on a modernised pavement (e.g., Astle and Ryan, 2008). In contrast, critical research asks educational professionals to think differently about the pavement – what is it, where is it going, do we need it? If we do, then who is on it and who needs to be on it? In addition, what alternative pavements are there and/or do we need? Such criticality requires professionals to be educated local policymakers, to know and understand knowledge production, and to engage in ‘educative’ leadership, and so relationally exchange ideas, facts, and theories in the public realm (Gunter and Courtney, 2020).

In this article, I argue that causing an obstruction by standing on the pavement is vital to educative leadership. I make this statement based on my own professional biography, and having recently transitioned to a new role as Professor Emerita I have been reflecting on what it means to have supervised doctoral projects (Gunter, 2020). There are published examples of education professionals talking about their experiences of doing criticality (e.g., Courtney et al., 2018; Rayner et al., 2015; Taysum and Gunter, 2008), and here I am making a contribution to this body of work by engaging in relational professional review and evaluation with six of my EdD and PhD graduates (coded 01–06). I asked these colleagues to provide a short narrative about their understanding of what critical research means for their practice. All of these graduates except 05 and 06 have worked in schools; at the time they wrote the narrative all had organisational leader roles: 02 in a school; 04 as a consultant; 01, 03, 05, and 06 in higher education. I have read and analysed their narrative texts through the metaphor of the pavement, and then checked my interpretations with these colleagues.

Critical researchers

For doctoral graduates developing as critical researchers have a number of features.

Challenging the self:

“I like the idea that the term ‘critical’ refers to the capacity to inquire ‘against the grain’ … because my research was intrinsically linked to practice in schools, taking up a critical position as a researcher after years of teaching meant for me that I did have to go against the grain, and question my own ‘taken for granted’ entrenched ideas, knowledge and position…” (01).

Understanding and explanation:

“Research that is socially critical in nature is characterised by the way in which the outcomes of the research are used to challenge existing practice through explicit analysis of a situation. One of the advantages of socially critical research is that it does not take institutions or power and social relationships at face value but instead questions the nature of these relationships and examines the processes of change affecting them” (05).

Recognising plurality in knowledge production:

“The taught sessions in the first two years of the EdD programme caused an initial shock, as I had to reconsider what I thought I knew about school teaching, leadership, governance and organisations. From then on, it was a case of reading, listening, thinking and revising the assumptions that I had developed over years of working in those fields. I began with some knowledge of how power works at institutional level, but I learned to critique that knowledge and to understand better how power works in policy enactment” (04).

Making a contribution:

“Undertaking research in an area relatively bereft of theory (social justice and admissions to the university) allowed me to make a number of critical conceptual contributions to my field. Taking a critical position meant being able to ‘step back’ from everyday practice, examine and apply literatures from philosophy and educational sociology and suggest new and more challenging policy positions outside of the current and narrow ‘received wisdom’ and policies within my field” (06).

The interplay between agency and structural location:

“I have been interested in questions of equity and identity since my earliest Master's work in marginalised sexual identity and school leadership. This obviously in some ways follows from my own biography as a former practising professional in a secondary school whose role was constructed as leadership. However, I see that there was nothing inevitable about adopting a critical approach to explore these issues, and so taking up this position has meant finding an epistemic and axiological community whose thinking and writing have enabled me to focus on what increasingly seems to me to be the key factors in educational leadership and policy: the identification and theorisation of power relations, agency and structure, and how these interplay with what professionals do and whom they understand themselves to be” (03).

These professionals have developed insights about agency for practice and the organisational conditions that structure that practice in ways that are often not witnessed beyond the doctoral classroom and supervision session. Some do write about their doctoral journey (e.g., Evans, 1999), but the anti-intellectual kulturkampf tends to encourage victory stories (e.g., Stubbs, 2003) and silences critical researcher biographies.

The six graduates provided narratives that outline the development of a social justice agenda because: “critical researchers seek to counter the social practices that produce marginalization and subjugation by educating and enlightening those who unwittingly participate in their own oppression” (Cherryholmes, 1999: 35). Consequently, critical research is different from the rationality of positivism that “provides an objectively true account of how the world functions” (Fay, 1975: 21), because it asks questions about whose truth dominates; and it is different from the subjectivity of interpretation that is based on “the intensions which actors have in doing whatever it is they are doing” (Fay, 1975: 73), because it asks questions about how those intensions are structured through power processes outside of the actor's purview. Critical research is enlightening through recognition of “felt dissatisfaction” and how the exercise of power generates tensions and troubling contradictions, and so it “arises out of the problems of everyday life, and is constructed with an eye towards solving them” (Fay, 1975: 109). This requires educational professionals to review the actuality and purposes of the pavement:

“The effect was to make me a lot more uncomfortable – feeling as if there were no certainties, no truth. Everything, including my identity, was in flux. But then, over time I learned to live with, and to embrace and enjoy the constant change, the questioning, the fact that I had the capacity to ask questions and to ‘go against the grain’. This interplay between theory, and practice, situated in a nested set of contexts at levels from macro to micro, really helped me to be a more thoughtful and more reflective practitioner, as well as developing my research skills” (01).

Standing on the pavement

Dialogue with the self is evident in how educational professionals as doctoral students think about their uncomfortable but productive experiences:

“I learned to situate the reading I was doing in relevant political and institutional contexts, rather than just looking at the one paper as a standalone piece; that was limiting my understanding. And this was hard too; it made me move out of a cosy place where I had been lazily festering, and where my thinking about education had been allowed to sit unchallenged for years” (01).

Taken-for-granted interpretations of the world are therefore open to in-depth scrutiny, where doctoral research reveals power structures and processes behind and within the commonplace. Working full-time within an organisation (with work that is undertaken outside of the working day) requires particular occupational positioning with colleagues, but at the same time working part-time as a doctoral student (with studies that are undertaken within and outside of the working day) requires distinctive researcher positioning in relation to colleagues. How we learn as we position and reposition, how we recognise and name that learning, and how we negotiate that learning with our colleagues (as well as partners and families) are integral to relating research design and processes with the researcher.

Studying the pavement

Doing a job as a job is different from ethically negotiating access to undertake research within and for a professional context. At a very simple level, a colleague has to deliver organisational goals, but they do not have to participate in another colleague's research project. At the same time, a doctoral student does not have data unless colleague says or writes it, but they may not communicate it because their colleague knows it. There is experiential learning about what this means in practice:

“Developing, or starting to develop, a critical stance was much harder work, and more time consuming and cognitively stretching than I had thought it might be. To try and develop and facilitate this criticality in myself, I developed a technique which I called ‘naïve questioning’… For example, one teacher said to me ‘obviously I can’t move the desks in someone else's classroom’. In my head, I thought I knew why – but I was careful to ask ‘why not?’” (01).

These researchers are recognising that they are “liquid researchers” (Thomson and Gunter, 2011), where they are simultaneously insiders and outsiders in order to develop strangeness within and about the organisation. These are not new issues (see Carr and Kemmis, 2005), where research design must be robust and ultimately defendable through peer review (by thesis examiners, and by journal editors), but it is fluid in regard to the actual doing of the design and delivery of data collection and analysis.

Redesigning the pavement

Educational organisations are located in a policy context where change is presented as rationally secure but where the dynamics of interpretation and enactment are often messy and unclear: “taking a critical approach highlighted more sharply ways in which ‘what is possible’ in my field was curtailed at both the institutional and macro levels in which power operates” (06). There are a number of issues involved, where the collection of numbers regarding the individual and organisational performance of students and teachers (e.g., National Student Survey in Higher Education in the UK; or the Ofsted inspection of schools in England) may be forms of disciplined enquiry but such performance technologies are not independent primary research. However, the context in which research access takes place is shaped by a policy context that prioritises such data, and independent research is threatened:

“The principal challenges I have faced concern how my work as a critical researcher is seen and valued in a meso-/macro-working environment where performance metrics count for a great deal, and which arbitrarily favour, for example, repeated large grant awards and evidence of impact beyond that on the field. Concerning funding, for instance, there are certainly fewer opportunities to ask questions beyond ‘what works?’” (03).

Consequently, productive professional agency is possible in difficult times, and so this demonstrates the actuality of educative leadership as a developmental process. This is not something that can be trained or implemented, but is an ongoing intellectual engagement with socially critical values and reflexive change. Such contributions to the design and purposes of the pavement does not only make a difference in practice but also to a field of knowledge. Knowing the field, and examining the dynamics of field knowledge claims means that a researcher can make the case for an empirical and conceptual contribution. There is no point in doing research unless the researcher is clear about what difference the research will and does make to what is known and is worth knowing more about.

Doctoral research projects are located in fields of knowledge that are organisationally located as ‘institutes’, ‘centres’, ‘schools’, and ‘faculties’, where there is codified knowledge regarding what is known and how it is known methodologically. Designing a research proposal and submitting it to a potential supervisor means that the researcher is seeking to locate within a specific field and what that means in terms of the intellectual and methodological resources that are codified and debated:

“Critical scholarship is challenging intellectual work, and so I have grown a great deal as a scholar through my engagement with the thinking tools I need to undertake it. I have made important connections with colleagues internationally who do critical work and who have helped to develop my own scholarship in new directions. I have found a home, intellectually and axiologically, at the University of [name] which variously provides both security and productive challenge” (03).

Summary

Alan Bennett's experience of being characterised as in the way of the angry shopper speaks to how professionals as critical researchers are regarded when they practice educative leadership. However, what the accounts of the six graduates show is the realisation that doing critical research is not about ordinary and commentary forms of criticism but is about revealing the location and exercise of power in regard to who controls the design and direction of the pavement, and who is allowed to position and practice on it. This is an analysis that goes beyond these respondents and their contextual location in educational services in England, and is open to examination in a range of national systems. Over 25 years of supervising 38 doctoral projects has taught me that standing in someone's way is necessary for challenging who the shopper is and why they characterise certain people and ideas as barriers to their progress. It also raises questions about how professional education through doctoral projects is not something that all professionals may wish to engage in. Hence the educative potential of a doctoral student within a workforce is enabling for all professionals regarding what is read, said, and debated within localised policymaking.