The Struggle for Collective Leadership: Thinking and Practice in a Multi-campus School Setting

Introduction

This article draws first on a critical review of school leadership research and then the data produced from an in-depth ethnographic case study of leading teacher leadership in a multi-campus secondary school (Ebony River College, pseudonym) in Victoria, Australia. There is no universal policy definition in Australia of a multi-campus school or how it is configured in practice. At a superficial level, a multi-campus school can be defined as a school with more than one campus. What prompted this research was local and international policy interest in the notion of ‘distributed leadership’ and the silence about its relations with the concepts of change and power. An aim of the research then was to try and understand the contextual complexities, contradictions and conditions in which contemporary leadership in a multi-campus school is conceived. A further aim was to try and identify and understand how barriers to the practical realization of ‘collective’ forms of leadership, such as ‘distributed’ are being realized at the case study school and engaged with.

The central argument of the article is that while the proposition for collective ideas and practice of leadership in both the literature and fieldwork comments of school leaders (teachers, principal and assistant leaders) may signal change or the need for change, how this comes to life in particular conditions (if at all) is not value or context free.

The literature review and case study research on which this article draws suggests that what constitutes ‘collective leadership’ is also going to be historically, socially and culturally contextualized. These contexts can shore up the survival and advancement of particular leadership conditions, values, beliefs, ideas and practices and can work against transformative change. In this article, such change is encapsulated from the literature review in moral understandings of leadership concerned with struggles over contradictions and conflicts in values, beliefs and the interests of all.

It is for these reasons, and in light of what others have identified as the a-historical nature of much leadership writing and research (Leo and Barton, 2006; Richmon and Allison, 2003), that the focus in this article from the ethnographic study is on the school’s inception and the affects this had on contemporary ideas and practices of leading teacher leadership. A major conclusion from the research was that the way the school was conceived and configured by bureaucrats and school leaders was a factor in laying the foundation for how contemporary leading teachers (a formal position of teacher leadership in Victoria, Australia that is secured based at least an interview, not just a person’s years of service), and in particular those teachers with a cross-college leadership responsibility were defined and configured in practice.

The Study

Consistent with the purpose and nature of critical ethnographic studies (O'Reilly, 2005), a number of research processes underpinned the study draw on in this article. Beyond the iterative development of the critical literature review, the fieldwork processes also included the keeping of a research journal prior to and during the 2-year fieldwork period; the research survey cooperation of 32 school leaders from eight Victorian government multi-campus schools (10 principal class: principals and assistant principals—4 female, 6 male; 21 leading teachers—14 female, 7 male; 1 unstated); the interview cooperation of seven education system leaders (2 Victorian and 4 New South Wales education department leaders and 1 Victorian secondary principal association leader); 17 leading teacher (10 female, 7 male); and 8 principal class (3 female, 5 male) leaders from the case study multi-campus school.

The interviews took between 1 and 2 hours and, in several cases, were spread over two sittings. An interview guide and accompanying letter of introduction was developed from the analysis of the pilot and literature review phases of the fieldwork and provided for comment to the school leaders being interviewed prior to the face-to-face interviews. Below are the four areas from the analysis of literature and data from the pilot study phase that formed a suggested focus for the interviews. The letter of introduction stressed to school leaders not to feel constrained by the areas or the order in which they appeared in the guide:

A key purpose of the interviews was to learn more about what leading teachers think and do in the context of a multi-campus school setting. The interviews with the campus principals and deputy principals, and college principal used the same guide but sought their views about leading teacher leadership at the college from their perspective as a principal.

In addition to these research processes, two observations in 2007 of whole-school leading teacher meetings were conducted and more than seven field-site visits to discuss the research phases with staff from the school were made. In total, the views from 64 educational leaders were formally sought to inform the development of this study. Prior to the commencement of the study, formal ethics approval from the Victorian Department of Education was sought and granted.

Comments were sorted and thematically analysed following each interview and then comparatively across other interviews and in relation to issues and themes raised in the research literature and pilot survey responses. Iteratively the categories became more abstract (Liamputtong and Ezzy, 2005). The qualitative software program NVivo7 assisted with the data management of themes, annotations and exploring new ways to analyse the text, such as the use of the word frequency function of the program. Collectively, these processes allowed the fieldwork comments to be approached from multiple perspectives.

Theoretical Framework

Taking a critical policy and research analysis of distributed leadership, a key aspect from the case study reported on in this article is the inception of the Ebony River College and the consequences this had on the development of leading teacher concepts and practice. The analysis required a theoretical framework that could cope with the contested and contextual nature of ‘distributed leadership’.

In addition to the school leadership research, inclusive education literature and engagement with theories of power from Bourdieu (1990) were also reviewed. This contrast of topics and sociological framing of the issues of power and change in the literature but with their overlapping themes of inclusion and exclusion helped orientate the analysis to take a relational and reflexive approach to what was and was not being said in the literature and fieldwork analysis. To this end, the simple but compelling questions, ‘Who’s in?’ ‘Who’s out?’ and ‘How come?’ from Slee’s (2006) writing about inclusive education were most instructive. Slee’s questions provided a framework through which to ask about the fundamental principles and assumptions in the research literature and fieldwork upon which ideas and practices of leadership are based. Unlike Slee’s (2006) use of such questions, I am using them in the context of inclusive social and cultural notions of school leadership.

This thinking in fields other than school leadership, such as inclusive education and disability studies offered fresh perspectives to identify and critically examine power and its different manifestations (Ainscow and West, 2006; Barton and Slee, 1999). This could be seen through, for example, categorization, language, voices, silences and the dynamics of its relationship to the concepts of transformative change and leadership.

Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘symbolic power’ were used to help focus the case study research on understandings and forms of power. Bourdieu conceptualizes power as fields of social and cultural struggles. He questions domination through the consequences of the exercise of symbolic power and the ways these are masked and revealed in the deeply structured cultural nature at a society, or institutional level (Bourdieu, 1990; Grace, 2002; Webb et al., 2002). Bourdieu’s work assisted in the study with the complexities of what is a persuasive assertion in the educational leadership literature that leadership is a contextualized social practice (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007).

Language, in this case ‘leadership’, is used as a medium through which to communicate a particular view of the world. It is a view that ‘exerts itself only when a social space or a power is perceived’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 112–113). Language itself is not power. From a critical perspective, symbolic power raises the stakes in who defines leadership and for what purposes—two key political issues in current debates around the need and purpose of standards for school leadership (Ingvarson and Anderson, 2007). Viewed in this way, Bourdieu (1990) asserts that it is the perception and use of language that can bring to life structure as a form of control that may otherwise be present but invisible.

A possible consequence then of symbolic power is that those positioned favourably by the use of it, accept that it legitimizes a cultural norm for their relations with others (Grace, 2002). By naming the activities of some as leadership, then by association this suggests that other activities or the activities of some others are not leadership. Language then as a form of power can be used as, ‘a battleground and a weapon’ (Webb et al., 2002: 95): it can legitimize ideas and practice making them less open to challenge and change.

In these circumstances, inclusion is reduced to being taken as ‘good’ and exclusion reduced to being taken as ‘bad’ (Sayed et al., 2003). This fails to recognize how inclusive and exclusive ideas and practice can simultaneously co-exist (Gunter and Ribbins, 2003). This suggests that a more productive analysis of leadership ideas and practice might be to identify and attempt to understand the ways in which people are disadvantaged because of inclusion and exclusion in different conditions.

Literature Review: Challenging Understandings of Collective School Leadership

For some years now, as Gronn (2003) puts it, leadership has been in ‘vogue’. But many researchers identify that leadership is a contested domain, defying unitary explanations for the exercise of it (Fitzgerald, 2003). Others argue that a focus on leadership is not a recent phenomenon in education but reflects a renaissance (Grace, 1995). These views suggest that the concept and practice of leadership is relational and contestable. An issue then for this article, is not to debate whether the concept of leadership is new or that there are numerous ways to conceive it, but to attempt to understand the purpose and nature of leadership in relation to the conditions in which it is conceived and develops. This stance requires, as argued by others, the issue of power to also be addressed (Gronn, 2008; Hatcher, 2005). Similar to Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power, Gronn’s (2003) proposition is that for leadership to retain its conceptual and practical utility, alternative concepts such as distributed leadership should be considered.

While forms of distributed leadership appear to be more inclusive, the basis on which such claims are made is contextual and contestable (Leo and Barton, 2006; Shields, 2004). Viewed from this critical perspective, the focus becomes then to not only critically examine the adding of teachers as leaders in schools, but also to attempt to identify and understand how views about what is ‘in’ and ‘out’ take form in the first place; and how this affects the ways in which people frame and experience leadership.

The Inception of Ebony River College: Legacies for Leadership

In the fieldwork for the study, much was made of the complexities of a multi-campus school—physical and cultural distances between campuses—and the challenges this presented to leadership attempts to develop and sustain inclusive relations for all. As the pilot-study revealed, it is rare for all staff in a multi-campus school to only work at one of the campuses. While school leaders at Ebony River College articulated with conviction their belief in being identified in text and talk and practice as ‘one college’, as noted earlier this was not the only belief in circulation within and beyond the campuses. Policy conditions at global, federal and state government levels, in dynamic tandem with those presiding at the time of the college’s inception, brought other beliefs to do with the market and performativity into play. As a consequence, what leadership meant and how it should be practiced was also subject to contradictory values and beliefs about understandings of an effective school.

The configuration of Ebony River College was to introduce a new arena, or as Bourdieu (Webb et al., 2002) frames it, a field of struggle for the cultural and social relations in it. The ‘flagship’ senior campus was a metaphor, albeit expressed in different ways and contexts that was to surface in many interviews with both leading teachers from all campuses and principal class leaders. In relation to students, the senior campus was perceived by leaders as a place to aspire to visiting: ‘the Mecca’ (Mary, principal); and a delayed reward for their time at a junior campus: ‘the pot of gold’ (Ian, leading teacher).

While language itself does not necessarily determine practice, it does contribute to meanings and expectations of whom and what is valued. The passing comment by Jane, a leading teacher, about the college configuration that ‘it works’, made in relation to the initial decision and her perspective on the decision today, was unchallenged by me at the time. But as data for the study was produced, this comment started to take on a new meaning when seen in relation to ‘Jane’s’ professional history (strong ownership for the development of her leading teacher role) and positioning within the college (at the ‘prized location’). As with Jane, those leading teachers with forms of cultural and social capital that made it possible to achieve certain ends (Bourdieu, 1997) rarely queried the status quo in relation to the organizational and cultural structure of the college.

When the topic of campus relations came up in interviews, which it did frequently (suggesting it was a matter of importance and interest to those interviewed), this tension over what ‘one college’ meant and the type and nature of relations conceived and expected as a consequence, was not far behind. But in practice, the principals (college and campus) more so than leading teachers, with the exception of those with cross-college roles, expressed a greater need and concern for keeping the whole at the forefront:

Keeping that College ethos at the forefront and not breaking down into campus differences and people want to focus on their campus and forget the College. I could talk about that for a long time … It’s an ongoing tension. (Gary, principal)

A strategy implemented by the principals (college, campus and assistant principals) to address this problem and a distinctive feature of formal leadership positions within the college was its cross-campus emphasis for many of the positions. Some leading teacher positions were purposefully created to assist with the development of relationships and processes of working together across campuses (for example, curriculum). But as I introduced earlier, inequitable social and cultural conditions can perpetuate when context is treated as an unproblematic backdrop. In the case of cross-college leading teachers’ experiences of leading and managing change, differences in the ways the campuses were led and operated made leading learning across them more challenging. For these cross-campus leading teachers, it brought additional conceptual (for example, how to frame learning opportunities for teachers) and practical (for example, how to get on top of an expanded leadership portfolio) leadership challenges. This meant that when it came to living out the values of one college, especially although not exclusively for these leaders, often ‘difference’ was reconceptualized as a deficit, a problem, a barrier to realizing a conceptualization of ‘collective’.

Leading teachers who had a cross-college responsibility appeared most conflicted in what they envisaged was needed to develop socially inclusive relations focused on learning compared to what they experienced it to be:

Developing that shared view is a really difficult thing when you don’t necessarily have any working personal relationship with somebody on another site even though, like, I know them, but I don’t really, I’m not working with them. They don’t see me as necessarily a co-learner, which is probably what people on this site would be more inclined to say that I’m in there doing the classroom stuff. I’m working with them I’m trying to develop things. So the people on this site would see me more like that. (Raylene, leading teacher)

… because I teach classes at this campus I don’t exist on the other two campuses or the timetable or, you know, I visit them and things like that but … in terms of understanding how it’s running, it can be really hard to find out what’s going on at the other two campuses and it depends on who the site coordinators are, and just opportunities to meet people … they don’t see me teaching, they don’t see me with the kids. You know, I can share curriculum documents with them, I can … advise them on how to write the reports and assess … it’s just funny, I think your credibility as a teacher stems from what you do in the classroom. (Kathy, leading teacher)

We have the KLA [Key Learning Area] meetings which are two or three a term so you get to see people then; but you don’t get to see them in action. You don’t see them in their classroom and you don’t see them in their student management role. (Natalie, leading teacher)

As other critical studies of leadership conclude, leadership is a socially contextualized practice (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007). Testament to this stance was the numerous comments from leading teachers about why their role was so difficult. These cross-college teacher leaders held being ‘seen’ and developing ‘relationships’ over time, and in the context of ‘teaching’ a class as critical non-negotiable features of what being a leader, leading and leadership meant to them in practice. From their perspective, the challenges of leading change rest in a mismatch between what their roles may have specified on paper and how they envisaged it needed to be enacted in practice. The historical contested cultural contexts and conditions of the campuses served to further cement their stance. As one Leading Teacher commented, more time to do their role does not address such concerns. Thus, ironically, the leading teachers simultaneously experienced feelings of being both ‘in’ and ‘out’ when measured against their understanding and expectation of their leadership.

These complexities to cross-college leadership for learning were not confined only to those in such roles. The consequences were also a source of comparison for other campus-based leading teachers’ leadership:

I don’t really have a cross-college role, but for the people who have a cross-college role, it’s really tough. Because they work with people they don’t know. Every year it’s a new staff. They’re going to meetings where they’re supposed to be meaningfully discussing the implementation of a new course at Year 10 but they haven’t been at that campus ever and they don’t know about that subject. So they’ve got to have; be across all of that and I don’t have to do any of that. So the curriculum people have to be across the other sites in a way that I don’t. (Craig, leading teacher)

I don’t feel that the multi-campus is set up for a success because you’re working at three different schools and they operate quite differently, it’s a big job to get three lots of teachers, to the senior campus and … meetings and development meetings, we all operate a bit differently … and that didn’t really appeal to me. (Julia, leading teacher)

In these institutional conditions, Sayed et al. (2003) warn that people and groups can become positioned against the people and groups who are ‘included’. Over time, the cumulative effects of such thinking and practice can become barriers to what others identify as a hallmark of social capital—trust (Bottery, 2003). This is not to suggest that ideas of social capital as a source of power and driver of change were absent in the quality and nature of relations at the College. But, as the differentiated perspectives of leading teachers in this study showed; such relations can be uneven in their quality, distribution and consequence (Sayed et al., 2003).

Conclusion

Positioning teachers as leaders can open the possibility for those who are directly affected by change in education to have a stake in how change is envisaged and enacted. This is a positive effect of reconceptualizing and reconfiguring, as Slee (2006) puts it—‘Who’s in?’ ‘Who’s out?’ and ‘How come?’ when it comes to teacher leadership. But a narrow view of inclusion suggests that once people are included then the goal of inclusion is achieved. This is not what I conclude from the study reported on in this paper. The leading teachers at Ebony River College—a formal position of teacher leadership in Victorian, Australia government schools –did not understand or experience leadership in unified ways.

The use of theory and thinking from critical policy perspectives in leadership and inclusive education helped identify nuances in teacher leader experiences of distributed leadership (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007; Bourdieu, 1990; Grace, 2002; Leo and Barton, 2006; Slee, 2006; Sayed et al., 2003). Their use also provided a framework allowing the analysis to bring to life social, cultural and historical factors as different forms of control. Without such perspectives, these forms of control may otherwise be present but invisible in the fieldwork and literature. In other words, in this study’s context the use of critical theory allowed similarities and differences to be identified in what might otherwise be a ‘unified’ and ‘homogenous’ take on teacher leadership.

A core leadership challenge that remains at Ebony River College, is the perennial tension of how to live out their values of ‘one college’ when, among other factors, they are spread across three campuses. When it comes to leading teacher leadership in a multi-campus school, it cannot be concluded that ‘inclusion’ (‘Who’s in?’) is ‘good’ and ‘exclusion’ (‘Who’s out?’) is ‘bad’. For the leading teachers at Ebony River College, inclusive and exclusive thinking and practice co-existed. The data produced in the case study and reported on in this article, suggests as much.

These observations from the study highlight the importance, overall, of not treating teacher leadership and its development as some homogenous category of school leadership. More specifically, the use of a critical framework in which Slee’s (2006) three simple but powerful questions are key, also meant that forms of ‘exclusion’ in teacher leadership concepts and practice could emerge in more detail. The proposition underpinning such a position is that ‘exclusionary’ factors need to be identified, challenged and changed for more socially and culturally inclusive concepts and practice of teacher leadership to thrive. This is exemplified in the nuanced comparisons of leadership within and between different leading teacher roles (campus and cross-college based) that may have otherwise been down-played or at worst overlooked altogether.

Such calls for more contextualized understandings of the complexities of leadership, and the obstacles for its complete implementation have been made by other scholars (Duignan and Marks, 2003). This case study analysis leads me to conclude that leading teachers, in particular those with a cross-college role, at Ebony River College were a symbolic and practical reflection of attempts by principal leaders to solve a perennial challenge and tension of how to create and develop cultural and social relations of ‘one college’. But it also raises a further question to take into subsequent studies of teacher leadership. In this case study and possibly other multi-campus contexts of leadership, the question of who benefits from cross-college leading teacher roles is a question worth asking again and again. More contextualized research is needed about the purpose and benefit of such distributed leadership roles.

The concept of ‘struggle’ and the use of it in this paper in the end is a positive relationship with change. But this understanding of change is also political. It recognizes that change does not just happen but must be struggled for in the face of entrenched historical leadership thinking and practice. This means that collective notions of leadership, such as distributed cannot be examined in the present day only and in isolation to understanding other contextual complexities.