Abstract
In established democracies, the notion of ‘singular’ school leadership practised by the principal has been challenged and a more expansive approach to leadership which includes the practice of teacher leadership is now widely accepted by practitioners and researchers alike. In contrast, in emerging democracies the practice of teacher leadership is less obvious, despite the embeddedness of the concept in policy discourse. This article takes South Africa as its case and reviews literature on teacher leadership in this emerging African democracy. It draws on published articles and unpublished postgraduate theses with a specific teacher leadership focus and loosely adopts the format of two previously published comprehensive literature reviews in organising its findings. Similar to the findings of these two literature reviews, this South African archive also shows that the majority of research in this domain is conspicuously descriptive rather than explanatory, largely atheoretical and overly reliant on small case study design. In response, this article argues that teacher leadership research must continue to be undertaken in emerging democracies but with far greater use made of critical methodologies underpinned by relevant social theory.
Keywords
Introduction
The concept and practice of teacher leadership has been the focus of sustained research in established democracies such as the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), Canada and Australia for a number of decades. As early as 1995, the American Smylie offered an assessment of the quality of literature on teacher leadership and raised a number of concerns about this research area. Since then, two comprehensive international reviews of the literature on teacher leadership have been published. The first of these is the Muijs and Harris article entitled ‘Teacher leadership – improvement through empowerment?’ which was published in Educational Management and Administration in 2003. The second of these is the York-Barr and Duke article entitled ‘What do we know about teacher leadership? Findings from two decades of scholarship’, which was published in Review of Educational Research in 2004.
It is evident from these two reviews that there is no consensus on how teacher leadership is defined. For some, notes Barth (1990), teaching and leadership are mutually exclusive entities and so the concept of teacher leadership for this group of people is an oxymoron (Troen and Boles, 1994). In contrast, other scholars argue that teacher leaders are both teachers and leaders; they are or have been ‘teachers with significant teaching experience, are known to be excellent teachers, and are respected by their peers’ (York-Barr and Duke, 2004: 267). Because of their expertise and success in the classroom, they are capable of developing trusting relationships and promoting new ideas and growth among colleagues (Lieberman et al., 1988). Thus, they have also come to be leaders; agents of change concerned with productive social and socialising relationships and connected with others through their own and others’ learning (Gunter, 2005). They have become what some might call pedagogical leaders and/or curriculum leaders.
However, teacher leadership can involve more than pedagogical or curriculum leadership. Where teachers demonstrate an interest in, and the necessary expertise for leadership beyond the confines of the classroom, opportunities for school-wide organisational leadership become possible. In this expanded leadership role, these teachers are able to see the ‘big picture’ and envision an alternative future for the school (Barth, 1990). They are also able to take calculated risks and, ultimately, assume collective responsibility for change initiatives that might seem difficult or threatening to colleagues (Lieberman et al., 1988). Thus, as Crowther et al. (2002) argue, teacher leadership is not solely about passion, commitment, professionalism and enthusiasm. While these attributes are important, teacher leadership involves something more. It is a form of leadership ‘suited to the imperative that schools transform themselves, and, in so doing, demonstrate for communities how that transformation can be managed positively and effectively’ (Crowther et al., 2002: xvii).
In summary, the scope and relevance of the two reviews above, to the field of teacher leadership research has proved of considerable importance and significance. However, and perhaps only due to a scarcity of African research on this focus area at the times of publication of these reviews, there is little mention of literature on teacher leadership from emerging democracies; for example, from countries on the African continent. In the South African context, this can largely be accounted for by the dominance of apartheid ideology where the hierarchical and autocratic conception of school leadership, precluded the practice of teacher leadership. Simultaneously, the international academic boycott and state control of the higher education research agenda further prohibited research in this focus area.
South Africa finally broke the stranglehold of the apartheid government when it became a democracy in 1994 and the proliferation of educational policies (such as the South African Schools’ Act of 1996 and the Task Team Report on Education Management Development of 1996) speak to the new government’s democratic intent for its schooling system. At the heart of the democratising process is decentralisation of some of the decision-making, such as decisions related to goal setting, student learning, planning, budgeting, resource management as well as staff management and development, to schools (Department of Education, 1996, 2008). However, while the vision of participatory leadership practices, including the devolution of power to teachers, is embedded in the language of this new policy discourse, this does not necessarily translate into practice in schools. Concomitantly, research focusing on the concept and practice of teacher leadership in South African schools has been limited; although the last decade has seen a substantial increase in the number of teacher leadership studies. The purpose of this article, therefore, is to present an ‘emerging archive’ of an extensive body of literature on teacher leadership in South African schools. The approach taken to do this is expanded on below.
Methodology
The review was undertaken in two stages and is presented as such in this article. Consequently, findings from the review of the literature are first summarised, offering a baseline account of how teacher leadership is understood and practiced in South African schools. Similar to the York-Barr and Duke (2004) review, the article draws on sources which identify teacher leadership as a key term and is driven by the following questions: How is teacher leadership defined? Who are teacher leaders? What does teacher leadership look like in practice? What conditions influence teacher leadership?
Thereafter, following a critique of this body of research, the article surfaces the absences and re-imagines what the research might look like in the future.
The two comprehensive reviews were published in 2003 and 2004 respectively (Muijs and Harris, 2003; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). The search for this article, therefore, encompassed sources from 2004. Specifically searched were EBSCOhost, Emerald and Google Scholar as well as university thesis repositories across the country. In all, 46 empirical sources with a specific teacher leadership focus were reviewed and all are cited in this article. Of the works cited, 11 are journal articles, four are book chapters, four are doctoral theses, while the remaining 27 are Master of Education (M Ed) theses. All articles and chapters had undergone a blind double peer review process and were published in either academic journals or scholarly books. All these theses (Masters and PhD) had been subjected to an external examination process and all had achieved a level of pass.
Despite the extensive search outlined above, it is important to note three particular limitations of it. Firstly, the search was restricted to sources in which ‘teacher leadership’ was identified as a key term and so the archive is relatively small. In order to keep the database manageable, sources which indirectly addressed roles and responsibilities of teachers leading in and beyond classrooms, but which did not use ‘teacher leadership’ as a key word, were not searched. Notwithstanding this first limitation, the database of 46 sources provides a useful and very pertinent entry point into an engagement on the topic of teacher leadership research and practice in South Africa. Secondly, studies were predominantly qualitative, small-scale case study designs that employed purposive samples to explore the concept and practice of teacher leadership in schools. There were only three large-scale quantitative studies which employed a survey design while a self-study design was adopted by only one of the 46 studies. Lastly, the majority of studies were purely descriptive accounts and did not draw on social theory for explanatory purposes.
In analysing the data, each of the 46 sources gathered during the word search was reviewed and coded. The initial phase of analysis involved inductive coding while the second phase involved thematic content analysis, loosely following the format of the two comprehensive literature reviews (Muijs and Harris, 2003; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). An account of teacher leadership in South Africa was constructed, informed by the chronology of the research process underpinning it. This account, presented in the next section, is organised according to the four research questions listed earlier in this article. Following this is a critique which provides the necessary evidence for the continuation of teacher leadership research in an emerging democracy like South Africa. However, as this article will argue, in order to move beyond superficial investigations of teacher leadership, consideration needs to be given to alternative design strategies (such as longitudinal studies), unconventional methods (such as interventionist research) and innovative social theory which bridges the theory/practice divide (such as cultural historical activity theory).
How is teacher leadership defined in the literature, and who are teacher leaders?
At the heart of much of the South African teacher leadership research is the collective agency potential of teacher leaders and their central role in the transformation of schools. Teacher leadership and distributed leadership, Chatturgoon (2008) contends, are inextricably linked to school reform efforts while Singh explains that teacher leadership offers ‘a radical departure from the traditional understanding of school leadership because it equates leadership with agency where leadership is not about role or function, but a dynamic between individuals within an organisation’ (Singh, 2007: 2). Grant draws on the work of Katzenmeyer and Moller (2001) to argue that ‘there is an urgent need to awaken this ‘sleeping giant’ of teacher leadership because, without this voice, the transformation of South African schools into professional learning communities will remain a pipedream’ (Grant, 2006: 530).
Awakening this ‘sleeping giant’ of teacher leadership, however, constitutes an enormous challenge in an emerging democracy like South Africa. As a direct consequence of the inequality in economic and educational provision inherited from the apartheid regime, a two-tier education system now operates in the country (Bertram and Hugo, 2008). The first tier is very small (15%) constituting those schools privileged during apartheid in terms of funding, resources, and the quality of teaching and learning they offered. In stark contrast, the second is a much bigger tier (85%) constituting those schools which mainly serviced black learners during apartheid and which were under-resourced in every way. South African researchers Christie et al. (2007) refer to schools in this second tier as ‘mainstream’ because these schools service the majority of the country’s learners. These schools are situated in communities which are socially and economically disadvantaged and which continue to be plagued by poverty, illiteracy, HIV/AIDS, violence and substance abuse (Christie et al., 2007). Bloch argues that it is the primary job of government to attend to this mass of mainstream learners who find themselves in predominantly non-performing township and rural schools and ‘whose poor education reinforces their desperate state of exclusion and marginalisation in a democratic country’ (Bloch, 2009: 109). In line with this argument, mainstream schools, defined in this way, are the focus of attention in much of the available South African teacher leadership research. This stands to reason because it is these schools which are centrally ‘important in findings strategies to achieve equity and quality for all’ (Christie et al., 2007: 100).
In the majority of mainstream school communities in South Africa, however, leadership remains understood as a positional construct and located either in the role of the principal (Ntuzela, 2008) or in the structure of the school management team (SMT) (Singh, 2007). Accordingly, in attempting to understand the concept of teacher leadership, teachers in Chatturgoon’s study associated the concept with ‘authority, status and position and felt that if they were not put in formal leadership roles by the SMT then they would not be recognised or acknowledged by their colleagues’ (Chatturgoon, 2008: 92).
In order to challenge this positional leadership conception, the majority of South African teacher leadership studies work from the assumption that all teachers are regarded as potential sources of leadership, regardless of their years of experience or rank in the school (Grant, 2005; Gumede, 2011; Khumalo, 2008; Singh, 2007). To illustrate, Chatturgoon argues that ‘every teacher, new or old in the profession, is capable of being a teacher leader’ (Chatturgoon, 2008: 99). Grant advances this thinking by describing teacher leadership as a process which involves ‘teachers becoming aware of and taking up informal and formal leadership roles both in the classroom and beyond’ (Grant, 2008b: 186). This requires, she argues, collaboration with stakeholders in the development of a common and dynamic vision of the school, supported by a culture of ‘fairness, inclusion, mutual respect and trust’ (Grant, 2008b: 186).
Interesting is that in much of the early South African teacher leadership research, teachers who lead informally in schools (rather than those who occupy formal school management positions) are identified as research participants in the various studies (Gumede, 2011; Rajagopaul, 2007). By consciously shifting the research focus to teachers who lead informally in schools and often against great odds, it is envisaged that this previously untapped ‘sleeping giant’ of teacher leadership will be awakened. This is in contrast to much of the literature from established democracies which, as York-Barr and Duke (2004) point out, largely focuses on leadership from formal teacher leadership positions.
Teacher leadership: a new concept and a commitment to it
The paucity of South African articles with a specific teacher leadership focus in the leadership literature has resulted in many of the early studies (Chatturgoon, 2008; Grant, 2006; Ntuzela, 2008; Rajagopaul, 2007; Singh, 2007) exploring whether the concept was recognised in the mainstream schooling context and, if so, how it was understood. These perception studies relied primarily on interview data and were qualitative and small-scale in their design. According to these non-generalisable studies, the concept of teacher leadership was indeed new to teachers (Gumede, 2011; Ntuzela, 2008; Rajagopaul, 2007) and, when probed, a common-sense and limited understanding of it as leadership restricted to the classroom prevailed (Rajagopaul, 2007; Singh, 2007). For example, Chatturgoon’s research found that teacher leadership was not a frequently used term among teachers in her study and ‘neither did they associate their own (leadership) activities and initiatives with the concept of teacher leadership’ (Chatturgoon, 2008: 90). These findings are in line with early US research on teacher leadership which found that most teachers ‘had not given much thought to teacher leadership, how it might be defined, or what it might look like in practice’ (Wasley, 1991: 145). Similarly, in the context of the UK, a study by Muijs and Harris (2007) established that while teachers sometimes practiced leadership, they did not actually consider themselves to be leaders.
Cognisant of the small-scale design of these initial South African qualitative studies, Khumalo (2008) adopted a survey approach in her M Ed study to gather a larger data set of teacher perceptions of the concept of teacher leadership. This study involved a random sample of 19 schools in a township district in one of the poorer provinces and drew on self-administered questionnaire data from 369 teachers: 189 primary school teachers; and 207 high school teachers (Khumalo, 2008). Drawing on this initial survey, a second survey in the same province followed; this one the focus of a postgraduate Honours research project. This second survey was broader in scope and used an adapted version of the Khumalo (2008) questionnaire. Purposive sampling was adopted to gather teacher responses (1055) about their perceptions and experiences of teacher leadership (Grant et al., 2010). A third large-scale study, this time a doctoral study (de Villiers, 2010), followed a few years later. This study explored educators’ perceptions of and readiness for teacher leadership, amongst a purposive sample of 283 educators from 134 schools within a district in a more affluent province, using a ‘Teacher Leadership Readiness Instrument’ (Katzenmeyer and Moller, 2001 cited in de Villiers, 2010: 166).
Similar to the findings of the early qualitative studies, these large-scale quantitative studies found that the idea of teacher leadership was embraced in principle; respondents conceptualised leadership as a shared endeavour and subscribed to the notion that teachers can lead, should they be afforded the opportunity (Khumalo, 2008). Generally, respondents held positive assumptions about teacher leadership and expressed a readiness for it. Nonetheless, there was a sense that more teachers should take up empowered and professional roles as teacher leaders in schools (de Villiers, 2010; de Villiers and Pretorius, 2011; de Villiers and Pretorius, 2012). However, despite this commitment to the notion that all teachers can take up a leadership role at one time or another, the surveys showed that the concept of teacher leadership was narrowly understood and conceptualised as leading within the classroom as opposed to leading organisationally (Grant et al., 2010). Thus, it can be seen that these quantitative, breadth studies confirmed the findings of the small qualitative studies.
At this juncture, it seems appropriate to reiterate that the research referred to thus far was exploratory in nature and attempted to understand how the concept of teacher leadership was understood. Many of these studies depended on self-reported data in the form of insights and experiences of educators, teachers and SMT members alike, to unpack the concept for the South African context. But as York-Barr and Duke remind us, ‘espoused teacher leadership practices can differ from actual teacher leadership practices’ (York-Barr and Duke, 2004: 265). Therefore, to access genuine teacher leadership practices, a large South African research project was carried out by 15 postgraduate students in two provinces and designed as a two-phased, multi-case study. Each of the 15 researchers investigated the leadership of three teacher leaders in a conveniently selected school over a two-term period. Observation was one of seven data collection methods adopted but it was considered fundamental given that ‘leadership activity, together with the artefacts and relationships that form an integral part, form the essence of a distributed leadership analysis’ (Timperley, 2005: 398). Muijs and Harris’ (2007) characterisations of teacher leadership provided the conceptual landscape for the project while a model of teacher leadership developed in South Africa (Grant, 2012) was adopted as the analytical framework. This model captures what teacher leadership might look like in practice in the South African schooling context and is discussed next.
Teacher leadership in practice
The model of teacher leadership, represented in Figure 1, emerged from South African studies of teacher leadership and developed in three phases over a five-year period. The development of each of these three phases is captured in the literature (Grant, 2006, 2008a, 2010, 2012). In the first phase, teacher leadership is analysed according to four semi-distinct areas or zones in which teachers currently (or in the future) might wish to lead in a school (Grant, 2006). Once this first level of analysis is complete, the second level explores the six roles which teachers can take up within the four zones (Grant, 2008a). Finally, once the analysis according to zone and role is complete, then the indicators of teacher leadership inherent in the roles are surfaced; the third level of analysis (Grant, 2010). The model thus offers a tool to describe the practices of teacher leadership in terms of the zones or places where teacher leaders are most likely to lead, the roles they are most likely to take up in each of the zones and the indicators attached to each of these roles (Grant, 2012).
Model of teacher leadership.
The ‘heuristic potential’ (Grant, 2010) of the model means that it can operate as a tool for looking forward, offering researchers a language of description to be able to communicate with other researchers about the possibilities of teacher leadership across different contexts. The model, in its varying phases of development, has been adopted as an analytical tool in a number of local studies. For example, the model in its first phase (a zones analysis) was adopted as an organising framework for the findings of the studies by Rajagopaul (2007), Singh (2007) and Chatturgoon (2008). In the study by Ntuzela (2008), the model in its first phase was again adopted but this time the study’s findings were mapped onto the model of teacher leadership in the concluding chapter of the thesis. The model in its second phase (a zones and roles analysis) was adopted as an analytical tool in the studies of Khumalo (2008), Pillay (2008) and Gumede (2011). Finally, and in its third phase (a zones, roles and indicators analysis), the model was adopted as an analytical tool in the two-phased multi-case study research project carried out by 15 postgraduate students investigating teacher leader practices within a distributed leadership framing (Rule and John, 2015).
Using the Muijs and Harris (2007) characterisations of teacher leadership together with the model, all 15 researchers in the two-phased multi-case study were able to categorise teacher leadership in their case study school as either restricted, emergent or developed (Table 1). Most common was the restricted teacher leadership characterisation (9 of 15) while two cases were described as emergent teacher leadership, with developed teacher leadership evident in the remaining four cases.
Teacher leadership characterisations in the two-phased multi-case study research project.
For the purposes of these 15 case studies, the category of restricted teacher leadership was ascribed to those nine schools where teacher leadership was primarily an individual rather than an organisational phenomenon and restricted to zones 1 and 2. Zone 3, the area of whole school development, was a no-go area for the majority of teachers. In this category of school, teachers were sometimes consulted on school decisions but there was little scope for authentic participation in school-wide decision-making and little space for taking initiative in this area. While support for teacher leadership was espoused, teachers were severely restricted in terms of the degree to which they could become involved in organisational leadership. This was primarily because the structural and cultural changes required to support teachers as contributors towards organisational leadership were not yet in place.
The category of emergent teacher leadership was attributed to the two schools where the leadership of teachers was viewed positively and where teachers were encouraged to embark on new initiatives, involve themselves in school level meetings, and participate in school decision-making processes. These case studies were thus characterised by examples of teacher leadership which spanned all four zones, although to a limited degree. While teacher leadership as an organisational phenomenon was envisioned in this group of schools, this was not yet fully enacted in practice.
By comparison, the category of developed teacher leadership was ascribed to those four schools where teacher leadership was taken up convincingly across all four zones and sustained as an organisational phenomenon. Teacher initiative as well as teacher activism (from all teachers) was strongly supported by the SMT. Active teams (within and beyond the school borders) met on a regular basis not only to discuss, plan and implement their work, but also to critique their practice and confront unjust, stereotypical and discriminatory ways of being, in the interests of a more equitable and equal society.
In summary, characterisations of teacher leadership as restricted, emergent and developed were evidenced in both phases of this research project with restricted teacher leadership the most common characterisation (Table 1). While there is no obvious correlation between the type of school and the characterisation of teacher leadership in Table 1, if one looks beyond this collaborative multi-case study to other smaller qualitative studies which have also drawn on the Muis and Harris (2007) characterisations, a pattern begins to emerge. For example, Ntuzela (2008) and Gumede (2011) each did a comparative analysis of teacher leadership in a rural primary and a semi-urban primary school. Both ascribed a category of restricted teacher leadership to their rural primary school and emergent to their semi-urban primary school. Pillay’s auto-ethnographic study (2008) traced her journey as teacher leader in two semi-urban primary schools in which she taught. Drawing on narrative, documentary, photographic and graphical evidence and adopting the model of teacher leadership as her organising framework, Pillay characterised her teacher leadership as developed in these two semi-urban schools.
From this particular grouping of studies, there seems to be a tendency towards restricted teacher leadership characterisation in rural schools while emergent and developed characterisations are a more semi-urban phenomenon. In the context of her study, Gumede (2011) suggests that this might be because rural schools are primarily influenced by traditional forms of leadership which accord absolute power to those in positions of authority. Non-traditional leadership practices such as teacher leadership, she argues, are foreign to these schools since they are far less influenced by Western culture. However, this is mere speculation at this point in time and further research is needed before any such claims can be confirmed.
What has been verified from the South African studies is that teacher leadership is indeed practiced in mainstream schools and numerous examples of the instructional leadership role of teachers exist (Jita and Mokhele, 2013). This paramount role involves leading learners in classroom-based activities and leading colleagues in activities related to the curriculum and extra-curriculum. However, fewer examples exist of teachers leading organisationally (Grant, 2014). These very same studies explored what constrained and enabled teacher leadership and it is to this discussion that I now turn.
Conditions influencing teacher leadership
Much has been written about circumstances favourable to nurturing teacher leadership, as well as those that constrain or reduce its effectiveness. As with the York-Barr and Duke (2004) literature review, findings in response to the question ‘What conditions influence teacher leadership?’ are the most robust and consistent. Specifically, constraining influences dominate the South African teacher leadership research but this is perhaps unsurprising given the prevalence of the restricted teacher leadership category. The most common of these constraining influences is now discussed.
Centralisation of power and control: the most significant constraint to teacher leadership
By far the most prevalent and pervasive of the constraining influences in the South African literature has to do with the centralisation of power and control in schools (a point raised earlier in this article) which remains inseparable from the formal principal role and closely associated with the legislated structure of the SMT. In many mainstream school communities, SMTs are positioned as ‘the rightful leadership titleholders’ who lay claim to central decision-making processes ‘essentially because of the symbolic capital acquired through position’ (Grant, 2010: 278).
This is particularly evident across the restricted teacher leadership cases but is also a central finding in two of the quantitative studies (Grant et al., 2010; Khumalo, 2008). In some studies, the autocratic leadership style of the principal (Lawrence, 2010) and/or the SMT (Jasson, 2010) restricts the emergence of teacher leadership. In other studies, it is the strong organisational hierarchy (Naicker and Mestry, 2013; Nene, 2010) and the process of autocratic decision-making (Gumede, 2010; Lawrence, 2010) that are foregrounded as significant barriers to the leadership of teachers. In some schools, teacher leadership is actively resisted by the SMT members because it is viewed as a threat to their legitimacy and thus perceived to contravene departmental policy (Ntuzela, 2008). In other schools, principals use positional power to overturn decisions made by school committees (Naicker and Mestry, 2013). This notion of ‘top-down’ school management structures as a major impediment to the development of teacher leadership is not unique to South Africa but is present in the international teacher leadership literature as captured in the two comprehensive reviews (Muijs and Harris, 2003; York-Barr and Duke, 2004). ‘[T]op-down’ structures, as Muijs and Harris explain, ‘militate against teachers attaining autonomy and taking on leadership roles within the school’ (Muijs and Harris, 2003: 442).
A discourse of delegation is also common across most of the restricted teacher leadership cases (Gumede, 2010; Lawrence, 2010; Ntuzela, 2008; Rajagopaul, 2007), In many instances, teacher participation in school decision-making processes is limited to superficial matters whilst crucial decisions remain the prerogative of the SMT members who give orders to teachers about what is to be done (Nene, 2010). In some cases, this is viewed as an unfair management practice and fiercely resisted by teachers who regard it as management ‘passing the buck’ (Singh, 2007). However, in other cases, this practice is deemed ‘contrived’ (Mpangase, 2010; Naicker and Mestry, 2013) but accepted because of the legitimacy of its source. However, occasionally when teachers are accepted into this almost impenetrable domain of the SMT, it is primarily because of their senior teacher status (Grant and Singh, 2009). Yet, not all senior teachers are afforded access to decision-making opportunities in the domain of the SMT. The study by Chatturgoon (2008), for example, makes mention of the ‘senior and master teacher’ role but shows how, in the absence of job descriptions for these departmental posts, the principal ‘did not give much attention to such teachers’ (Chatturgoon, 2008: 78).
Some reasons are suggested in the South African studies for the resistance to teacher leadership by school management and for their over-emphasis on control. These include the risk of building a culture of trust in the face of accountability pressures (Grant et al., 2010), vulnerability because of possible teacher incompetence and the consequent fear of ‘letting go’ (Fani, 2016; Mancoko, 2015), a sense of superiority and the right to status and power (Lawrence, 2010), and a long-standing traditional culture of authoritarianism which remains unquestioned and goes unchallenged (Mpangase, 2010). Thus, despite the post-1994 structural democratisation of schools, the entrenched culture of authoritarianism, patriarchy and non-collaborative decision-making persists and is the biggest constraint to teacher leadership in mainstream South African schools.
However, despite the prevalence of SMT resistance to teacher leadership in the South African research, Singh (2007) makes the argument that the SMT is also a crucial pressure point for change. This article now considers the case studies of developed teacher leadership to determine what enables teacher leadership and the role of the SMT in this process.
Enabling teacher leadership: creating a conducive environment for collaborative learning and innovative practices
What emerges from the developed teacher leadership case studies is that teacher leadership is fostered as an organisational phenomenon rather than an individual endeavour (John, 2015) and, in many instances, deliberately orchestrated by the school principal (Pillay, 2008). The primary goal in these schools is the centrality of expert teaching practice in pursuit of excellence in learner performance (Gunkel, 2010). Principals spend a significant portion of their time involved in teaching, in and outside the classroom (Pillay, 2008) and teachers are appropriately supported and acknowledged for their endeavours (John, 2015). Teachers’ knowledge about and expertise in their learning areas contribute to their self-confidence which means that these lead teachers are less afraid of failure than their colleagues when taking up leadership roles (Moonsamy J, 2010).
The environment in these schools supports team work, collaborative working relationships and participatory decision making (Molefe, 2010) in an attempt to work towards shared norms and a common vision (Moonsamy P, 2010). Teachers experience a sense of belonging and are supported by colleagues and the SMT (Moonsamy J, 2010). Room for teacher innovation is created (John, 2015) and a culture of risk taking is enabled (Gunkel, 2010). A strong work ethic (Pillay, 2008) and a culture of trust (John, 2015) permeate such schools. Additionally, a well-functioning committee structure (Molefe, 2010), professional learning communities (Moonsamy P, 2010) and cross-school networks (Pillay, 2008) characterise these schools. Such environments nurture teacher leadership (including pedagogical, curriculum and organisational forms of leadership) in order that schools will be able to ‘meet the challenges of an ever-changing educational system and keep abreast with the changes’ (Pillay, 2008: 122).
What becomes instantly apparent from the research discussed so far is that, if there is any hope of educational transformation in South Africa, a significant increase in the number of mainstream schools which display developed teacher leadership is required. To achieve this, the country must draw on the expertise of these schools and use them as case studies of good leadership practice. These cases show that school culture is a dominant influence on the success of teacher leadership initiatives and school improvement. The York-Barr and Duke (2004) literature review endorses this point. The challenge is therefore to find strategies to support schools in interrogating their cultural conditions and supporting them in creating collaborative, inclusive and innovative learning environments.
Having discussed the conditions influencing teacher leadership, I now move on to the final section of this article which surfaces the absences in this particular body of literature and re-imagines what research in this field might look like in the future.
Surfacing the absences
Despite the limitations of this body of literature, a baseline account of how teacher leadership is understood and practiced in mainstream South African schools and the conditions influencing teacher leadership, is beginning to emerge. It now seems appropriate to pose the following question: Does this work challenge existing thinking and understandings in the field, bring new lines of inquiry and possibility into view, and afford good grounds for being recommended or heralded as ‘ground breaking’ or essential to the field, including its advancement? (Reid, 2016: 425)
Another strength of this archive is that all 46 sources consist of systematic empirical investigations with identifiable research questions, specific methodologies, and original data collection and analysis processes. This is in contrast to Smylie’s (1995) assessment of the quality of the early teacher leadership literature which, he argues, consisted mainly of position statements, essays, project descriptions and status reports with only a relatively small portion consisting of systematic empirical investigations. Since Smylie’s article, the number of empirical sources has increased, but as York-Barr and Duke (2004) confirm, non-empirical sources still endure.
A further significance of this South African archive, as has already been mentioned, is that it is largely focused on teachers leading informally in schools, although it does not exclude a formal teacher leadership focus. This is in contrast to the prevalence of formal teacher leadership positions in the international research (York-Barr and Duke, 2004). The overemphasis on formal teacher leadership in this international body of research is perhaps because of the increasing literature which has accompanied the proliferation of teacher leadership programmes and policies in established democracies (Smylie, 1995: 4). In contrast, teacher leadership programmes and policies are not, as yet, a South African phenomenon.
However, despite these perceived strengths of the South African teacher leadership archive, it is also appropriate to challenge ‘existing thinking and bring new lines of inquiry’ and possibility into view. The remainder of this article does this by surfacing the absences in this body of literature and re-imagining what the research might look like in the future.
First, and in keeping with much of the extant teacher leadership research (Smylie, 1995; York-Barr and Duke, 2004), very few of the South African studies use formal theory to focus research questions, guide inquiry and interpret findings. Instead most are superficial investigations, guided implicitly or explicitly by a policy logic (Grant, 2006; Gumede, 2011; Ntuzela, 2008; Rajagopaul, 2007). They are descriptive accounts which typically do not explain ‘why relations between means and ends are likely to exist’ (Smylie, 1995: 4). York-Barr and Duke argue that research grounded in theory ‘is less likely to revisit what is already known and is more likely to further existing understandings and inform practice’ (York-Barr and Duke, 2004: 291). By drawing, for example, on theories of leadership, organisational learning, agency and power, explanatory accounts of complex relational leadership practices can be advanced, new theoretical insights gained and cumulative knowledge developed.
Pillay’s (2015) doctoral study is one of the few studies in the archive to draw on formal theory. It is framed as a social realist study which attempts to make visible the networks of leadership and the day-to-day practices of teacher leaders in three highly functional mainstream schools in order to investigate how they influence school success. The thesis, whilst drawing on the teacher leadership model, also draws on Archer’s (2003) concepts of structure, culture and agency as well as the ‘internal conversation’ as additional explanatory tools. The study found that the schools functioned as leadership hubs with a range of leadership networks and expansive teacher leadership practices. The role and agency of the school principals was central to enabling these networks and practices. Teachers possessed an abundance of professional capital (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012) and both teachers and SMT members served as strong social actors (as opposed to remaining primary agents).
Second, while the archive includes a relatively large number of articles written by Grant, this is perhaps to be expected when a researcher champions a new research area and attracts new researchers to it. However, absent from the archive are published critiques of this work. While the model of teacher leadership has been individually critiqued by a handful of postgraduate scholars (John, 2015; Kumalo, 2015; Moonsamy P, 2010; Pillay, 2015), these critiques remain unpublished. For example, Moonsamy P (2010) and John (2015) both argue that the model does not fully capture the non-curriculum practices and inter-relationships that teachers engage in, such as those connected to the complex social challenges faced by mainstream learners. Making a different point, Kumalo (2015) explains that while the model speaks to the organisational prerequisites necessary for the emergence of teacher leadership, it fails to include the requisite personal dispositions and attributes of a teacher leader. Pillay (2015) suggests an expansion of the model through the introduction of ‘collaborative structures’ and ‘agency’ as prerequisites to teacher leadership. A published comprehensive critique of the model which takes into account these unpublished individual critiques will, no doubt, advance the scholarship of this focus area.
Third, while the research to date gives us rich descriptions of teacher leadership roles and practices in each of the four zones of the model, the absence of explanatory theory precludes a micro analysis of the inter-relationships between teacher leaders and learners (zone 1), the inter-relationships between teacher leaders and their teacher colleagues (zones 2 and 4) or the inter-relationships between teacher leaders and the SMT (zone 3). Despite this absence in much of the teacher leadership research, a few studies have, nonetheless, attempted a descriptive micro-analysis of leadership practices within each of the four zones. Forde’s study (Forde and Chikoko, 2012) goes some way to developing our understanding of teacher leadership in the zone of the classroom. However, his purposively sampled 47 teacher leaders, each of whom had enjoyed a history of notable educational success, were drawn from classrooms located in previously advantaged state schools rather than in mainstream schools. His study found that while there was a general unawareness of the legislated requirement that teachers be leaders, once the concept ‘teacher leader’ and the legislation was made explicit to participants, it became clear that these teacher leaders actually had a significant understanding of teacher leadership in action. This understanding is recorded in the thesis as the knowing, doing, being and relating of teacher leadership. Kajee’s (2011) study explored the induction and mentoring of novice teachers by teacher mentors (in zone 2) in a previously advantaged urban high school. Framed as a teacher leadership study, Kajee found that in the absence of a school mentoring policy and mentoring system, mentoring practices varied considerably. She identified the existence of five different mentor/mentee relationships in the school and ascertained that some were more effective than others.
Moodley’s (2011) study explored decision-making as an activity of school leadership (zone 3) in a mainstream primary school across a number of formal school structures, including staff meetings, phase meetings and awards committee meetings. The study pointed to the important role of the principal as enabler of shared decision-making through the inclusion of teachers in both classroom and organisational leadership practices. This finding resonates with the characterisation of developed teacher leadership (Muijs and Harris, 2007), mentioned earlier. The focus of Gardner’s (2011) study was the leadership of teachers in an academic partnership between two primary schools: one a privileged private school; and the other an under-resourced mainstream school (zone 4). Conscious of the power relations at play, Gardner determined that subject knowledge was developed as teachers shared their different experiences of teaching. While academic leadership was primarily in the hands of the private school teachers, it was the mainstream teachers who provided leadership related to the social aspects of learning, such as learning to engage with difference.
Fourth, another noticeable absence in the teacher leadership archive is a discussion of the role of teacher leader as researcher, either as reflective practitioner or as action researcher. While the model of teacher leadership makes provision for action research as an indicator of teacher leadership (zones 2 and 4), there is little empirical evidence of this in any of the South African studies (the Pillay, 2008 study is the exception). This stands in contrast to empirical studies in established democracies which relate how teachers engage in school-based action research (Ash and Persall, 2000).
Fifth, conspicuously absent from the South African teacher leadership archive is the adoption of critical methodologies which seek to challenge the status quo and bring about change. Methodologies of change are central to the transformative potential of teacher leadership and studies which intervene in practice will break new ground.
Re-imagining future teacher leadership research
The absences in this database of teacher leadership research suggest the need for more robust conceptual tools and explanatory theories. One such explanatory theory which can provide the necessary conceptual and methodological tools is cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2015). As a holistic theory of practice, an activity theoretical analysis offers the conceptual tools to investigate how the work of teachers is situated in its socio-historical context. It can help determine what the specific improvement focus of the leadership activity is, examine how and why teacher leadership emerges (or not) in the setting and resolve how the SMT as its own activity system influences teacher leadership. It can also offer a micro-analysis of the various activity systems within (or across) the four zones of teacher leadership.
Yet, while CHAT is concerned to describe practical activity, it is also able to intervene in practice in order to promote change (Engeström, 2015). By virtue of its formative interventionist approach (Sannino et al., 2016), it offers a methodology of research and practical societal transformation. Teacher leadership studies, therefore, designed as formative interventions and informed by the concepts of expansive learning and transformative agency, are likely to advance the field, both theoretically and practically. An activity theoretical interventionist approach would also provide an opportunity to develop teachers as researchers in the take up of the researcher-interventionist role (Sannino et al., 2016).
The CHAT is but one of a number of innovative social theories which bridges the theory/practice divide and which moves beyond superficial investigations of teacher leadership. Other theories are equally appropriate and engaging with a wide-range of suitable theories can only enhance the field.
Conclusion
This overview has attempted to map the conceptual and empirical terrain of teacher leadership in South Africa in order to contribute an ‘emerging democracy perspective’ to the global teacher leadership discussion. Like York-Barr and Duke (2004), I contend that while one could conclude this review with a pessimistic view of the prospects for teacher leadership in South Africa, we must not lose hope. The research is full of examples of courageous teacher leaders in mainstream schools who are doing all sorts of innovative and interesting activities, often in hostile contexts and with little or no support from their SMT. Indeed, these teachers have ‘ventured forth courageously into the unchartered waters of shared leadership, genuinely hoping to improve teaching and learning for the children and youth in their charge’ (York-Barr and Duke, 2004: 292). In so doing, they have contributed to our understanding of teacher leadership in a South African context. The South African teacher leadership archive is small, however, given the infancy of this research field. Thus, more studies of teacher leadership are required, drawing on relevant social theories where appropriate. The next decade looks to be an exciting one as this research area moves beyond superficial investigations of teacher leadership towards more robust and nuanced explanatory accounts of complex and relational leadership practices.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.