You may have noticed a hiatus in my posts, for which I apologise. Let me explain. My capacity for writing has been entirely used up by the challenge of finishing a book. The project had been brewing for a long time but there comes a point in the writing process when it becomes obsessional. As the deadline looms, you find yourself working on it every minute of the day, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It is profoundly satisfying but exhausting, so imagine the joy of actually submitting the manuscript a couple of days before the deadline. What was it Churchill said at the end of the second world war? “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing; but let us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead”. The toil and effort that Winnie was referring to was not the challenge of dealing with queries from the copy editors but the need to subdue imperial Japan, so by comparison, maybe I am overdramatising.
Having submitted the manuscript, I am now very happy to be able to resume my blogging. I feel a sense of freedom. In my blog I can write without worrying quite so much about the referencing style. Is that source really Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and Windshield-Wiper or was there a fourth Hungerdunger? (Marx Brothers, 1930). Neither will I have to suffer being chided by my co-authors for using emotive language or phrases that might be ambiguous in a different cultural context.
I must say however that writing this book has been transformative. It enabled me and my colleagues Judy Durrant, Val Hill, Gary Holden and Amanda Roberts to delve into a huge archive of material from our work supporting teacher leadership over 30 odd years. We explored dimensions of the context such as the nature of teachers’ professional identity, the landscape of educational change and prevailing conceptualisations of educational leadership. We provided a rationale for non-positional teacher leadership and put forward proposals for strategies to empower teachers and enable them to lead change. We also examined the evidence for the efficacy of the approach. We all felt stretched by the challenge but fulfilled and quietly proud of ourselves.
Our new book
The title of our book is Teachers and the practice of leadership: enabling change for transformation and social justice. I wonder what the term social justice conjures up for you. Does it trigger thoughts of what the MAGA crowd calls wokery? Decoloniality and anti-racism are key dimensions of social justice but in our book, we highlight the everyday struggle for social justice in classrooms and schools. Teachers make hundreds of decisions every day and their actions and utterances all have consequences. Teachers can also strive to address social justice issues when they initiate development work to address problems they see before them. They become aware that some students are not learning as well as their peers and resolve to develop strategies to overcome this.
Justice can only be truly achieved when every child is able to thrive, learn and achieve their full potential. Currently, this is not the case. Millions of children in various parts of the world have no schooling at all. Millions more attend school but leave without even the basic capabilities. Even in modern developed societies, there is a scandalous disparity between those who win at the game of schooling and those who learn that the game was not designed for them. Even those who seem to be successful are short-changed in a system that is engineered on the basis of a functionalist or instrumentalist view of education in which the student’s performance in formal tests and the subsequent certification are what really counts. I welcome Santiago Rincón Gallardo’s call to ‘liberate learning’ so that children and young people can experience what he referred to as ‘deep learning’. Some writers have used terms such as ‘powerful learning’ or ‘transformational learning’, but I think such adjectives are redundant. Learning is learning. It is a process in which humans extend their capacities – knowledge, understanding and skills – through creativity and critical thinking focused on solving problems that concern them.
Our book offers a vision of teacher-led change in which teachers can refresh their sense of moral purpose and act strategically to develop practice in ways that address the social injustice they see around them in their schools. We argue that even though policy makers are entitled to lever educational change, it is nevertheless the teachers who ultimately will make the difference. They are the ones who will make the moral choices in their practice and in their exercise of leadership that will result in learning for all.
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