This edited volume brings together a range of perspectives on Educational Leadership, Management and Administration (ELMA) and various theories of resistance or compliance along with how policy and politics play out in school communities.
The book makes a significant contribution to debates around theorising educational leadership and the implications of discourses on schooling and the politics of education. It brings together a broad array of international scholars to examine theories of resistance in ELMA and establish a resistance-oriented agenda for critical ELMA research that promotes change and diverse ideas about leadership. Using both empirical data and conceptual analysis, the chapters provide opportunities for theorising the work and working conditions of educational leaders alongside questions of compliance and resistance that further improve the understanding of these concepts in the field.
Providing cutting-edge research and theorisation into this emerging area, the book will be highly relevant for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of educational leadership, management and administration, and educational policy. It will also be of interest to school leaders.
1. Introduction
2. Leaders Resisting? The Very Idea
3. Theorising principals resistance and compliance as part of school
autonomy reforms in Australian public education
4. An analysis of resistance in parvenu educational leaders biographies:
Thinking with Arendt about identities, academies and public schooling.
5. Educational leadership in trying times: Primary principals resistance in
New Zealand
6. Resisting English education policy: Making sense or absolute nonsense
7. Resisting evidence-based policy hegemonies in a post-truth climate
8. Resistance and the permanent instability of educational neo-liberalism:
Up, down, turn around, please dont let me hit the ground
9. Turning Power / Resistance Upside-Down to Critically Affirming Digital
Educational Leadership
10. The paradox of tactics in the teaching of literacy: Resistance and
leadership by Aboriginal teachers
11. We Are Visible: Student Voices Amplifying Counternarratives to Impact
Policy
12. Multiple counter-publics in public education: educational and community
leadership resisting neoliberal reform
13. Managing Tension: agonism and alliance in an ethos of democratic
principal engagement
14. Education trade unions and union renewal: re-imagining resistance
15. Conclusion
Amanda McKay (previously Heffernan) is a Senior Lecturer in Education, Manchester Institute of Education, University of Manchester, UK.
Pat Thomson is a Professor of Education, School of Education, University of Nottingham, UK.
Jill Blackmore is an Alfred Deakin Professor in Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia, as well as president of the Australian Association of University Professors.
