The Importance of Educational Leadership in Rural Contexts

Educational Leadership and Rural Contexts Dr John Halsey School of Education, Flinders University, South Australia June 2009 john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Overview • Framing • Leadership Matters • Demography • Globalisation • Some theory • Some research • Some implications john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Framing • vibrant productive rural communities are essential to Australia’s future- they are not an optional extra- food, water/management, energy, environmental health, cultural meanings, security • the continuous emptying of rural places with the consequent running down of services, linked to the apparently endless processes of consolidation to generate economies of scale and efficiencies (whose efficiencies?), directly impacts on a country’s capacity to survive • “even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated” (Diamond, 2005, 2) • “either we solve the problems [within the next few decades], or the problems will undermine not just [countries like] Somalia but also First World societies [like Australia] (Diamond 2005, p.7) ” john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Leadership Matters • Re the impact of leadership on learning, research done at the University of Minnesota Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement, and the University of Toronto Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation Learning from Leadership Project, shows leadership matters (2004). • From the Executive Summary: “… leadership not only matters: it is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning, … [and] the impact of leadership tends to be greatest in schools where the learning needs of students are most acute” john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

How do high-quality leaders achieve impact? • “By setting directions – charting a clear course that everyone understands, establishing high expectations and using data to track progress and performance. • By developing people – providing teachers and others in the system with the necessary support and training to succeed. • And by making the organization work– ensuring that the entire range of conditions and incentives in districts and schools fully supports rather than inhibits teaching and learning.” john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Demography • 6.5 billion now- 9.5-10 billion by 2050 • “The most important resource in regional Australia is its people, but our knowledge of them is somewhat limited… [and] 35.2% of Australians lived outside of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the 21st century…” (Hugo, 2005, 56) • “The demographic processes shaping population change in individual country towns, as in the metropolitan sector generally, are: fertility, mortality, internal migration and international migration” (Hugo, 2005, 63) • a particularly striking aspect of the changes taking place in rural Australia, as well as many other developed and developing countries, is the decline in the number of youth who remain in rural communities beyond school leaving age john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Demography • “it is the loss of youth and the partial replacement of that demographic by older people that is of most concern … the structural shift has an impact on the economic wellbeing of a community and also on the sense of [its] vitality…” • Salt (2005, 68) • youth are fundamentally future orientedand therefore are a critical • human resource for renewing, re-building and re-energizing rural Australia • age profile • ethnic diversity and clustering • Indigenous populations and communities john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Globalisation • Food security- “Without food, we are clearly nothing. It is not a lifestyle or add-on fashion statement. The choices we make about food affect both us, intrinsically, and nature, extrinsically. In effect, we eat the view and consume the landscape. Nature is amended and reshaped through our connections- both for good and bad” (Pretty, 2002, p.11) • Energy and water- much of the world’s energyis sourced from rural and remote regions and much of the world’s fresh water supplies have their headwaters in rural locations and traverse substantial rural landscapes, which entails varying degrees of human intervention and management john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Globalisation • free market forces- “the penetration of farming structures by corporate capital has hastened the deregulation of the industry”… there is “unevenness” of impact… (Lawrence, 2005, 104) • winners and losers- two of the losers seem to be retention of natural capital and building social capital • farming from ‘a way of life towards a way of producing products and profits’- reduction of independence- “the future of ‘family farming’ has become inseparable from the aspirations of firms in the corporate sector” (Lawrence, 2005, 107) • “Critical to success in a global environment, as the OECD argues, is access to communications technology and transport… for rural areas, such access is particularly difficult, as the combination of market forces and a lack of critical mass create serious service shortages” (Alston, 2005, 161) john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Globalisation • ICT and velocity, volume, variety, product and process value adding • transformations and continuous change versus maintenance of ‘the familiar- the way we are and do things around here’ • “Socioeconomic relations are changing as control over the production process moves off-farm, with entities such as banks, food processes, and supermarkets having a greater say in production” (Lawrence, 2005, 107) john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Globalisation • illustration- in a 40 year time-span to the mid 1990s, the number of potato • growers in Tasmania fell from 7,000 to 550 and then to 330 by 2001 • “subsumption”- [the process] of farmers losing autonomy due to the workings of agrifood (Lawrence, 2005, 111) • “Globalisation has altered the relationship between food and farming. Once, the latter resulted in the former. Now, the former is determining the conditions for on- farm production” (Lawrence, 2005, 119) john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Globalisation • arresting the decline of the natural environment and developing new paradigms of valuing it so that it in turn, can do what it has always done- sustain life in all its complexity and diversity. • “…an intimate connection to nature is both a basic right and a basic necessity…we have shaped nature, and it has shaped us, and we are an emergent property of this relationship. We cannot simply act as if we are separate. If we do so, we simply recreate the wasteland inside of ourselves” (Pretty, 2002, pp. 10-11) john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Re- thinking leadership for rural contexts • individuals, communities and nations can exercise substantial choice over what happens to them when space and contexts are created for ideas to emerge and have opportunities to flourish • “Transformations must occur in the way we all think [and act] if there are to be real and large-scale transformations…” (Pretty, 2002, 168) that will progress new, sustainable and sustaining ways of habitation and living john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Some Theorising- Spatiality • Soja (1996) argues that thinking differently about space and spatiality may result in insights about phenomena, from the very personal to the global that might otherwise remain masked, blurred, hidden, suppressed or oppressed. • The ‘thinking differently’ here Soja (p.2) calls Thirdspace, “a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, appearances, and meanings”. • The central challenge of Thirdspace is to “begin to think about the spatiality of human life in much the same way that we have persistently approached life’s intrinsic and richly revealing historical and social qualities: its historicality and sociality” (p.2, emphasis in original). • ‘Spatiality’ is the term Soja (1989) uses to convey the inherently social quality of organized space…. socially-produced space” (p.80). john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Some theorising- Knowledge Making • From Popper (1992) on Three Worlds: World 1 refers to existing entities or ‘real’ things. World 2 refers to the “world of our experiences” (Popper, 1992, p.7) and is also referred to as the world of the mind. World 3 is the world of knowledge, the ‘products’ of the human mind. In Popper’s three Worlds, there is a complex interactive process that occurs between and with each of the worlds to produce knowledge, known as hermeneutics. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Focussing on how- the procedural • Fontana and Frey (2005, p.698) define how as “the constructive work involved in producing order in everyday life” and “the traditional whats” as “the activities of everyday life”. • how- “in what way or manner” ; by what means: how did it happen” Macquarie Dictionary (1990). • “practical intelligence” includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something…” (Gladwell, 2008, 101 using Sternberg’s idea and terminology). john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Research design Key research question: how do principals of rural schools construct their roles? john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Faming into the role john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Vision and learning john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Leading and organising john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Community john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Learnings for the next leadership position • business as usual: continue to do ‘what seems to work’ • self and others: the centrality of relationships- “emotional intelligence- the capacity for recognising our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships” (from Golemann in MacGilchrist, 2004, p.129) • values: are like a ‘transportable commodity’ that can be a resource for developing leadership in other contexts • pacing, planning and resources: essentially means for ends john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Summary john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Discoveringand constructing space • In terms of Thirdspace discourse, principals construct their roles by making or finding space to facilitate the possibility of new ideas emerging. In particular, they frequently construct or use established types of social spaces, both within and beyond the school, as contexts for this to occur. • The qualities of the social spaces they create or find have a bearing on what might emerge in terms of leading and managing the tension between the status quo and change. Put another way, “social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-active, interdependent; [and]…social relations of production are both space-forming and space-contingent…” (Soja, 1989, p.81). john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Discovering and constructing space • With the space they find and construct, principals posit, advocate and prosecute Other while simultaneously working to retain and manage sufficient definition, sufficient order, sufficient sense of continuity to maintain organisational coherence and effective functioning. • From the perspective of Popper’s Three Worlds, principals of rural schools engage in a continuous process of knowledge making, essentially driven out of, and by, the contexts and spatiality of their roles. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Discovering and constructing space • Principals traverse the space they find and construct conceptually as well as physically, from marginal and boundary precincts to centre. • Hooks in Soja (1996) when discussing the issue of choosing (my emphasis) marginality and using marginality, makes the fundamental point that locating oneself is not done in relation to something or some position of power, but in one’s own capacity. This is particularly pertinent for how principals of rural schools construct their roles. • Rural principals look beyond the immediate environs for models and modelling of exemplary practice. • The uniqueness of rural contexts and spatiality has the potential to reframe rural principalship, from one of comparative evaluation with others, to one where rural principalship asserts its own legitimacy. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Gender • The differentiated treatment of males and females, particularly during the entry phase of a principal’s appointment, is probably of most significance in terms of its impact on how principals go about the day-to-day work of constructing their roles. • The differentiated treatment of females permeates and pervades the thinking and actions of female principals, and intrudes upon their private time. • It seems as though if you are a female rural principal you are on duty, being monitored, being assessed, and being ranked against ‘what a man might do in and with the job’, more or less on a continuous basis. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Gender • In contrast to what female principals have to contend with as they construct their roles, the privileging of ‘maleness and school leadership’ appears to be a matter which is taken for granted. • One of the consequences of this is that males enter into school, community, and school–community contexts, in comparatively unproblematic, uncontested ways. They are generally afforded a ‘clear run’ at establishing themselves and, subsequently, building their career profiles. • On the other hand, females not only have to contend with the differentiation, they also have to devise and weave into everything they do, strategies for managing and minimising it. Put another way, community and gender combine to form a zoom lens that focuses in to expose, to reveal and to portray role construction by ‘women at work’ for scrutiny and judgement. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Implications • Firstly, while small rural communities often convey strong patriarchal definition about the social and physical allocation and use of space, and female spaces typically “lack the public visibility and legitimacy of males sites” (Alston, 2005, p.143), Thirdspace as a possibilities machine, is a conceptual force for redressing this situation by profiling and progressing Other. • Secondly, the prevailing patterns of space designation — physical and social — in rural contexts are important resources for creating new knowledge at a local level but with wider contextual resonances and applicability. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

Implications • Knowledge making, which is at the heart of Three Worlds, when combined with the premise that there is always more than duality which is one of Thirdspace’s key properties, creates a potentially potent means for changing the status quo, and for helping to refocus agenda priorities so that sound evidence for doing something becomes less snared and enmeshed in gendered proclivities. • The dimension of a rural principal’s role that stands out from all others in relation to how they construct their roles, is location in a context of high visibility and low anonymity. • It is community in an encompassing sense that presents rural principals with the most pervasive, most problematic and least controllable aspects of their role. Paradoxically, it is also community which provides rural principals with a very powerful and potentially enduring resource for constructing their roles. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

References • Alston, M. (2005). Gender perspectives in Australian rural community life. In C. Cocklin, & J. Dibden. (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Australia: University of New South Wales Press, pp.139-156. • Blackmore, J. (1998). The Politics of Gender and Educational Change: Managing Gender or Changing Gender Relations? In A. Hargreaves, R. Leikerman, M. Fullan & D. Hopkins (Eds.), International Handbook of Educational Change. • Corbett, M. (2007). Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. • Davison, G. (2005). Rural Sustainability in Historical Perspective. In C. Cocklin, & J. Dibden. (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Australia: University of New South Wales Press, pp.139-156. • Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Allen Lane Penguin Books. • Dunshea, G. (1998). Beginning Principals and the Issue of Gender in Rural and Regional Areas. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 26, No.3, pp.203–215. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

References • Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers The Story of Success. Australia, Penguin Group. • Green, B. and Reid, J. (2004). Teacher Education for Rural–Regional Sustainability: Changing Agendas, Challenging Futures, Chasing Chimeras? Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3). • Gruenewald, D.A. (2003a). The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place. Educational Researcher, 32(4), pp.3–12. • Gruenewald, D.A. (2003b) A. Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place–Conscious Education. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), pp.619–654. • Halsey, R.J. (2006). Rural–Urban School Partnerships and Australia’s Sustainability. Forthcoming publication. • Halsey, R. J. (2007). Constructing Rural Principalship: Thirdspace and Threeworlds. Unpublished Doctoral Thesis, Flinders University, Adelaide. • Hugo, G. (2005). The State of Rural Populations. In C. Cocklin & J. Dibden (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. • Kenneth Leithwood K., Louis, K.S., Anderson,S. & Wahlstrom, K. (2004). How leadership influences student learning (Executive Summary). The Wallace Foundation, nada. • Lawrence, G. (2005). Globalisation, agricultural production systems and rural restructuring. In C. Cocklin & J. Dibden, Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney, Australia: University of NSW Press. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

References • MacGilchrist, B., Myer, K., Reed, J.(2004). The Intelligent School, second edition, London, Sage Publications. • Miles, R.L., Marshall C., Rolfe J. & Noonan S. (2004). The Attraction and Retention of Professionals to Regional Areas. Unpublished Report. Queensland Government: Queensland Department of State Development. • Pretty, J. (2002). Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature. London: Earthscan Publications. • Popper. K. (1992). In Search Of A Better World. London and New York: Routledge. • Popper. K. (1992a). Unended Quest. London: Routledge. • Salt, B. (2004). The Big Shift: Who we are and where we are headed. Third Edition. South Yarra, Victoria: Hardie Grant Books. • Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. USA: Blackwell. • Soja, E.W. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. john.halsey@flinders.edu.au

The Importance of Educational Leadership in Rural Contexts