Andrew Bills

Pedagogical approaches for developing relational sensibilities in educational leaders

This paper draws from phenomenological research exploring the nature of relationships in education, collaborative research exploring alternative pedagogies in educational leadership programmes and postgraduate students’ experiences of leadership. These inquiries have been brought together with the aim of outlining two pedagogical approaches which evoke an appreciation of, and contemplative stance towards, the relational sensibilities within the lived experiences of practising, emergent and aspiring educational leaders. Relational sensitivity and sensibilities are essential to how leaders show what matters in their immediate context. Relational sensibilities appear to have an enduring and ontological presence within experiences of leadership. Examples include a leader’s attunement, nous, tact and improvisation. In addition, sensibilities include how leaders remain resolute having made a moral judgement. Two pedagogical approaches that deepen leader’s relational sensibilities are outlined. One includes the interpretive and hermeneutic use of experiential stories in inquiries of leadership as a phenomenon. A second pedagogical approach, an appreciative appraisal, involves the application of Appreciative Inquiry to the life-centric nature of an individual’s professional practice. It is critically important that leadership courses engage leaders in pedagogical approaches that engender a deepening appreciation of relational sensibilities in their everyday lives. This concern underpins the need for those in leadership to revisit their everyday humanity as this leads to action sensitive praxis.

Taking on Bourdieu's "Destiny Effect": Theorising the Development and Sustainability of a Socially Just Second-Chance Schooling Initiative Using a Bourdieusian Framework.

This article aims to theorise a storyline account of a collaborative three-year action research project into schooling re-engagement using a Bourdieusian framework. In the article we discuss how we (two teachers and a social worker) developed an alternative senior secondary school that re-engaged a sizable minority of marginalised young people back into formalised learning and consider how this school became a significant and sustainable educational alternative. Our work during this developmental period drew us into community-based activism enacting socially just curricular and pedagogical experiments. Through networked political action for schooling justice in concert with critical friends (our university partners), the marginalised young people we worked with and supportive regional youth stakeholders, we reconstructed our professional habitus as professionals into a more enabling rendering and strived to proffer through our relational, pedagogical and curricular work with students more of a transformative habitus. Our curricular and activist work inside the community extended the field of schooling relations into a more socially just orientation. This more enabling community field merged with our schooling field and enabled us to source political capital engendering secure, recurrent school funding and a purpose-built schooling facility. We claim that the market logics of schooling significantly influenced our beginning enrolment growth trajectory, and discuss how these logics compromised our ability to break through Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘destiny effect’. Since its inception in 2003, the Second Chance Community College has offered a comprehensive senior secondary schooling programme for more than 1000 young people. Throughout its 12-year history, the majority of students have gone on to secure work, apprenticeships and tertiary study but only 10% of students have successfully completed their final year of schooling.

Social inclusion education policy in South Australia: What can we learn?:

In this article, we interrogate the policy assumptions underlying a significant South Australian public education re-engagement initiative called Flexible Learning Options, formulated within South Australia’s social inclusion policy agenda, beginning in 2006. To this end, we applied Baachi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ policy analysis framework to a historical range of departmental Flexible Learning Options policy documents and evaluations to uncover how Flexible Learning Options (1) understands the problem of early school leaving, (2) defines the notion of being an ‘at risk’ young person and (3) interprets and enacts the intervention process for young people identified as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving. Our policy analysis indicates re-engagement in learning – as measured by improved retention – to be the key Flexible Learning Options policy driver, with schools ‘silently’ positioned as a significant part of the retention in learning problem. The Flexible Learning Options engagement in learning intervention directed at ‘high-risk’ students’ works to remove them from schools into places where personalised support and an alternative curriculum are made available. ‘Lower risk’ students are given a combination of in-school and off-school learning options. Our What’s the Problem Represented to be? analysis also reveals that (1) the notion of ‘risk’ is embodied within the young person and is presented as the predominant cause of early school leaving; (2) how the educational marketplace could work to promote Flexible Learning Options enrolment growth has not been considered; (3) schools are sidelined as first choice engagement options for ‘high-risk’ young people, (4) secondary school redesign and family intervention as alternative reengagement strategies have largely been ignored and (5) through withdrawal from conventional schooling, the access of many Flexible Learning Options to students to an expansive curriculum delivered by teachers within well-resourced school learning architectures has been constrained.

Designing and using an organisational culture inquiry tool to glimpse the relational nature of leadership and organisational culture within a South Australian primary school

ABSTRACT This case study research found that the relational leadership and organisational culture at a public primary school situated in a high poverty location in South Australia was built upon the strength of the inter-relationships between the teachers, teachers and leadership, and between teachers and students. Supported by what we called ‘dynamic inter-relationships’ and a ‘commitment to ongoing growth’ manifesting as key themes across the qualitative survey data generated by the school’s participants, we found the individual strengths of staff served the ‘on-going formation of organisational life’. Cognisant of these disclosed relational underpinnings, the research provided recommendations to the school’s leadership team about how they could best progress their educational reform agenda. The findings affirmed an Appreciative Inquiry inspired approach designed for the research was ‘fit for purpose’ as it generated extensive qualitative data from the teachers and leaders, offering opportunity for deep interpretive analysis using hermeneutic methodology of the school’s relational leadership and organisational culture. The research findings were subsequently confirmed by the teachers and leaders through a dialogic presentation of the research findings as an accurate representation of the culture of their school.

Whatever It Takes! Using a Component Theory Approach with Public Secondary School Principals "Doing Schooling Differently".

ABSTRACT Purpose: The research seeks to capture the ‘special character’ of schools as seen through the eyes of the Principal and to introduce alternative understandings of ideological praxis’ to challenge and unsettle the dominant ideology and logics of secondary schooling with consequent school design implications in South Australia. Design/methodology/approach: Using an ideological framework based, the research focussed on the common shared understandings across each school pertaining to each ideology. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysed through interpretive and hermeneutic processes. Findings: The findings show the tensions, subtleties and nuances of two dominant and competing ideologies: a dominant discourse of individual schooling purpose for student mobility and economic productivity and an emerging public purposes ideology of education for good citizenship, sustainable futures and the public good. The dominant neoliberal public policy ideology and the associated historical design logics of conventional schooling is challenged and reconstituted by the experience, expertise, courage, determination and moral purpose of the principals in this research. Originality/value: This article opens specific ideological understandings held by the Principals that have moved all of the schools towards pedagogical excellence and a repurposing of their organisations for the students’ sake.

Understanding emancipatory forms of educational leadership through schooling justice work: an action research study into second chance schooling development

ABSTRACT Concerned about the phenomena of early school leaving in our region, we are two teachers who initiated and developed a new school from the ‘ground up’ to re-engage young people disenfranchised with schooling back into formalised learning. Using critical action research methodology over a three and a half year developmental period, this endeavour involved us in exercising particular dimensions of leadership to engineer a sustainable second chance school. Twelve years after its development, the school continues with enrolments of over 100 senior secondary students in recent years. The schooling justice work we pursued during the developmental period drew us into ‘emancipatory’ leadership work that called us to be; (1) teacher activists embracing social entrepreneurial strategies imbued with (2) relational sensibilities, and (3) architects of socially just school design informed by (4) critical praxis within a university led professional learning community. The ‘second chance school’ has re-engaged over 1000 students back into formalised learning since its inception and has offered pathways into post-school tertiary study, apprenticeships and training for the majority of these students.