Educational leadership: the audience creates the text.
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Date
2014
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of South Africa.
Abstract
Alternative conceptions of educational leadership that challenge the performativity culture do not
appear substantively to alter the trajectory of practitioner’s everyday choices. This article uses as data
the responses from three different audiences to a presentation on such alternative conceptions. The
three groups were academics attending an educational leadership conference, circuit managers
as part of a post-project workshop, and a group of aspirant school rectors in a training diploma
programme. The first two groups were South African and the third a Mauritian audience. The
audience responses show how they subverted, re-interpreted and jettisoned the message of the
presentation. Three vignettes constitute the analysis of the audiences’ foregrounding of the lived
complexities of making alternative leadership choices. The article suggests we need to be aware
of how and why practitioners will choose or not to become alternative proponents of the dominant
discourses around ‘educational quality’.