Contradictions and Opportunities in Contexts of Everyday Leadership in Education

Abstract

AbstractIn this chapter, we focus on the emergence of contradictions and opportunities in everyday leadership in five comprehensive schools. We discuss how principals, teacher-members of leadership groups and teachers with no leadership responsibilities understand and conceptualise leadership work, their relationships with each other and the practices of the school. Leadership and schooling are understood as contextual practices taking place in situated, professional, material and external elements of contexts. Power is seen as an essential part of leadership, existing in relationships and interaction, and through shared understandings, values and practices. The data were collected in five schools in Southern Finland in 2018 and consist of five interviews with principals (n = 5) and five group interviews with leadership group member teachers (n = 21) and five with teachers (n = 26). We approached the data by asking: How do the respondent groups define the leadership and the school-level practices stemming from that, and how do they describe the contradictions and opportunities for leadership in their school contexts? The results unravel a range of situations and positionings of leadership in Finnish schools indicating the nature of nonuniformity of the comprehensive school system.