Educational leadership across cultures

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this article is to introduce a reflection on leadership in the educational context. Our reasoning will start from the concept of group in its sociological meaning, from Donati (2021) to Goffman (1959) passing through Tuckman’s five stages of group development (1977). In this way, we will argue about the idea of leadership, more in detail on an important element in which the educational leader acts: the culture at all its different levels:, that of the school and then that of the community, which represents a crucial junction for its influence on the way of conceiving educational systems (paragraph 2), the term used to designate the holder of leadership is educational leader, meaning the one who coordinates and manages tasks within an educational context (paragraph 3). The choice that inspires our approach to leadership concept is, from one hand to frame the theme in its transcultural perspective, we believe that any educational context today can only be conceived as an international and global theater, regardless of the origin of the actors and the audience that are there. In addition to people and the objects, the way of formulating concepts of use that have multiform tonalities, origins, and heritages, often far from the context in which they appear and act, they are hybrids. On the other hand, schools often experience internationality and globalization very concretely: they host foreign students and participate in international projects of cooperation with other countries (paragraph 4). In our final remarks, we will affirm and demonstrate that the reflections proposed in this pathway on the topic of leadership are intended to signal the importance of laying the foundation for an international content orientation on which the knowledge of the educational leader is based. Therefore, using the concepts that describe intercultural communication, we assume that sociology can undertake a more incisive analysis of the meaning of multicultural societies.