Excavating the South African teacher leadership archive: Surfacing the absences and re-imagining the future

Abstract

In established democracies, the notion of ‘singular’ school leadership practised by the principal has been challenged and a more expansive approach to leadership which includes the practice of teacher leadership is now widely accepted by practitioners and researchers alike. In contrast, in emerging democracies the practice of teacher leadership is less obvious, despite the embeddedness of the concept in policy discourse. This article takes South Africa as its case and reviews literature on teacher leadership in this emerging African democracy. It draws on published articles and unpublished postgraduate theses with a specific teacher leadership focus and loosely adopts the format of two previously published comprehensive literature reviews in organising its findings. Similar to the findings of these two literature reviews, this South African archive also shows that the majority of research in this domain is conspicuously descriptive rather than explanatory, largely atheoretical and overly reliant on small case study design. In response, this article argues that teacher leadership research must continue to be undertaken in emerging democracies but with far greater use made of critical methodologies underpinned by relevant social theory.