Exploring Cross-Cultural Understandings of Teacher Leadership: A Phenomenographic Study

Abstract

The chapter reports a study that explored the diverse understandings and experiences of teacher leadership among members of a geographically dispersed and culturally diverse research group. Phenomenography as a methodological approach was used to illuminate the variation in the way members of the International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) research team ( www.mru.ca/istl ), located in 10 countries, experienced teacher leadership. The authors begin the chapter by locating the study in the emerging literature on culturally diverse perspectives of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership and present a sociocultural theoretical framework to guide the interpretation and discussion of the findings through a cross-cultural learning lens. The study’s design and methodology are then described, and the findings are presented in the form of categories of description reflecting nine discrete, structurally related conceptions of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership across three broad teacher leadershipTeacher leadership domains: (i) The school, school community, and formal education systemEducation systems; (ii) Teachers’ work, the teaching profession, and teaching as a career; and (iii) The broader historical, socio-political and global contextsGlobal contexts of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership. Insights into the cultural nuances of diverse understandings and experiences of the phenomenon of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership in the data are generated via mapping conceptions of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership in each of the nine categories back to participants’ geographical regions of origin. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the work of the ISTL team and the extent to which they can serve as an experiential frameworkExperiential framework for thinking about cross-cultural understandings of teacher leadershipTeacher leadership among the teacher leadershipTeacher leadership research community.