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Abstract
Inspired by scholarly calls to focus more intently on the influence of context on leaders’ construction and negotiation of identity, this paper draws on evidence from our Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) project in London, New York City and Toronto. Throughout the paper, we strive to illuminate how the city-based context influences how race/ethnicity is experienced and described. We use social identity theory, organisational fit and in-group prototypes to frame school leaders’ explicit discuss race/ethnicity when reflecting on identity. We describe our data gathering process using our Professional Identity card-sort Tool, which guided leaders’ reflections on identity. The analysis details how we extracted and interpreted evidence from leaders who were explicit about the interrelationship between their own personal racial/ethnic identification and its alignment or misalignment with their school-level communities. We explore how different city contexts influence leader experience of in-groups and out-groups and the related leadership challenges and opportunities. In conclusion, we reflect on the influence that structures, policies and communities have on how leaders experience identity and the possible implications for their work. We also explore the value of attending to potential context-based identity-driven experiences for school leader development and support.
Highlights
Teacher disinterest in leadership (Gronn and Lacey, 2004), headteacher retirements (Howson, 2008) and rapid cycles of staff turnover (McKinney et al, 2007) continue to negatively influence recruitment and retention of school leaders (BBC, 2009)
We report on instances of leaders discussing their own race/ethnicity in alignment or misalignment with their school community using representative quotes from leaders’ own narrative descriptions
While we provide more thorough and robust analyses of withinand between-city patterns in our aforementioned reports, here we focus on two patterns of discussion that emerged across all three cities: alignment of personal and community identity and proving professional ability
Summary
Teacher disinterest in leadership (Gronn and Lacey, 2004), headteacher retirements (Howson, 2008) and rapid cycles of staff turnover (McKinney et al, 2007) continue to negatively influence recruitment and retention of school leaders (BBC, 2009). Keywords Cities, context, ethnicity, leadership, Generation X, race, school, social identity theory Second – and the focus of this paper – leaders in each city discuss race/ethnicity within their school leadership roles in very different ways.
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