Leading to liberate learning

Abstract

This chapter takes the following basic proposition as its starting point: Learning is a practice of freedom. It argues that realising this basic proposition in classrooms, schools, and across entire education systems requires profound and widespread cultural change. Furthermore, it proposes that social movements, as collective vehicles for cultural renewal, offer some of the keys to liberate learning across entire school systems. The chapter examines the role that education leaders do and can play to liberate learning. It does so by reviewing and bringing into conversation existing knowledge about effective leadership in schools, school networks, and school systems; case studies about movements of widespread pedagogical transformation in the Global South; and Marshall Ganz’s thinking and work on leadership and social movements. It frames the conversation among these three bodies of knowledge in three parts. First, it discusses some of the ways in which existing knowledge about effective leadership in education is useful to understand how and under what conditions leadership can be leveraged to liberate learning. Second, it distils some of the key lessons that movements of widespread pedagogical renewal in the Global South offer with regards to the role that leaders can play to liberate learning. Finally, it discusses some ways in which Ganz’s key definitions of leadership, strategy, strategic capacity, and public narrative are useful to articulate a new way to think about and cultivate leadership in schools and school systems.