Principal Agency

Abstract

With a point of departure from the question posed by Biesta (2017), ‘Educational leadership for what?,’ this chapter explores school leaders’ future goals and visions about what values, knowledge and skills to lead towards. Drawing on a theoretical pragmatism approach within curriculum theory and its underlying transactional realism framework, principal agency in relation to the curriculum is empirically analysed from a temporal perspective. The empirical material consists of interviews with principals from school settings representing both low- and high-performing schools. School leaders make different curriculum choices, and as significant policy actors, they have the opportunity to indirectly influence classroom discourses and concepts of knowledge, affecting students’ access to ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young, 2013). Different contexts and school leadership practices create differences in principal agency. The question of ‘educational leadership for what?’ – that is, towards what values, knowledge and skills principals should lead – allows alternative considerations of what versions of curriculum students will be offered – beyond the language of performance, outcomes and standards.