There is a profound ethical base to such leadership. At its heart are the principles of equity and entitlement. This is extended into the belief that a crucial component of the educational process is the fight for social justice. Economic, social and cultural poverty is a major barrier to educational opportunity. Leadership in this context is about more than fighting discrimination – it is about the active promotion of a society based on positive acceptance and engagement. Many schools have a distinguished record of promoting equity, but the strategy has to be actively promulgated in the community if it is to be sustainable.
When individuals (students, teachers, parents) are bound to shared ideas, values, beliefs, and frameworking, bonds of fellowship emerge which empower the membership as a whole.
(Sergiovanni, 2001: 66)
The school becomes a microcosm, a model, of the ideal for the community but this has to be extended if it is to be sustainable. While the moral foundations give a community authenticity, it is in the extension into the broader community that it becomes sustainable:
The system of shared values and beliefs creates an identity among the members of a social network, based on a sense of belonging. Thus the social network is engaged in communication within a cultural boundary which its members continually recreate and renegotiate. Social boundaries … are … boundaries of meaning and expectations.
(Capra, 2002: 76)
It is a key function of leadership to extend the boundaries of shared meaning and expectations.
Vision
School leaders have become increasingly familiar with the concept of having a vision as to how the school should be in the future. This has to be extended into the whole community. Indeed it is difficult to see how a vision for an institution could be developed without reference to the wider community. Such a vision might include reference to:
- shared values and vision
- social cohesion
- economic growth
- the development of a learning community
- inclusiveness
- safety and security.
Such a vision will be subject to regular review and change – the speed of social, economic and technological change requires regular, fundamental review of the vision:
Leadership consists in facilitating the emergence of novelty. This means creating conditions rather than giving directions, and giving the power of authority to empower others … Being a leader means creating a vision: it means going where nobody has gone before. It also means enabling the community as a whole to create something new.
(Capra, 2000: 106)
Relationships
Relationships are the life-blood of the community; they translate aspirations into experience and are the single most powerful signifiers of communication and culture. Our judgements about almost all social interactions, membership of organisations and communities are usually expressed in terms of our perceptions of the quality of relationships. The value of a friendship is not measured in terms of its technical efficiency but rather in terms of the level of emotional engagement. Although Goleman (2002: 192) is discussing organisations in the following extract, the principles can be readily applied to communities; the purpose is:
… to foster emotionally intelligent leadership widely and deeply at every level, and to systematically create norms and a culture that support truth and transparency, integrity, empathy, and healthy relationships.
For Goleman the powerful leadership style is the authoritative or visionary which is expressed and described through relational behaviours – self-confidence, selfawareness and empathy. Relationships are fundamental to the creation of social capital – in fact it is not exaggerating to say that social capital is found in relationships and networks and the level of engagement in a community is directly proportional to the quality of interpersonal interaction. It is a primary responsibility of the leader both to model and facilitate such relationships.
An example of the importance of this institutional level is found in Bryte and Schneider’s (2002) study of trust in schools. They regard trust as the ‘connective tissue’ which enables schools to work effectively. Trust is defined in their study as having four components:
- respect
- competence
- personal regard
- integrity.
In their research, Bryte and Schneider found that schools with high levels of trust have a one in two chance of making significant improvements. Schools with low levels of trust have only a one in seven chance of improving. In this group only schools that made improvements in trust made improvements in academic performance.
The research showed that the integrity of social relationships was an essential precursor to any form of improved performance by the school. It is not unreasonable to postulate that the evidence from Chicago schools in this study, coupled with the example from New Mexico cited above, points to the quality of human relationships in the institution and the community as vital prerequisites to change and growth.
Learning
Communities are healthy when they are learning; in fact a definition of a community would have to include a capacity to grow and develop in an organic way. Again, it is a significant component of leadership both to model and facilitate effective learning at individual and community level. Wenger (1998) develops a social theory of learning around the concept of communities of practice which are to be found in every domain of human activity – in fact they are a way of explaining human activity. Significantly, in the context of the critique
of schools earlier in this book, he argues:
In spite of curriculum, discipline and exhortation, the learning that is most personally transformative turns out to be the learning that involves membership of communities of practice.
(Wenger, 1998: 6)
For Wenger learning ‘is part of our participation in our communities’ (p.8). He argues that a community develops coherence through the relationship between three dimensions:
- mutual engagement – people engage in actions whose meanings they negotiate with each other (p.73);
- a joint enterprise – negotiation and mutual accountability (p.77);
- a shared repertoire – shared stories, tools, discourses, styles, concepts and artefacts (p.82).
It is the function of the teacher to allow this to happen and to actively promote these dimensions. The most successful leadership teams, project groups, classrooms, drama and musical performances in schools share high coherence in these three elements. It might be thought of as another manifestation of high social capital.
All the traditional taxonomies of leadership can be subsumed into the notions of the creation of communities of practice; not in the sense of structural or organisational interventions, but creating the supportive infrastructure that recognises the dynamic, interactive and complex nature of community learning:
The aliveness of an organisation – its flexibility, creative potential and learning capability – resides in its informal communities of practice.
(Capra, 2002: 97)
Resources
The development of social capital is contingent, to a significant degree, on the availability of economic capital. The availability of resources is a fundamental component of community regeneration and sustainability. Equally the process of social change is a function of economic security and well-being. Economic and social entrepreneurship are in a symbiotic relationship. This is not to argue that poverty precludes the existence of social capital. High social capital can exist in poor communities and wealth is no guarantee of high social capital.
What is significant is the level of social engagement and poverty does tend to minimise the motivation to engage. Long-term poverty is socially debilitating – it creates a vicious downward spiral which can become self-reinforcing across the generations. Loss of hope leads to loss of aspirations and expectations. There is increasing evidence of the neurological and psychological implications of poverty, especially on children’s capacity to learn.
It may well be therefore that one dimension of educational leadership for community renewal is engagement in economic entrepreneurship. This seems far beyond historic expectations of school management – and it is.
Educationalists do not necessarily make good capitalists, but in many communities the schools are reservoirs of very high leadership and management expertise. Schools are major resources in their own right – just think of the ICT resources in most schools, inadequate by most criteria but often lying idle for 85 per cent of the year.
Too often education has seen business as a source of handouts and business has seen education as a means of marketing to the young. There are, perhaps, opportunities to see schools not as venture capitalists but as key partners in creating employment and injecting resources into the community. Schools are one of the most powerful sources of networking in the communities – and networks are powerful precursors to economic success. Putnam (2000: 325) cautiously argues that:
… social capital of the right sort boosts economic efficiency, so that if our networks of reciprocity deepen, we will all benefit, and if they atrophy, we will all pay dearly. There appears to be a clear equation linking economic, social and academic success, with education contributing to all three and schooling only directly to the latter.
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