Educational Leadership and Michel Foucault by Gillies Donald;

Author:Gillies, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1221484
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Conclusion

This chapter has looked at how issues of power and discipline relate to educational leadership. While educational leadership involves the exercise of power and the application of disciplinary methods, of much more importance from a Foucauldian perspective is how leaders themselves come to be subjected to disciplinary control and surveillance. To become a leader and to be endorsed as one, to have one’s leadership continued as it were, can be seen as hugely interwoven with issues of surveillance and control. While the concept of leadership has connotations of relative freedom and autonomy, a Foucauldian analysis highlights the ways in which exercising leadership in educational settings is by no means opposed to discipline and control but is an instance of the same. Indeed, as the consideration in Chapter 3 suggested, the school effectiveness agenda, and the related prominence given to school leadership, are wholly founded on the central importance of the examination.

Evaluation is the necessary core of this development: without it, these discourses cannot function. One can legitimately claim, therefore, that whatever their ostensible purposes and intentions, the effect of these discourses is to establish an incredibly powerful and pervasive regime of discipline and surveillance. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that the leadership agenda is absolutely immersed in what Foucault termed ‘the age of infinite examination’ (1977: 189).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.