Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times: A Bourdieusian Study of Social Justice Educational Leadership Practices (Educational Leadership Theory) 3031476158, 9783031476150

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Educational Leadership Theory Series Editors: Scott Eacott · Richard Niesche

Katrina MacDonald

Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times A Bourdieusian Study of Social Justice Educational Leadership Practices

Educational Leadership Theory Series Editors Scott Eacott, School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Richard Niesche, School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

The Educational Leadership Theory book series provides a forum for internationally renowned and emerging scholars whose ongoing scholarship is seriously and consequentially engaged in theoretical and methodological developments in educational leadership, management and administration. Its primary aim is to deliver an innovative and provocative dialogue whose coherence comes not from the adoption of a single paradigmatic lens but rather in an engagement with the theoretical and methodological preliminaries of scholarship. Importantly, Educational Leadership Theory is not a critique of the field—something that is already too frequent—instead, attention is devoted to sketching possible alternatives for advancing scholarship. The choice of the plural ‘alternatives’ is deliberate, and its use is to evoke the message that there is more than one way to advance knowledge. The books published in Educational Leadership Theory come from scholars working at the forefront of contemporary thought and analysis in educational leadership, management and administration. In doing so, the contributions stimulate dialogue and debate in the interest of advancing scholarship. International Editorial Board Ira Bogotch, Florida Atlantic University, USA Fenwick W. English, University of North Carolina, USA Gabriele Lakomski, University of Melbourne, Australia Paul Newton, University of Saskatchewan, Canada Izhar Oplatka, Tel Aviv University, Israel Jae Hyung Park, Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Eugenie Samier, University of Strathclyde, Scotland Roberto Serpieri, Università di Napoli Federico II, Italy Dorthe Staunaes, Aarhus University, Denmark Yusef Waghid, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa Jane Wilkinson, Monash University, Australia

Katrina MacDonald

Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times A Bourdieusian Study of Social Justice Educational Leadership Practices

Katrina MacDonald School of Education Research for Educational Impact, Strategic Research Centre in Education Deakin University Burwood, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2510-1781 ISSN 2510-179X (electronic) Educational Leadership Theory ISBN 978-3-031-47615-0 ISBN 978-3-031-47616-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Here’s tae us, Wha’s like us, Gey few, And they’re a’ deid (Robert Burns)

For my beloved parents Lindsay MacDonald (1942–2023) Nigel Alan Finlayson MacDonald (1935–2020)

Acknowledgments

In the MacDonald journey from North Uist to Western Queensland, my siblings and I were the first generation of our Scottish diaspora to finish school, in no small part because of our parents’ insistence. I am deeply grateful to the many people who have supported me on my research journey. I thank them with all my heart. Firstly, I must acknowledge and thank the outstanding educational leaders who generously and with humour participated in this research: principals Rachael, Peter and Christine and assistant principals Lucy and Steven. I am indebted to my academic supervisors Prof. Jane Wilkinson and Dr. Corine Rivalland, without whom my research would not have been possible. Their mentorship has been invaluable. As an early career researcher, I have been fortunate to have the mentorship of some outstanding colleagues: Professors Amanda Keddie, Jill Blackmore, Jane Wilkinson, Scott Eacott, and Associate Professors Richard Niesche and Brad Gobby. Working with you is a delight. I have learned so much from you all. I thank my dearest friend Sue Bennett, without whose encouragement I might not have pursued further postgraduate study. Two amazing teachers have influenced me, both in the classroom and out: Matthew Hardy and Jodie Hollands. I am so grateful to my friends who support and uplift me: Amanda Keddie, Jane Wilkinson, Denise Chapman, Haoran Zheng, Lauren Armstrong, Raelene Kwong and Jenn Carruthers. My parents, Nigel and Lindsay MacDonald, neither of whom were able to finish their own schooling, instilled in us a sense of curiosity about the world and a lifelong love of learning. I am filled with love and gratitude for what they gave us. My siblings, Natalie MacDonald and Alan MacDonald, for different reasons and in different ways, are both inspirational and their love and support are sustaining. I am so thankful for my bedrock and my compass, Dr. Rhys Davies, and our two sons Bryn and Alan Davies. Rhys has always understood and supported my intellectual pursuits. As a family, we have faced many challenges. With them, I have learned to value and find joy in small moments and to not look too far into the future. I have learned not just to be a parent, but an advocate and to see the world afresh. This has challenged my understanding about privilege and has led me here, now. Finally, thank you to Prof.

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Acknowledgments

Scott Eacott and Associate Professor Richard Niesche, who as series editors have provided a space for this work. I thank you all. This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.

Contents

1 Introducing Socially just Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Positioning the Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Leading for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 About the Study—Theoretical Framework and Research Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Contributions to the Field of Educational Leadership and Leading Practices for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 Structure of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Towards a Normative Understanding of Social Justice Leadership Practices: Mapping the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Educational Leadership or Leading Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 Theories of Social Justice and Schooling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 Towards a Normative Understandings of Leading for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.1 A Focus on Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.2 Critically Reflective and Critically Reflexive . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.3 Shared Ethos of SJ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.4 Leadership Dispersal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.5 Effective Processes, Strategies and Structures to Support the Smooth Running of a School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.6 Develop Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.7 Supportive Social Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.8 Activist and Political . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3.9 Think Critically About Leadership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 Leadership for Social Justice in Primary Schools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 3 4 6 7 8 10 15 15 18 20 20 21 22 23 24 24 25 25 26 27 28 28

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Contents

3 Theorising the Educational Leadership Field—Harnessing Bourdieu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Bourdieusian Tool Kit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.1 Mechanisms of the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.2 Conditions of the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3.3 Reflexivity and Positionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 The State of the Field—Education in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37 38 40 43 44 47 48 51 56 56

4 Spatial Injustices and the Context for Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Educational Disadvantage in Australia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Consequential Geographies—Theorising the Spatial Distribution of Advantage and Disadvantage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Setting the Scene—Exploring the Locations of Research . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Century Heights Primary School (CHPS)—Rachael and Lucy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.2 Bonham Hollow Primary School—Peter and Steven . . . . . . . 4.3.3 Aurora Creek Primary School—Christine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 Mission, Macrocosms and Mothering—Rachael’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Context—Century Heights Primary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Rachael—Primary and Secondary Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Encounters Between Habitus and Field—Mission, Macrocosms and Mothering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Macrocosms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.3 Mothering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

77 78 80

6 Mission, Monarchy and Might—Peter’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Context—Bonham Hollow Primary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Peter—Primary and Secondary Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Encounters Between Habitus and Field—Mission, Monarchy and Might Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Monarchy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Might . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

101 102 102

66 67 67 70 71 73 74

84 85 88 92 95 96

104 109 112 115 115

Contents

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7 Monitor, Ministry and Mentor—Christine’s Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Context—Aurora Creek Primary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Christine—Primary and Secondary Habitus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Encounters Between Habitus and the Field . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.1 Monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.2 Ministry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3.3 Mentor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

119 120 120 126 126 131 135 138 138

8 Socially Just Principals in Unjust Times? A Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Spatial Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Intersectional Identities and Social Justice Understandings . . . . . . . 8.3 Resistance and/or Compliance—Socially Just Practices . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Merit and Aspirations—Social Justice Disjunctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

143 144 145 149 152 156 157

9 Implications for Leading for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 What Has This Book Offers the Scholarship of Leading for Social Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Implications for Leadership Scholars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Implications for Policy and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 Concluding Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

161 162 163 164 165 166

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167

About the Author

Katrina MacDonald is a senior lecturer in Deakin University’s Faculty of Arts and Education. Her research and teaching interests are in social justice and socially just leading practices, spatiality and the sociology of education through a practice lens (feminist, Bourdieu, practice architectures). Katrina’s qualitative research has focused on principal’s social justice understandings and practices and the impact of school reform policies on the provision of just public schooling. For more information on Katrina’s work, see https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/katrina-mac donald.

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Abbreviations

ACOSS ACPS AEDI AP BHPS CHPS DETV EA ESS HCV ICSEA LBOTE LSJ MCEETYA NAPLAN OECD PISA PSD SEI SEIFA SJ SJL

Australian Council of Social Services Aurora Creek Primary School Australian Early Development Index Assistant Principal Bonham Hollow Primary School Century Heights Primary School Department of Education and Training, Victoria Educational administration Education Support Staff Housing Commission of Victoria Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage Language Background Other Than English Leading for social justice Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy Organization for Economic and Co-operation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment Program for Students with Disabilities School Effectiveness and Improvement Socio-Economic Index For Areas Social justice Social justice leadership/leaders

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2

Primary research participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Secondary research participants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69 70

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Chapter 1

Introducing Socially just Leadership

Abstract This chapter introduces research that investigated the social justice leadership understandings and practices of educational leaders in primary schools in marginalised communities in Victoria, Australia. It contextualises this research within educational justice research in Australia, and briefly introduces two frameworks through which the analysis takes place: Pierre Bourdieu’s theorising of habitus and field and Edward Soja’s theorising of spatial justice. The social justice framework is introduced and the methodological and analytical tools are explained, including narrative and life history research design. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the contributions this book makes to educational leadership research and an outline of the following chapters. Keywords Social justice · Educational leadership · Narrative · Life history

Principal’s work is complex, intense and emotional with added complexity when positioned in schools located in marginalised communities. This book explores the work of three principals, recognised as exemplary by the education bureaucracy, working in marginalised communities in the state of Victoria, Australia. It provides an intimate portrait of these principals, their biographies and how their understanding of what constitutes justice for their communities influences their socially just leading practices. These are explored using the toolkit devised by sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu to understand their habitus and practices in the education field. These intimate portraits both challenge and contribute to educational leadership scholarship and leading for social justice research in the rich exploration of the life histories of these educational leaders. The research on which this book is based was my doctoral research. My teaching career began in a large public primary school located in a wealthy and privileged coastal outer suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, one of the most advantaged in Australia. For the most part, our students, materially, wanted for nothing both in their homes and at school. Our public school facilities rivalled those of the neighbouring private schools. Any needs over and above the funding provided by government was raised by the community, between $60,000 and $80,000 a year, which funded additional

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7_1

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enrichment programs and facilities for our students such as in the arts, music and sports. Less than 8 km from the school in which I taught, was another public primary school serving one of the most marginalised communities in Australia. I drove home past this community every day, and every day it reminded me of the privilege I took for granted in my personal and working life. My daily journey past this community was a stark reminder of the spatial expression of inequality in Australia and I wondered how the principals of these two schools in the same public system, serving such vastly different communities navigated the complexities of their work. These experiences led me to the research reported on in this book. Australia is one of the most advantaged countries in the world, yet more than 3.3 million people (13.4%), including more than 761,000 children (18%), are living in poverty (Davidson et al., 2022; Tanton et al., 2021). Inequality has been rising in Australia over the last three decades (Productivity Commission, 2018), and is mirrored in other affluent nations across the world (United Nations Department of Economic Social Affairs, 2020). It has been exacerbated by the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic (Berkhout et al., 2021). This, together with the impact of the climate crisis now accelerating exponentially and disproportionally adversely impacting marginalised communities (Islam & Winkel, 2017), and a global ‘deepening democratic recession’ bringing declining freedoms and authoritarian governance (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2022) make schools complex places to work. Indeed, Francis and Mills (2012) in their analysis of the injurious nature of schooling in the global north, suggest that schools can be ‘damaging places’ for both students and staff because of the reproduction of inequality, the ‘institutional structures of discipline and surveillance’ (p. 251), and the effects of participation in these experiences for teachers. The assault on the social contract in Australia has accelerated, through the hegemony of neoliberal ideologies that have influenced economics and geopolitics in earnest since the 1980s. Inevitably these neoliberal instruments have had an increasing impact on public schooling, especially in marketisation and competition, along with the suite of accompanying policies of school choice and increased accountability measures (Keddie et al., 2020, 2022). International research into the functioning of public education systems in developed and affluent countries indicates that some systems are becoming increasingly segregated and are failing some children (Daraganova & Joss, 2019; Rowe & Perry, 2021; Sciffer et al., 2022). This failure may have a catastrophic long-term effect on the lives of those children. For example, lower educational achievement means young people are vulnerable to poorer longer term earning capacity, poorer mental and physical health, increased incidence of homelessness and social exclusion, reinforcing a cycle of disadvantage (Duncan, 2022; Redmond et al., 2022; Tanton, et al., 2021). This is a clarion call for educators and policy makers, through a commitment to socially just practice, to challenge entrenched disadvantage. As with the principals in this study, my own life experiences have influenced my research agenda and trajectory. As a narrative study, I include my own voice in order to be visible to readers. My critical consciousness is rooted in my experiences growing up in remote rural Australia with a parent with a disability. I grew up in a region without equitable access to education. My home was 70 km from the nearest

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town with a school that only went to year 10 (of 12). By the time I finished school, what had been a region previously made wealthy by the post-war 1950s wool boom and beef cattle, was now a landscape riven by drought. There were fewer jobs, the community was in decline, young people were leaving seeking lives in the city. I witnessed the rural decline and became part of the steady flow of young people to seek new, less isolated, lives in the city. When my children started school, I was increasingly drawn to educators and education. My time spent in classrooms as a parent helper and then on school councils reminded me that the first thing I had ever wanted to be was a teacher. The first school I worked in as a teacher was a public primary school nestled in one of the most advantaged locations in Australia, yet close by and part of the same public school system, was one of the most marginalised communities in Victoria. My experience in schools as a teacher and a parent leader showed me that who the principal is, their ethical and moral stance, their experiences, their beliefs, their values matter to the school community and the teachers, families and children in them. Combined with my experience in a public school system serving disparate communities in such close proximity to each other, I wondered how principals understood notions of justice, and how they practiced social justice leadership. This book is the result of my doctoral research examining this question.

1.1 Positioning the Research In Australia multi-dimensional, deep and persistent disadvantage, including social exclusion and deprivation, including 18% of children (Tanton et al., 2021), is often manifested in geographically defined areas. Two key organisations researching poverty in Australia, The Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) who produce the Poverty in Australia report (Davidson et al., 2022) and the Jesuit Social Service and Catholic Social Service Australia, who produce the Dropping Off The Edge report (Tanton et al., 2021), both argue that deep, persistent and entrenched disadvantage leads to a cycle of poverty. While ACOSS (Davidson et al., 2020) investigate broad patterns and trends in poverty in Australia, The Dropping Off the Edge research (Tanton et al., 2021) recognises that persistent and entrenched disadvantage is often spatially concentrated in particular locations. This geographic pattern of disadvantage becoming concentrated in particular neighbourhoods is recognised across research and policy areas such as social inclusion, urban planning and housing, early childhood, health and education (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022; Daraganova & Joss, 2019; Deloitte Access Economics, 2019; Tanton et al., 2021). The spatial distribution and concentration of disadvantage is not just an Australian phenomena; it is recognised as a pattern worldwide in many affluent countries and is a feature of developed wealthy countries where inequality has been growing since the 1970s (Piketty, 2014; Raffo et al., 2010). In the US, for example, Sharkey (2013) argues that severe and persistent inequalities are often concentrated in particular neighbourhoods and can be linked to (socially constructed) race. In the UK, while

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disadvantage may be concentrated in particular areas, Garner and Bhattacharyya (2011, p. 9) argue that an ‘ethnic penalty’ related to income and employment may be exacerbated in certain geographic areas. Pat Thomson’s (2002) examination of leadership in schools in the rustbelt of an Australian city illustrates the ways in which residents are stripped of their economic and social capacities in geographic areas. In Aotearoa New Zealand, child poverty is concentrated in geographic areas and ‘Mäori and Pasifika children are approximately twice as likely as Päkehä/European children to be living in severe poverty and are also at a higher risk of persistent poverty’ (Children’s Commissioner’s Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty, 2012, p. 7). Likewise, in Canada poverty is often concentrated in spatially defined urban areas and is linked to immigrant and Indigenous status, creating a ‘racialized’ status for students who struggle in the education system (Gaskell & Levin, 2012, p. 18). Research suggests that quality early years education in both early childhood and primary settings can have a long term positive impact on educational success in the later years of a child’s education (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2019). Early childhood institutions, primary and secondary schools located in marginalised communities are tasked with the role of trying to mitigate the effect of entrenched and generational disadvantage. The research reported on in this book is located in primary schools. Primary schools are uniquely positioned, bridging both the transition from early years education in prior-to-school settings to primary school, and the transition from primary to secondary schools where educational disadvantage often means that young people do not finish school (Lamb et al., 2020).

1.2 Leading for Social Justice There is no one settled definition, or theory, of leadership for social justice, and there is a significant deficiency in the literature with a lack of voices from non-Anglophone nations (Gümü¸s et al., 2020). The existing literature argues for an inclusive understanding of social justice, with the driving force being to address the differences in educational outcomes as a result of cultural, social, political and economic opportunities, such as those recognised by race, class, sexuality, gender, disability, and other marginalised conditions. Research such as that by Bogotch, and colleagues (Bogotch et al., 2008) has concluded that all educational struggles for social justice ‘remain unfinished and incomplete’ (p. xii). They argue that social justice movements grow as historical understanding of social relations develop, suggesting that social justice leadership will be specific to the broad historical, social and spatial contexts in which it operates, and that scholars are obligated to continue the struggle to define subjective theories of justice to suit their own unique situations. All educational leaders, both primary and secondary, manage a complex range of tasks in their roles, which has intensified in recent years, including managing and monitoring curriculum development, assessment and reporting, staff selection and performance and professional development, financial management, developing

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school mission and values, driving school reform, school accountability, community relations and marketing, community and social welfare, supervision of major building works, grief counselling (Anderson & White, 2011; Day, 2014; Niesche, 2013). Additionally, their leadership role intersects with other community challenges including mental health and well-being, economic and social disadvantage and access to products and services (Anderson & White, 2011). While there are certainly some general qualities, strategies and skills common to exemplary educational leaders, those that work in marginalised communities may require different leadership strategies, given they face a greater range of challenges, particularly in managing the specific needs of marginalised communities (Day, 2014; DeMatthews, 2015). This is crucial in understanding how principals working in these communities understand their own contexts and how they operationalise these understandings in their leading practices. The modern notion of social justice recognises that there should be a fair and just relationship, including a consideration of the distribution of wealth, opportunities and privileges, between an individual and the society in which they live (Department of Economic & Social Affairs United Nations, 2006). Fraser (2009) considered justice in terms of the politics of redistribution, recognition and representation. She defines justice as parity of participation (2007). Her three dimensional theory of justice includes the economic, cultural and political dimensions (Fraser, 2005). Distributive principles of justice, the economic dimension, recognise there is not an equitable distribution of material benefits (Fraser, 1997). These include exploitation, economic marginalisation and deprivation. Ameliorating these conditions through the politics of redistribution would require eliminating economic barriers or ‘reallocating resources to redress the deficit’ (Power, 2012, p. 475). Recognitive principles of justice, the cultural dimension, centre on the equal recognition and respect of the culture, histories and perspectives for all groups within society. Addressing the misrecognition would include, for example, breaking down the categories which isolate and underpin different status groups (Power, 2012). The political dimension of justice is representative justice, which is the right of all people to participate and be accorded a voice (Fraser, 2005). Fraser (2005) argues that this political dimension encompasses the three dimensions, furnishing ‘the stage on which struggles over distribution and recognition are played out’ (p. 75). Nancy Fraser’s work has been crucial in developing understandings of social justice in education and is being used in critical educational research (e.g. Apple, 2011; Blackmore et al., 2022; Keddie, 2012; Power, 2012) to shine a light on the ways, for example, in which school reform impacts on socially just outcomes in the UK (Keddie & Mills, 2019) or Australia (MacDonald et al., 2021). Sharon Gewirtz (2006), argues that in education, social justice should be considered ‘in relation to particular contexts of enactment’(p. 69). She contends that justice is first contextually shaped by the multiple abstract meanings that can be held simultaneously about justice, and that these can be in tension with each other (Gewirtz, 2006). Secondly, she suggests that we need to pay attention to the ways in which justice is mediated by norms and constraints that motivate agents, such as norms that compete or conflict with justice ideals and constraints outside of an agent’s

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control like economic constraints and discourses of power (Gewirtz, 2006, p. 70). Finally, Gewirtz (2006) argues that ‘what counts as justice is level- and contextdependent’ (p. 70), arguing that a range of stakeholders will mediate and value justice issues differently. This understanding of the contextual enactment of social justice is particularly important in the research outlined in this book because it relates to how individual principals understand and enact social justice leadership in their school communities.

1.3 About the Study—Theoretical Framework and Research Design This research engaged with participants to understand their life histories and how this influenced their understandings and practices in leading for social justice in marginalised communities. Exploring their life histories and their social justice and leadership understandings and practices is theorised using Pierre Bourdieu’s practice theory and uses his theoretical and analytical tools. This is explored in detail in Chap. 3. In addition, I also draw on Edward Soja’s theorising of spatial justice to understand the spatial distribution of dis/advantage. This is explored in more detail in Chap. 4. In this research, focused on how principals understand and enact social justice leadership, the data was generated with the participants through interviews, autobiography and observation allowing thick description of each of the participants’ social justice leading practices. The research was undertaken as a form of narrative inquiry as a study of the ways in which humans experience the world (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Connelly and Clandinin (1990) argue ‘that people by nature lead storied lives and tell stories of those lives, whereas narrative researchers describe such lives, collect and tell stories of them, and write narratives of experience’ (p. 2). Narrative inquiry is a form of case-centred research which seeks to elucidate individual experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). Life writing, including autobiographies, life histories, critical evocative portraiture and other interpretive methodologies all seek to do one thing: to tell a story (English, 2006; Glesne, 2016; Goodson & Sikes, 2001). English (2006) argues that research in the field of educational leadership which historically has drawn on organisational theory has overlooked the importance of understanding ‘the lives, intentions, interactions and contexts in which leaders labor’ (p. 143). Life writing, therefore offers a ‘superb source’ as a research strategy and affords us the opportunity to see the leaders as individuals; to ‘…deal with the exceptions, the irregular’ rather than to see leadership in broader patterns and commonalities (English, 2006, pp. 142–143). Autobiography, which the participants in the study were asked to construct, offers an account of someone’s life which is written by them; a self-narrative that reflects perspectives and preferences of the author in topics, styles and conclusions (Chang, 2008). Bruner (1987) argues that autobiographies should

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be seen not just as a retelling of events but as ‘a continuing interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience’ (p. 12). Autobiography, as a stand-alone method of data generation, does not necessarily create, for the author, connections to the broader structures in society because they are often constructed as a chronological interpretation and representation of the forces which shape perspectives and actions (English, 2006). The construction of a life history, through interpretation and analysis by a learned other, in contrast to autobiography, can turn an autobiographical narrative into scholarship through connecting the life story in time and space to a broader historical context (Goodson & Sikes, 2001; Goodson et al., 2016). In this book, I have explored the autobiographies of the principals, Rachael, Peter and Christine, and present their life histories as intimate portraits. The analyses reported here drew on aspects of narrative inquiry, Bourdieu’s epistemological qualitative methods, and Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke’s explication of theoretically informed thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Braun and Clarke (2022) argue that theoretically informed thematic analyses identify and report on patterns within the data, describing it in rich detail, while also including interpretation. My thematic analyses proceeded in accordance with the phases described by Braun and Clarke (2022). The first layer of analysis was an immersive exploration of all the generated data. In this initial phase I transcribed interviews and began working with the data by drawing on narrative methods of analysis through creating life histories. This work linked the participants biographies with cultural, social, political and historical events creating inter-textual and inter-contextual modes of analysis (Goodson et al., 2016). These life histories then became the core of the writing in Chaps. 5–7, where I drew on specifics of the participants’ primary and secondary habitus and their encounters in the field linked to the thematic analyses. I used a range of metaphors as organising principles within each of the participant stories. Kelly (2011) argues metaphors can act as shortcuts in describing ‘research activity, which is often not straightforward [and can] actively bring meanings and foster associations from ‘outside’ the immediate context of the research project’ (pp. 431–432). My use of metaphors to organise the participant stories work also to trouble contested terms and normative social justice leadership concepts.

1.4 Contributions to the Field of Educational Leadership and Leading Practices for Social Justice The research on which this book is based sought to add to the body of knowledge on leadership for social justice in schools located in marginalised communities. The findings contribute to theory and educational leadership and social justice scholarship through the rich narratives that highlight the complexities of the everyday practices of principals who work in schools located within these communities. Of particular significance is the importance of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991) in exploring how the principals have become responsibilised in gendered, classed

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and raced ways. It reveals the path educational leaders have taken to work in schools located in marginalised areas, and how they lead, i.e., what strategies they mobilise in order to manage the complexities of their work in terms of their leadership practices. This research is significant as school leadership can make a small but crucial difference to students’ learning outcomes, especially for students of equity backgrounds (Leithwood, 2021). Understanding the strategies principals employ to manage the complexities of their work as well as understanding why they work in such schools is critical from a social justice perspective. Furthermore, the social justice leadership literature has tended to focus on instilling social justice principles in aspiring leaders. This research contributes to an understanding of what shapes the social justice dispositions of primary principals working in these challenging contexts, examining the links between the ideal (what ‘should be’) and how these principles of social justice leadership are lived in the complex contexts in which these school leaders are located (‘what is’).

1.5 Structure of the Book Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive literature review of global social justice leadership research. It first defines what is understood by leadership practices and then it outlines the ways in which social justice leadership research has developed differently across the world. Normative understandings of social justice leadership are then outlined based on this broad literature. These understandings then contextualise social justice leadership in primary schools. Chapter 3 explores how Bourdieu’s work has been instrumental in exposing the reproduction of disadvantage through schooling as a result of the interplay between the apparently ‘natural’ practices that perpetuate disadvantage in fields such as education and the habitus of those participants who encounter the field (Eacott, 2010; English, 2012; Gunter, 2010; Thomson, 2017; Wilkinson & Eacott, 2013). Given that this research aims to examine the interconnections between leaders’ understandings of social justice and their subsequent practices within the education field, a conceptual tool kit that examines central issues of power, privilege and reproduction is central to the work. In this chapter I discuss how Bourdieu defined these tools, as well as the substantive critiques of his work and how they have been harnessed in educational research, particularly educational leadership research. I then use these concepts as a lens through which to map the current educational field in Australia, thus providing a context for understanding the social justice practices of the principals in the study. Chapter 4 provides a context for the case studies in this book. It firstly outlines how advantage and disadvantage are spatially distrubuted in Australia, outlines the impact of this maldistribution on educational outcomes for children. It theorises this maldistribution through the critical geographies of Edward Soja. It then introduces the contextual details for the case studies canvassed in this book. They are some of the most marginalised and under-resourced areas in Victoria: two primary schools in outer suburban areas, and one in a rural area. It then briefly introduces the three

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primary schools lead by the key participants in this research, principals Rachael, Peter and Christine, and secondary participants, Lucy and Steven. Chapter 5 is the first of three chapters exploring the rich narratives and life histories of the primary participants. These narratives are explored through metaphors. Drawing on the methodological tools of narrative inquiry I sought to understand the life experiences of the participants of this study. These are explored and analysed through Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and the field mechanisms of capitals, social class, and doxa, as well as field conditions such as illusio, to consider how these life histories can be understood in light of the participants’ crucial roles in leading in marginalised primary schools. In so doing, these chapters explore what educational leaders understand by social justice, how these understandings influence their social justice leadership practices. It uncovers disjunctions between participant articulated understandings of social justice and the social justice leadership practices they report on. For Rachael, this chapter explores aspects of her leading practices through the metaphors of mission, macrocosms, and mothering. ‘Mission’ explores Rachael’s moral understandings of her work as a principal in a school located in a highly disadvantaged community. ‘Macrocosms’ explores her relationship and work for and with her community. ‘Mothering’ explores Rachel’s ethics of care through a feminist lens and exposes the enormous workload she has taken on. A disjunction in Rachael’s articulations of socially just leading practices is uncovered in her adherence to the discourses of meritocracy, a function of her experiences as an immigrant to Australia. Chapter 6 explores Peter’s primary and secondary habitus through his history as a missionary prior to becoming a teacher then principal. His leadership is explored through the metaphors of mission, monarchy and might. Peter’s ‘mission’ as a principal, linked to his missionary past is explored in more detail. ‘Monarchy’ explores Peter’s positioning as principal in his school and the ways in which his leadership positions others in his school. The metaphor of ‘might’ exposes the ways in which power is deployed in Peter’s school to craft his vision of schooling for the children in his community. Chapter 7, provides an intimate portrait of Christine, an experienced principal near the end of her career. Her leadership is explored through the metaphors of monitor, ministry and mentor. First, her life history informs the development of her primary and secondary habitus. The metaphor of ‘monitor’ is used to explore the ways in which Christine surveils the staff and students in her rural school through an ethics of care. ‘Ministry’ is deployed as a way of examining Christine’s workload in caring for the wider community. The metaphor of ‘mentor’ outlines Christine’s commitment to share her knowledge and experience with teachers and aspiring principals in the service of public education. Chapter 8 brings together the rich narratives explored in the previous chapters. It explores key findings in relation to social justice leading practices. Firstly it examines the implications of the spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage and how this influences leadership in schools. It explores leadership, intersectionality (gender, class and race) and social justice understandings through the very different life experiences of Rachael, Peter and Christine. The social justice understandings and practices

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of the participants are further examined through their resistance and compliance with the expectations of their governing public school system. The social justice disjunctions of the participants are explored through their varied understanding of merit and aspiration within their communities. The implications of these explorations are outlined. The final Chapter, Chap. 9, outlines the implications of this research for social justice leadership scholarship, for leadership scholars, for policy makers, and for principal practice.

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Davidson, P., Bradbury, B., & Wong, M. (2022). Poverty in Australia 2022: a snapshot 0858710994. Sydney Day, C. (2014). Resilient principals in challenging schools: The courage and costs of conviction. Teachers and Teaching, 20(5), 638–654. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2014.937959 Deloitte Access Economics. (2019). Unpacking drivers of learning outcomes of students from different backgrounds. Australian Government Department of Education. DeMatthews, D. (2015). Making sense of social justice leadership: A case study of a principal’s experiences to create a more inclusive school. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 14(2), 139–166. https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2014.997939 Department of Economic and Social Affairs United Nations. (2006). Social justice in an open world: The role of the United Nations. United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Social Policy and Development. Duncan, A. (2022). Behind the line: poverty and disadvantage in Australia 2022. Eacott, S. (2010). Bourdieu’s strategies and the challenge for educational leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 13(3), 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/136031209034 10587 English, F. W. (2006). Understanding leadership in education: Life writing and its possibilities. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 38(2), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220620600555121 English, F. W. (2012). Bourdieu’s misrecognition: Why educational leadership standards will not reform schools or leadership. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 44(2), 155– 170. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2012.658763 Francis, B., & Mills, M. (2012). Schools as damaging organisations: Instigating a dialogue concerning alternative models of schooling. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(2), 251–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.688765 Fraser, N. (1997). Justice interruptus: Critical reflections on the ‘postsocialist’ condition. Routledge. Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36(69–88) Fraser, N. (2007). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. In T. Lovell (Ed.), (Mis)recognition, social inequality and social justice: Nancy Fraser and Pierre Bourdieu (pp. 17–35). Routledge. Fraser, N. (2009). Scales of justice: Reimagining political space in a globalizing world. Columbia University Press. Garner, S., & Bhattacharyya, G. (2011). Poverty, ethnicity and place. Aston University, York. www. jrf.org.uk Gaskell, J. S., & Levin, B. (2012). Making a difference in urban schools: Ideas, politics and pedagogy. University of Toronto Press. Gewirtz, S. (2006). Towards a contextualized analysis of social justice in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2006.00175.x Glesne, C. (2016). Becoming qualitative researchers: An introduction. Pearson. Goodson, I., Antikainen, A., Sikes, P., & Andrews, M. (2016). The Routledge international handbook on narrative and life history. Taylor & Francis. Goodson, I., & Sikes, P. (2001). Life history research in educational settings: Learning from lives. Open University Press. Gümü¸s, S., Arar, K., & Oplatka, I. (2020). Review of international research on school leadership for social justice, equity and diversity. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2020.1862767 Gunter, H. M. (2010). A sociological approach to educational leadership. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(4), 519–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2010.484927 Islam, N., & Winkel, J. (2017). Climate change and social inequality: DESA working paper no. 152: United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Keddie, A. (2012). Schooling and social justice through the lenses of Nancy Fraser. Critical Studies in Education, 53(3), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2012.709185 Keddie, A., MacDonald, K., Blackmore, J., Boyask, R., Fitzgerald, S., Gavin, M., Heffernan, A., Hursh, D., McGrath-Champ, S., Møller, J., O’Neill, J., Parding, K., Salokangas, M., Skerritt,

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C., Stacey, M., Thomson, P., Wilkins, A., Wilson, R., Wylie, C., Yoon, E.-S. (2022). What needs to happen for school autonomy to be mobilised to create more equitable public schools and systems of education? The Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384022-00573-w Keddie, A., MacDonald, K., Blackmore, J., Wilkinson, J., Gobby, B., Niesche, R., Eacott, S., Mahoney, C. (2020). The constitution of school autonomy in Australian public education: areas of paradox for social justice. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2020.1781934 Keddie, A., & Mills, M. (2019). (Book). Autonomy, accountability and social justice. stories of English schooling. Routledge. Kelly, F. (2011). ‘Cooking together disparate things’: The role of metaphor in thesis writing. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 48(4), 429–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/147 03297.2011.617088 Lamb, S., Huo, S., Walstab, A., Wade, A., Maire, Q., Doecke, E., Jackson, J., Endekov, Z. (2020). Educational opportunity in Australia 2020: Who succeeds and who misses out. Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria University, for the Mitchell Institute. Leithwood, K. (2021). A review of evidence about equitable school leadership. Education Sciences, 11(8), 377. MacDonald, K., Keddie, A., Blackmore, J., Mahoney, C., Wilkinson, J., Gobby, B., Niesche, R., Eacott, S. (2021). School autonomy reform and social justice: a policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present). The Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s13384-021-00482-4 Niesche, R. (2013). Deconstructing educational leadership: Derrida and Lyotard. Routledge. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). The Bellknapp Press of Harvard University Press. Power, S. (2012). From redistribution to recognition to representation: Social injustice and the changing politics of education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 10(4), 473–492. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2012.735154 Productivity Commission. (2018). Rising inequality? A stocktake of the evidence. Canberra. Raffo, C., Dyson, A., Gunter, H. M., Hall, D., Jones, L., & Kalambouka, A. (2010). Education and poverty in affluent countries. Routledge. Redmond, G., Main, G., O’Donnell, A. W., Skattebol, J., Woodman, R., Mooney, A., Wang, J., Turkmani, S., Thomson, C., Brooks, F. (2022). Who excludes? Young people’s experience of social exclusion. Journal of Social Policy, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00472794 22000046. https://www.cambridge.org/core/article/who-excludes-young-peoples-experienceof-social-exclusion/F817D2FE8C0742EED5C38669853D680A Repucci, S., & Slipowitz, A. (2022). Freedom in the world 2022: The global expansion of authoritarian rule. Washington Freedom House. Rowe, E., & Perry, L. B. (2021). Voluntary school fees in segregated public schools: how selective public schools turbo-charge inequity and funding gaps. Comparative Education, 1–18. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2021.1942359 Sciffer, M. G., Perry, L. B., & McConney, A. (2022). Does school socioeconomic composition matter more in some countries than others, and if so, why? Comparative Education, 58(1), 37–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2021.2013045 Sharkey, P. (2013). Stuck in place: Urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality. University of Chicago Press. Tanton, R., Dare, L., Miranti, R., Vidyattama, Y., Yule, A., & McCabe, M. (2021). Dropping off the edge 2021: Persistent and multilayered disadvantage in Australia. Melbourne Thomson, P. (2002). Schooling the rustbelt kids: Making the difference in changing times. Trentham Books. Thomson, P. (2017). Educational leadership and Pierre Bourdieu. Routledge. United Nations Department of Economic Social Affairs. (2020). World social report 2020: Inequality in a rapidly changing world. UN.

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Chapter 2

Towards a Normative Understanding of Social Justice Leadership Practices: Mapping the Field

Abstract In this chapter I map the existing research in regard to educational leadership (EL) and leading for social justice leadership (LSJ). Firstly, I discuss and then define how EL is conceptualised in this book. I then examine research into schools located in areas of social disadvantage, in particular examining the role that principals of these schools may play in making a difference in the educational outcomes of children. In so doing, I draw on a rich corpus of literature on education for social justice. I conclude with a summary of the gaps in existing research and the contribution that this study makes in this area. Keywords Educational leadership · Social justice · Social justice leadership · Schooling

As identified in Chap. 1, in Australia, along with other affluent nations, there is growing inequality. This inequality is reflected in a range of ways, such as the concentration of disadvantage in geographical areas where multiple stressors, like long term unemployment, poverty, disability, Indigeneity or cultural background, may intersect. Importantly for this study, is the link between concentrated disadvantage and educational disadvantage. It is at this nexus where the principals in this study operate.

2.1 Educational Leadership or Leading Practices The last fifty years has seen an exponential growth in research about leadership as an organisational and management tool and the enshrining of leadership (and its link to management and administration) as a field of study in its own right. As a result of leadership studies being embedded in the work of business or management faculties the research has had a focus on managerial and organisational theory (Northouse, 2015). Within this literature exist a range of theories of leadership, for example, trait approaches, leader-member exchange, situational, and transformational leadership to name a few (Northouse, 2015). Northouse (2015) contends that as many

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as 65 different systems of classification have been developed to define the different dimensions and characteristics of leadership. The proliferation of these theories, caricatured as adjectival leadership has created a normalised disciplinary leadership discourse that assumes that leadership is the product of the individual and is ‘timeless, enduring and essential to the human condition’ (Wilson, 2016, p. 29). However, Wilson (2016) argues that this ‘conventional understanding we have of leadership today is profoundly limited, limiting and problematic’ (p. 2). Studies of school leadership have mirrored the path that general leadership studies have taken. They have been mired in the managerial and organisational aspects of leadership and co-opted in the School Effectiveness and Improvement (SEI) literature on leadership. Since the 1980s, in Australia there has been an increasing policy focus on management (as opposed to leadership) in both primary and secondary schools. This focus is characterised by Blackmore (2013) as a market and managerial turn stemming from the move towards self-management and executive power as a result of neoliberal restructuring of the education landscape. This managerial turn is made clear through the 2007 Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop’s statement that ‘principals are the CEOs of their schools, and like CEOs they must oversee an efficient and successful business’ (Bishop, 2007, p. v). The SEI literature is seductive for educational policy makers and leaders because it appears to offer easy solutions to problems, as if schools were ahistorical organisations, and school leadership not context specific. Niesche (2014) suggests that the idea of educational ‘leadership’ is a technique of governmentality, arguing that ‘leadership as a discourse (and a particular type of leadership primarily) is being deployed as a strategy of governments, and as an answer to educational problems’ (p. 144). Indeed, Muijs (2010) argues that the primary problem with SEI approaches, which have not successfully addressed the achievement gap for disadvantaged students, is ‘in the (mis)use made of the concept by policy makers’ (p. 87). Bogotch (2015; see also Gunter & Courtney, 2020) argues that EL research has often ignored the necessary educational focus, while in Australia, John Smyth had been arguing for an educative view of leadership since the 1980s (Smyth et al., 2014). In the adjectival (transactional, transformational, etc.) leadership research, there still remains an idea of a static and ‘heroic’ leader (usually assuming heterosexual, CIS gendered, white masculinities) (Blackmore, 1999; Wilkinson, 2018), suggesting that the application of these models of leadership can be problematic in educational settings and policy making (Courtney and Gunter, 2015; Eacott, 2010). In fact, John Smyth (Smyth et al., 2014) argues that: the totalizing way in which educational leaders and policy makers around the world have become captured and implicated in doing some deeply damaging work in inflicting a neoliberal agenda upon schooling…[makes] it so unattractive, deformed, intellectually bereft and repulsive. (p. 107).

To counter these limited explorations of EL, some scholars have turned to critical and social critical theory, although, as Niesche (2012) notes such scholars tend to be ‘working against the grain’ (p. 457) of the broader EL research field. More recent critical leadership approaches use the lenses of post-structuralism and postmodernism

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to understand how ‘power, inequality, identity, subjectivity, exploitation, oppression and domination’ are implicated in understanding leadership (Wilson, 2016, p. 31). Critical research recognises that there is a powerful connection between politics, economics and culture, and that social, spatial, historical and ideological forces both produce and constrain our social structures (Bourdieu, 2005). Wilson (2016) argues, for example, that the ontology of leadership ‘is fluid, unstable and not something fixed in ‘human nature” (p. 10). These alternative approaches to more traditional understandings of leadership reinforce the idea that leadership has ‘been invented and re-invented in many different forms over a long period of time’ (Wilson, 2016, p. 2), i.e. it is a social invention, not human nature. Australia has a particularly rich history in the critical tradition when it comes to EL and social justice research. The geographic isolation of Australia meant that these critical researchers looked outside of what was happening in the discipline in Australia and drew their influences from the work of continental philosophers and critical theorists from the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe, as well as linking with emerging key critical researchers from the United States (US) such as Michael Apple and Henry Giroux (Tinning & Sirna, 2011). This has meant that Australian research of leadership in schools has a long history in challenging the managerialism of EL policy and research. This research developed new ways of thinking about EL as socially constructed, reaffirmed the centrality of education, introduced new ideas from related fields, considered social justice as the heart of the work, and ‘introduced ethics and contestation as central to the field’ (Bates, 2011, p. 7). For example: Bob Lingard’s work has enriched understandings of how contemporary education policies have worked to restructure principals’ work and subjectivities (Lingard & Gale, 2007); Jane Kenway and Jill Blackmore added feminist theory to the critical approaches (Blackmore, 1989; Kenway & Modra, 1992); Fazal Rizvi brought a critical lens to policy analysis and understanding multiculturalism (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009); and John Smyth critiqued traditional EL understandings (Smyth et al., 2014). In this research the term educational leadership does not rely on notions of leadership taken from management and business literature but is instead is: … both about the key educational matters of teaching and learning, and is itself educational through intention, process and outcome. The purpose of educational leadership is not just about particular tasks and behaviours, but is a social and socializing relationship. (Ribbins & Gunter, 2002, p. 372)

In this understanding of leadership, the scope is wider than formal leaders such as the principal, but includes teachers, children and the wider community. Indeed there is a growing literature on ‘middle’ leadership exploring these wider conceptions (Grice, 2019; Grootenboer et al., 2020; Lipscombe, Grice, Tindall-Ford, & De-Nobile, 2020). This troubles the ideas that are tied up in the managerial and adjectival leadership literature. There is a tension in these broader conceptions, however, because both state and federal governments, policy makers and educational systems attribute to the principal full responsibility for school outcomes and driving reform and change, thus ‘responsibilising’ the principal (Lingard, 2014). For this reason, Wilkinson (2017) uses the term leading rather than leadership in order to trouble the notion of leadership

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as an individual property vested in the personage of the principal. This shift in language focuses attention to the practices of leading and the connections between leading and other educational practices such as professional learning, teaching, and policy implementation; considered ecologies of practice (Kemmis et al., 2012). This also sidesteps the debates in corpus of the EL literature about whether the research constitutes a field, and whether it should be reflected through the contested terms: educational management, administration or leadership (Eacott, 2022). While the research in this book is focused on those in whom the power of the institution is inscribed, that is principals working in schools in marginalised communities, the focus is on the practices of leading rather than the concepts that are inherent in the literature of formal leadership. Taking this focus allows an analysis of how the principals understand social justice, how their leadership practices are influenced by these understandings and the implications of these for leading for social justice scholarship, policy and practice. In the following section I turn to exploring how theories of social justice that have been mobilised in EL research.

2.2 Theories of Social Justice and Schooling In Chap. 1, I briefly introduced theories of justice that have supported the research in this book. I now turn to how justice has been considered in terms of education and EL. The terms equity and social justice are often used in studies of poverty and disadvantage, but they are not always defined and are sometimes seen as interchangeable. In the Gonski Report (Gonski et al., 2011), a critical examination of the inequities in school funding in Australia, equity is defined as ‘ensuring that differences in educational outcomes are not the result of differences in wealth, income, power or possessions’ (p. 105). This is aligned with the understanding of equity in the OECD equitable schooling policy recommendations which considers equity in terms of fairness and inclusiveness (Field et al., 2007). The educational work of the OECD, however, is heavily critiqued by Lingard et al. (2014) as seeing a commitment to equity as compatible with productivity and market efficiency. As both Keddie (2012) and Lingard and colleagues (Lingard et al., 2014) argue, through the process of the global neoliberal restructuring of education and increased accountability through high stakes testing such as NAPLAN and PISA, social justice has been rearticulated as equity and can be seen as a measure of performance and comparison. Therefore both terms have become problematic in that ‘stronger conceptions of social justice as equality of opportunity in an equal society have given way to weaker conceptions of equity as fairness in a meritocratic society’ (Lingard et al., 2014, pp. 711–712). For this reason, in this book, I reclaim the term ‘social justice’ as aligned with human rights based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly, 1948) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nation International Children’s Emergency Fund, 1996). This approach to social justice argues that advocates are committed to people living

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in ‘dignity, opposing discrimination and inequality, and protecting people against harm from the government and other actors’, helping to ‘ensure more participatory and sustainable solutions to social justice issues’ (The Advocates for Human Rights, 2017, p. 68). A key point in the above discussions is that understanding the context of the school is critical: Thomson’s thisness (Thomson, 2002). Braun and colleagues (Braun et al., 2011) argue that the contextual dimensions of a school include situated, professional, material and external contexts and that a ‘real’ school is only understood through taking these dimensions into account. Mulford (2008) argues that school context is one of the three key interrelated elements of leadership, along with school organisation and the school leader. Schools are an amalgamation of individuals in a particular socio-geographic space and time (Eacott, 2015). No one school is the same as any other, and therefore educational leaders must seek to understand the specific community needs and demands relevant to that particular school. This may be at odds with the expectations of the governing bodies. Similarly, no one leadership or management style or practice will be effective in all contexts. Educational leaders require flexibility and an ability to understand the specific context of their school and community, and be able to develop and adapt their strategies in order for children to reach their potential. Understanding of the contextual enactment of social justice was particularly important in this research because my interest was in how individual principals understand and enact leading for social justice (LSJ) in their school communities. The scholarship around leadership and social justice is founded on the tenets of critical theory, in that it ‘openly takes sides in the interests of struggling for a better world’ (Giroux, 2009, p. 35). While Ira Bogotch and colleagues explored the possibilities in Radicalizing Educational Leadership: Dimensions of Social Justice, drawing on diverse disciplines and theories outside of the field of education, they conclude that all educational struggles for social justice ‘remain unfinished and incomplete’ (Bogotch et al., 2008, p. xii). Blount (2008) argued that social justice movements grow as historical understanding of social relations develop, suggesting that LSJ will be specific to the broad historical, social and spatial contexts in which they operate. She concluded that scholars are obligated to continue the struggle to define subjective theories of justice to suit their own unique situations. In this regard, different regional traditions of LSJ research have developed (MacDonald, 2020). The LSJ research from the US has primarily focused on the educational outcomes differentiated through socially constructed notions of ‘race’, the LSJ research from the UK has a strong focus on educational outcomes differentiated through class, Australia’s critical research on LSJ is more varied and eclectic, and, as Gümü¸s and colleagues (2020) argue, there is a silence in the literature from non-Anglophone voices. More recently, critical feminist intersectional theory has been incorporated into LSJ research narratives (Fuller, 2021, 2022). In the following sections this international literature is drawn together to outline the apparent normative understandings of LSJ practices.

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2.3 Towards a Normative Understandings of Leading for Social Justice Research with/into educational leaders in both primary and secondary schools suggest that principals who have a clear focus on social justice will tend to exhibit a range of practices. Drawing together the literature, these (normative) practices can be summarised as follows (MacDonald, 2020). They will: . have a focus on pedagogy where leadership in a school will be focused on improving student learning outcomes, but also on learning with staff . be critically reflective, reflecting in, on and for action but also critically reflexive. . promote a shared ethos of social justice as a key part of the school’s agenda . create structures with leadership dispersal . implement structures and strategies that support smooth running of the school . seek to develop networks and partnerships with local organisations and businesses which create powerful educational connections. . champion supportive social relationships with and between staff, students and in the community . be activist and political . be able to think critically

2.3.1 A Focus on Pedagogy The educative focus of educational leadership is reflected in this practice. All educational leaders should have pedagogy at the heart of their work, however as a LSJ practice it has a wider focus. In his critical work around the impact of neoliberalism Smyth (2012) advances an archetype for a socially just school that features interwoven and synergistic ‘generative themes’: community oriented, activist and political, and pedagogically engaged. Educational leaders who have a social justice focus for pedagogical engagement, according to Smyth (2012, p. 15) include: considering local communities as a valuable resource, taking risks, confronting controversial issues, innovation, bending rules for students and creating a school culture that is safe for reflection, that provides students with a wide range of experiences. This extends a focus on pedagogy beyond a functional focus on improving student learning outcomes measured on narrow understandings of success and a narrow curriculum, together with teacher learning and development, but includes understanding the contexts of students and communities, and the places where the schools are located. For example, Thomson’s (2002) research in post-industrial rustbelt Australian suburbs where unemployment had risen as a result of the manufacturing downturn led her to argue that the haecceity of schools, what she terms their thisness, and their neighbourhood contexts are essential policy approaches to addressing issues of social justice.

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As a matter of urgency, LSJ practices in marginalised communities must have a focus on closing achievement gaps (Brown et al., 2011; Day, 2014; Hayes et al., 2006; Keddie et al., 2020; Theoharis, 2009), but accounting for place and the people in it is critical in working towards this goal (see Chap. 4). The research in these areas include exploring place-based pedagogies as critical to engaging students and communities (Shannon & Galle, 2017; Somerville, 2020; Somerville et al., 2012, 2019) culturally responsive school leadership (Khalifa, 2020; Khalifa et al., 2019), the social class of students and communities (Raffo, 2014; Reay, 2012, 2017; Reay et al., 2010; Taysum & Gunter, 2008; Thomson, 2002), intersectional identities of leaders and students (Agosto & Roland, 2018; Fuller, 2022; Ispa-Landa & Thomas, 2019; Keddie, 2022a; Wilkinson and MacDonald, 2022) and the critical importance of decolonising education for Indigenous learners (Brown, 2019; Lopez, 2020; Regmi, 2022; Zembylas, 2018).

2.3.2 Critically Reflective and Critically Reflexive In order to fulfil the wider socially just pedagogical focus described above, research suggests that ELs need to be critically reflective, reflecting in, on and for action (Furman, 2012; Smyth, 2012; Young, 2015), but also critically reflexive (Lingard et al., 2003; Niesche, 2017). English (2020, p. 1) distinguishes between reflection and reflexivity with two questions: ‘Reflection of practice refers to asking such questions as, ‘Did we reach our goals, and if not, why not?’ or ‘How could my leadership practice be improved?’ Reflexivity asks instead, ‘How am I thinking about how I am thinking about leadership?”. For Niesche (2017, p. 246) this means that principals should be ‘immersed in writings on social justice, inequality, diversity, sociology, philosophy’. Again this points to the importance of understanding the contexts in which ELs are working, and asking of themselves and their staff and community: What are the purposes of education, and how do we, in our school, work toward or against those aims? This means that educational leaders who are focused on social justice must be cognisant of the policies and conditions that enable or constrain just education practices, and the broader enablers and constraints for meaningful participation in education for marginalised communities. As pointed out above, for example, an awareness of the impacts of, and a willingness to challenge, the impact of the unacknowledged violent colonial history of a settler nation like Australia on education for Indigenous learners becomes a critical component of LSJ (Brown, 2019; Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Understanding that school may be damaging places for some students, and working against that, is crucial (Francis & Mills, 2012). Jane Wilkinson argues that the principalship in Australia is ‘coded white’, despite the diversity of the Australian population (Wilkinson, 2018, p. 56). This is also reported in Aotearoa New Zealand (Milne, 2016), and the US (Hancock & Warren, 2016) which demands culturally responsive leadership (Chen & Yang, 2022; LoBue, 2022). Australia, for example, is one of the most multicultural countries in the world. Almost 30% of the population

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was born overseas, and almost half have a parent born overseas (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). Yet the teaching, and leading, educational workforce lacks the same diversity as the population: while 25% of the population speaks a language other than English, less than 12% of teachers and leaders do (Wilkinson, 2018). In addition, despite 60% of primary and 40% of secondary principals in Australia being women (McKenzie et al., 2014), the broader EL literature still assumes white masculinity as a normative model for leadership (Wilkinson, 2018). Blackmore (2010), in her call for a cultural turn in EL scholarship drawing on critical race theory and feminist theories, also argues that White men and women in leadership rarely ‘question their Whiteness’ (p. 45). She contends that a necessary condition of inclusive education and leadership is for an exploration and understanding of the privilege that Whiteness brings and this should be foregrounded (Blackmore, 2010). In her case study of the practices of principals of a regional secondary school adjusting to an increasingly culturally diverse student population, Wilkinson (2018) argues that the colour-blindness of the policies and standards governing leadership for social justice, along with the homogeneity of the leaders themselves, means that having a socially just leader in a diverse school may be left to chance. She argues that this is not acceptable, and calls for ‘a system-wide, morally and ethically informed set of supportive approaches’ that respond to the context of schools and ‘are informed by critical scholarship and reflexive standards of practice’ (Wilkinson, 2018, p. 68). In my research a key research focus is the examination of the career trajectory of principals working in disadvantaged primary schools, and I investigate the likelihood of these principals ending up in these schools by ‘chance’. A focus on educational justice requires ELs to have a strong reflexive approach to understanding the social, economic, political and cultural conditions in which they work, together with knowing, understanding and working with their school communities. But it also requires having a reflexive understanding about the self. In the literature of LSJ, the identity of leaders is a recurring theme. It is crucial in examining the beliefs, understandings, and practice of educational leaders working with marginalised communities. Life histories have proven to be an indicator of the types of leaders that principals become (Cubillo & Brown, 2003; Scanlan, 2012) and Santamaria (2014) suggests that leadership practice is always a function of who someone is, and calls for investigation into how who someone is influences what they do. This is particularly important in my research because I investigate the life histories of the participants in my study.

2.3.3 Shared Ethos of SJ The setting of goals and expectations is a key role for school leaders (Robinson et al., 2015; for a critique, see Courtney and Gunter, 2015). However, leaders with a focus on educational justice for their students and communities promote a ‘shared ethos’ (Niesche, 2017, p. 246) of social justice as a key part of the school’s agenda (e.g. Anderson, 2009; Blackmore, 2006; Furman, 2012; Taysum & Gunter, 2008;

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Wilkinson, 2018). Operationalising socially just practices within their schools is dependent on what ELs understand by social justice (Taysum & Gunter, 2008) and depends on the extent to which they understand the enablers and constraints discussed above. However, Bogotch (2021, p. 194) argues that working towards a socially just school ‘involves—in its deliberate and explicit use of moral power—disrupting/ troubling everyday practices which are inequitable and exclusive’. Working towards a shared understanding of socially just practice with staff, as part of their professional development, and with communities to speak back to injustice is a key role for ELs. Encouraging professional learning and collaboration with teachers that identifies contextual injustices and develops ‘in-action’ practices to combat these (Bogotch, 2021) promotes shared understandings of social justice (see also Kitchen and Taylor, 2020).

2.3.4 Leadership Dispersal Leaders attuned to working towards socially just outcomes in their schools tend to create opportunities for dispersing leadership (Brooks, 2012; Brown et al., 2011; Hayes et al., 2004; Keddie et al., 2022a, 2022b; Smyth, 2012). Such leaders will be committed to spreading leadership practices across the school, will support collaborative decision-making and will champion the development of leadership in others, including children and community members. Distributing leadership across organisations such as schools is critical for principals in managing their growing and complex workloads, and sharing leadership in this way has come to be a measurable in accountability regimes for principals, for example as a key component of understanding the principal role (Australian Institute for Teaching & School Leadership, 2018). Growing interest in ‘middle leadership’ in governing organisations has also contributed to the enshrining of some form of shared responsibility across the school. However, as Tian and Nutbrown (2021, p. 1) argue, distributed leadership has been recast and may be ‘misused as a managerial tool’ when responsibility is shared, but power is not, which reinforces epistemic injustices. This rearticulation of distributed leadership as shared responsibility rather than democratic versions promoting collaboration and collectivism (Lumby, 2013; Spillane, 2006) can have the effect of alienating teachers, creating low trust and high surveillance environments (Keddie et al., 2022a, 2022b). Leaders who foreground socially just outcomes will focus on democratic distributed leadership that shares not just responsibility, but also decision making, and encourages collegiality, trust in the professionalism of others, ownership and willingness to implement change (Keddie et al., 2022a, 2022b).

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2.3.5 Effective Processes, Strategies and Structures to Support the Smooth Running of a School Effective school leaders have a focus on creating processes, strategies and structures that support the smooth running of a school (Hayes et al., 2004; Robinson et al., 2015). This is particularly important in terms of socially just leading practices because this allows for a primary focus on teaching and learning and student and community wellbeing. There are dire consequences for having processes that are hard to navigate for staff in schools in marginalised communities. For example, in their study in a school in an economically disadvantaged and culturally diverse outer suburban metropolitan school in Australia, Amanda Keddie and colleagues found that complex systems for requesting support for behavioural and wellbeing issues for students left teachers feeling surveilled, unsupported and mistrusted (Keddie et al., 2022a, 2022b). The importance of effective processes, strategies and structures together with good communication in schools (and elsewhere) was highlighted during the Covid-19 pandemic. In Australia, the rapid shifting in and out of lockdowns, between on-site and remote learning created chaos and uncertainty for students and staff in schools, disproportionally negatively impacting on young people in marginalised communities (Eacott et al., 2020; Longmuir, 2021; Sum, 2022). As we have adjusted to a Covid-normal, there is a greater need for strong processes, strategies and structures as students have returned to school with greater mental health needs, learning loss, and disconnection from their teachers and schools.

2.3.6 Develop Networks ELs who have a SJ focus will seek to develop networks and partnerships with local organisations and businesses which create powerful educational connections (Robinson et al., 2015). Developing such networks is critical in marginalised communities in bringing economic, social and cultural capitals for the benefit of the children and families and staff. These networks can extend to building networks outside of the school to support teachers, the community (DeMatthews, 2018a) and also creating and extending principal networks to support the educational leadership work in schools (Rehm et al., 2021). In the US, this has been considered through the lens of bridge leadership. Bridge leadership, explored in Sonya Douglass’s work focused on the intersectionality of gender and race in her investigation of Black women leaders (Douglass , 2012), is understood epistemologically as the navigation of space between people (Tooms & Boske, 2010). In this sense, the leaders in Douglass’s study acted as a ‘bridge for others, to others, and between others in multiple and often complicated contexts over time’ (Douglass , 2012, p. 11). Developing key networks, bringing economic, social and cultural capitals into the community, linking communities with support organisations, developing connections through acting as a bridge across time

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and space (Tooms & Boske, 2010) are practices that challenge injustices experienced by children and their families in marginalised communities.

2.3.7 Supportive Social Relationships Key to building the kinds of networks discussed above, is the championing of supportive social relationships with and between staff, students and in the community (Brown, 2008; Furman, 2012; Hayes et al., 2004; Smyth, 2012; Theoharis, 2009). Learning takes place within and through relationships (Rogers, 2012) and effective EL occurs within and through relationships. These practices also include supporting the development of a culture of care which encourages teacher professional risk taking (Gandolfi & Mills, 2022; Heffernan et al., 2022; Ryu et al., 2022) and leads to high trust—low surveillance environments where the teachers have the support of school leadership to do their job (Francis et al., 2017; Furman, 2012; Lupton & Hempel-Jorgensen, 2012; Smyth, 2012). Leaders with a social justice focus will promote inclusion, giving voice to teachers, parents and students, particularly to the marginalised (Furman, 2012). Building a culture of care with a focus on relationships is intense emotional work for ELs (Heffernan et al., 2022). Personal resilience is a major factor in enabling leaders to manage the intense emotional demands that EL, and especially leadership with a strong social justice focus, brings (Blackmore, 1996; Day, 2014; Gonzalez & Firestone, 2013; Pratt-Adams & Maguire, 2009). This is related to the recognition that a principal’s work (in fact, all leaders’ work) is fundamentally emotional work (Beatty, 2000). Emotional labour at work occurs when there is an expectation that specific emotions will be displayed to others (Humphrey, 2014). Blackmore (1996, p. 346) points out that emotional labour is a common consequence of an educational leaders work in managing the dissonance ‘between felt and displayed emotion’. While there are certainly some general qualities, strategies and skills common to all exemplary educational leaders, those that work in disadvantaged communities face a greater range of challenges (Day, 2014; DeMatthews, 2015, 2018b) suggesting that the emotional labour they perform may be greater. Risk is a feature of the emotional labour of EL, especially EL for social justice and in areas of social disadvantage. Rivera-McCutchen and Watson (2014) suggest that there is risk involved in social justice leadership because it challenges dominant discourses and models of leadership.

2.3.8 Activist and Political In the socially just school envisaged by Smyth (2012), educational leaders must be activist and political. They will engage willingly in political action where necessary, recognise asymmetries of power, commit to fight against the interests of the

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elite, protect teachers against damaging policies, subvert external policies, challenge harmful stereotypes and deficit narratives and a feel a duty to teach their students and the community how to ‘speak back’ to injustices (Smyth, 2012). They will understand that forms of marginalisation such as racism (sexism, homophobia etc.) are not the ‘behavior of an individual but explore how structures and processes constitute systemic cultures and forms of racism, and seek to openly acknowledge and address where it occurs’ (Niesche, 2017, pp. 246–247). They will challenge power relations and structural inequalities and deficit discourses, promote equal opportunities for marginalised children (Anderson, 2009; Smyth, 2012). Anderson’s (2009) argument for EL as advocacy mirrored some of John Smyth’s earlier concerns around neoliberal influences transforming the principalship into an entrepreneurial business management. While it could be argued that advocacy relies on an individual leader (Smyth et al., 2014), Anderson’s (2009) conception of advocacy leadership is broad and incorporates linking with community-based groups to work for all children and youth so that it is collectives rather than individuals that work as advocates. He argues that advocacy is needed at multiple levels from the individual child to social policy, for example, and international influences (Anderson, 2009). He calls for leaders to challenge deficit discourses and taken-for-granted structures, to use culturally relevant curriculum that starts with what children bring to the classroom, to broaden assessment from high-stakes testing (Anderson, 2009). His socially critical perspective on advocacy offers more than just another adjectival leadership theory and is very similar to John Smyth’s archetype of a socially just school (Smyth, 2012). Bogotch (2021) argues that now, more than ever, ELs should be political and engage in public discourses. This could be risky to early career leaders (see Chap. 3), but for EL to be an emancipatory project (Waite, 2022), it is critical that ELs see themselves as public intellectuals, to be advocates with their marginalised communities.

2.3.9 Think Critically About Leadership A final practice for ELs with a focus on social justice for the children in their schools, and their communities, identified in the LSJ literature is a critical focus on EL discourse (Niesche, 2017). Richard Niesche (2017) argues that it is essential to be able to think critically about leadership discourse and what is being sold, for example, to consider the role of consultants in schooling and the impact of edubusinesses such as Pearson on the independence of curriculum (Ball, 2012; Hogan et al., 2016). Niesche (2017) is linking the restructuring of education to neoliberal orthodoxies and the subsequent impact on educational leadership discourses. He notes that ‘this ‘education’ reform is little more than a red herring that is dangled in front of school leaders but in reality offers them little in return other than increased managerialism and accountability with fewer resources’ (Niesche, 2017, p. 239). Thinking critically includes understanding how policy and governance influences work in schools, the politicisation of curriculum, etc. This is linked to the previous

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discussion on activism and the political nature of work in schools and opens a space for thinking about resistance (see Chap. 3).

2.4 Leadership for Social Justice in Primary Schools Research on social justice leadership in primary schools has focused on principals who have a strong sense of social justice and advocacy (Theoharis, 2009), women leaders and the policy and labour demands on them (Blackmore, 2004), the implications of disadvantage for policy makers (Thomson, 2002), coded white principalship in high refugee population or Indigenous communities (Keddie & Niesche, 2012; Wilkinson and Bristol, 2018) women leaders who are mothers and their identity (Bradbury & Gunter, 2006). This study differs to that of Theoharis’s (2009) work in that while his participants were known to be exemplary social justice leaders, my focus is on spatially concentrated disadvantage and the leaders who lead schools in these areas, their career decisions that have led them to this location, and how they understand and practice social justice leadership. In contrast to Theoharis’s study, when I began my research, the social justice understandings of the principals were unknown. Niesche’s (2014) call for more detailed investigation of the conditions and real daily work of principals in an era of increasing accountabilities and surveillance is crucial for my research. My work has sought to understand the life stories of principals and how this influences their articulation of and practice relating to their understandings of social justice through a Bourdieusian lens (Chap. 3). It extends on Niesche’s Foucauldian analyses using genealogy of ethics and governmentality, power, resistance and counter-conduct (Niesche, 2013; Niesche & Haase, 2012; Niesche & Keddie, 2015) through analysis and understanding of the habitus of principals working in disadvantaged areas, their capitals, and how they navigate fields; or how they ‘play the game’ to their advantage, and the advantage of the children in their communities. The research in this book is focused on leading for social justice in Victorian primary schools located in marginalised communities. Schools, teachers and in particular, principals (albeit indirectly) can, and do, play a key role in ameliorating the educational disadvantages suffered by students noted in discussions above. Leaders in primary schools are uniquely positioned in the transition from early childhood education through to secondary education to influence the likelihood of young people dropping out of school. My work builds on and extends the previous social justice leadership research that has been located in primary schools (e.g. Keddie & Niesche, 2012; Theoharis, 2009). My research is focused on how educational leaders who work in these marginalised areas are guided by social justice and to understand what kinds of socially just practices they enact once there.

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2.5 Conclusion In this chapter I have mapped the field of EL for social justice. I discussed how EL research grew from the business administration and organisational leadership fields; highlighting the problems that this has had in educational contexts to support my critical stance. I argued that this is a matter of justice, reclaimed the term ‘social justice’ as aligned with human rights, and pointed to the contextual enactment of social justice. I then introduced the leadership for social justice scholarship that supports my study. I outlined the rich international scholarship that focuses on the practices of leaders in schools in disadvantaged communities. This research has a regional flavour. In the US, the scholarship has largely focused on the educational outcomes of children differentiated through race. The research from the UK has a strong focus on educational outcomes for children differentiated through class, and Australia’s long critical research tradition on social justice leadership is more varied and eclectic. I drew this research together to suggest a normative view of the practices that a leader with a social justice focus might exhibit. Finally, I concluded with a summary of the gaps in existing research and the contribution that my study can make in this research area. In the following chapter I introduce Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice; the theoretical and analytical lens that has informed my research. In addition I outline the state of the public education field in Australia in which the principals who participated in this research are situated.

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Chapter 3

Theorising the Educational Leadership Field—Harnessing Bourdieu

Abstract Bourdieu’s work has been instrumental in exposing the reproduction of disadvantage through schooling as a result of the interplay between the apparently ‘natural’ practices that perpetuate disadvantage in fields such as education and the habitus of those participants who encounter the field (Eacott, 2010; English, 2012; Gunter, 2010; Thomson, 2017; Wilkinson and Eacott, 2013). Given that this research aims to examine the interconnections between leaders’ understandings of social justice and their subsequent practices within the education field, a conceptual tool kit that examines central issues of power, privilege and reproduction is central to the work. In this chapter I discuss how Bourdieu defined these tools, as well as the substantive critiques of his work and how they have been harnessed in educational research, particularly educational leadership research. I then use these concepts as a lens through which to map the current educational field in Australia, thus providing a context for understanding the social justice practices of the principals in the study. Keywords Bourdieu · Thinking tools · Habitus · Field · Capitals

In Chap. 2, I outlined the historical conceptions of leadership within organisational and management frameworks. Critical scholars claim that the educational leadership field lacks robust theorisation and that this void has had damaging effects on the field’s conceptual development (Eacott, 2010; Lakomski et al., 2017; Wilson, 2016). This can be seen, for instance, in the ways in which uncritical borrowing from business literature has found fit within the School Effectiveness and Improvement literature which offers context-free ‘solutions’ for struggling schools (Brooks, 2017; Courtney & Gunter, 2015; Eacott, 2017; Lakomski, et al., 2017; Riveros et al., 2017). In the past two decades, however, a range of theories from the social sciences have begun to be taken up in educational administration, particularly by critical scholars working in the field. One such theorist is Pierre Bourdieu, whose critical thinking tools, such as habitus, field, capitals, doxa and symbolic violence have been extremely helpful in shining a light on the educational leadership field and its practices, through

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exposing the asymmetrical power relations in the field of schooling (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977; Gunter, 2002; Hannus & Simola, 2010; Rawolle & Lingard, 2013). This has been critical in relation to issues of social justice and educational leadership practice. Bourdieu’s work has been instrumental in exposing the reproduction of disadvantage through schooling as a result of the interplay between the apparently ‘natural’ practices that perpetuate disadvantage in fields such as education and the habitus of those participants who encounter the field (Eacott, 2010; English, 2012; Gunter, 2010; Thomson, 2017; Wilkinson & Eacott, 2013). Given that this research aims to examine the interconnections between leaders’ understandings of social justice and their subsequent practices within the education field, a conceptual tool kit that examines central issues of power, privilege and reproduction is central to the work. In this chapter I discuss how Bourdieu defined these tools, as well as the substantive critiques of his work and how they have been harnessed in educational research, particularly educational leadership research. I then use these concepts as a lens through which to map the current educational field in Australia, thus providing a context for understanding the social justice practices of the principals in the study.

3.1 The Bourdieusian Tool Kit Throughout his working life, including ethnography in Algeria, studies into education, culture, art and language, a concern with inequality in France and his unease with neoliberalism, Pierre Bourdieu developed and refined a series of analytical concepts that he invited researchers to use to aid their thinking. Bourdieu contends that his concepts, or ‘thinking tools…are only visible through the results they yield’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 160). Thus, he argues, ‘scientific theory…emerges as a program of perception and of action…which is disclosed only in the empirical work that actualises it. It is a temporary construct which takes shape for and by empirical work’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 161). Bourdieu’s thinking tools are important for the way in which they both illuminate and explain social processes and enable researchers to link theory to practice. Bourdieu’s theory of practice includes a number of concepts, of which habitus, field and capital are the most widely deployed, as well as numerous concepts that act as mechanisms and conditions of the field. These are discussed separately below. They do not stand alone however. They are mutually constituted and inseparable; they are not single features of social systems but they are ‘particular foci of the same thing; two sides of the same coin’ (Grenfell, 2012, p. 149). Bourdieu was adamant that his tools be applied not just to the researched, but also to the researcher. He argued that the sociological gaze must also be turned upon the sociologist for the purpose of socioanalysis. This reflexivity, Bourdieu contends, guards against ‘epistemocentrism, or this ‘ethnocentrism of the scientist” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 69). Bourdieu’s invitation to use his thinking tools was an invitation to think with and beyond them, adapting them where necessary to address practical empirical problems.

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Bourdieu argued that the goal of sociology ‘is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the ‘mechanisms’ that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation’ (Bourdieu and de Saint Martin, 1996). Loïc Wacquant contends that the body of Bourdieu’s work represents ‘an integrated, epistemologically coherent, mode of social inquiry of universal applicability’ which overcomes the ‘debilitating reduction of sociology to either an objectivist physics of material structures or a constructivist phenomenology of cognitive forms’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 4–5). Bourdieu rejected the paired opposition of objectivist and subjectivist modes of knowledge and the dichotomies of structure versus agency and theory versus practice, arguing that they provide ‘false antinomies’ obscuring ‘the truth of human practice’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 10). His relational theory of practice weaves together the external constraints that influence interactions and representations (the objective structures—positions), and the internal perceptions and appreciations of agents (dispositions) governing their lived experience (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Bourdieu’s work has not been without criticism, some of which may be the result of the celebrity status he achieved in France as he campaigned against neoliberal globalisation in his later working years (Calhoun, 2014; Swartz, 2003). Some have been vicious, such as Jeannine Verdès-Leroux’s work in which she describes Bourdieu’s work as ‘sociological terrorism from the Left’ and ‘a con-artist’s sociology’ (VerdesLeroux, 2007, p. 1). Substantial criticism has suggested that his theory is overly structurally deterministic, although recent scholarship challenges this interpretation (Reay, 2015; Yang, 2014). Bourdieu himself rejected this critique as a misreading of his work, a deliberate ‘obfuscation of my intentions’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 159). Attempts to use his theories and conceptual tools in allegedly inauthentic ways have also contributed to enduring critiques of his work (Silva & Warde, 2010; Thomson, 2017). In fact, Yang (2014) argues that there has been ‘an impoverishing simplification’ of Bourdieu’s work and that this has contributed to some of the criticism (p. 1538). Further criticism has been focussed on the shortcomings in his conceptualisation of some of his thinking tools (discussed below), yet Calhoun (2014) argues that Bourdieu’s key intellectual themes and conceptual frameworks remained consistent throughout his career. Lamont (2012) contends that even where critics have questioned his meta-theoretical assumptions, Bourdieu’s work has opened ‘new vistas’ and allowed new questions to be asked (p. 235). Recent Bourdieusian scholarship (Courtney, 2017; Reay, 2015; Sayer, 2010; Thomson, 2017; Yang, 2014) suggests that there is sufficient leeway in Bourdieu’s work to reread, modify and adapt his theories to our current understandings. Indeed, Wacquant (1992a, p. xiv), a long-time collaborator of Bourdieu’s, drawing on Michel Foucault’s appeal for the value of theory, argues that in using Bourdieu’s theory of practice we should ‘use it, deform it, to make it groan and protest’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 54). In spite of some shortcomings, explored below, Bourdieu’s oeuvre offers a powerful analytical method for examining the ways in which the leadership and social justice practices of the principals in the research explored in this book comply

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with, seek compromise and/or resist, the logics of the educational field in which they operate. This is critical in understanding how educational leaders working in the most marginalised communities in Victoria accept or challenge the asymmetries of power within the public education field. In the following sections I explain the thinking tools of Bourdieu’s theory of practice, and outline the ways in which they have been used in educational leadership research. I start with the concept of habitus, and then move on to discuss field along with the mechanisms and conditions of the field. These include important concepts to my research such as capital, social class, doxa, illusio, symbolic violence and misrecognition.

3.2 Habitus The concept of habitus was developed by Bourdieu in order to resolve the antimony of structure and agency, a conundrum that had torn the social sciences apart (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Wacquant, 1992b). This antimony remains the source of much of the critique of Bourdieu’s work by those who question the success of his resolution in terms of habitus. Bourdieu relates that all of his thinking began with the question of how behaviour can ‘be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules’ (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 65). Formally defined, habitus is a system of dispositions, a property of agents (institutions, groups or individuals) that comprise ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). Structure is a result of agents’ life circumstance, both past and present, including upbringing, educational and work experiences (Bourdieu, 2010a). An agents’ habitus is structuring in that it shapes present and future practices (Bourdieu, 1990a, 1990b). The structure is systematically ordered rather than unpatterned or random, and is the result of dispositions which generate perceptions, thought and action (Bourdieu, 1990b). Bourdieu (1977) argues that the habitus is embodied and is ‘history turned into nature’ (pp. 78–79), suggesting that an agent’s history structures what becomes natural in their habitus. Dispositions designate ‘a way of being, a habitual state (especially of the body) and … a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 214). Dispositions are both durable and transposable, but not immutable, and are linked to an individual’s history. They may become active in a wide range of theatres of social action, which evolve according to their own logics (Bourdieu, 1977, 1993b). A habitus is in a constant state of change in response to new experiences, but this is mediated by the degree of flexibility or rigidity of the agent (Bourdieu, 2000). Bourdieu argued that the structure of the habitus is mediated through the external conditions of existence within the family, so that factors such as world views, domestic morality and taste, for example, become the basis of ‘perception and appreciation of all subsequent experience’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78). In this way, the primary habitus is embodied and developed in childhood through early experiences with family and school and then later through further work and life experiences as the secondary habitus. Primary and secondary habitus formation has been a key focus

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of this research in order to understand how the life experiences of the participants in the study have shaped their understandings and social justice leadership practice in their schools. An agent’s location in social space has a key role in the development of the primary habitus and the practices and classifications that agents acquire. For example, Bourdieu argued that different kinds of social practices, such as particular behaviours, manners, accents and social interactions are taken on by agents depending on their closeness in social space, classified by themselves and others as different social classes (See Sect. 3.3.1) (Bourdieu, 1990a). The dispositions of agents across different social classes, because their modes of generation may differ, can ‘cause one group to experience as natural or reasonable practices or aspirations, which another group finds unthinkable or scandalous’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78). Bourdieu uses the idea of ‘practical sense’ to describe the relation of ‘ontological complicity’ between habitus and the world which determined it (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 20). Practical sense then is the extent to which an agent is comfortable and matched (finds fit) within the field they are navigating. This has emerged as an important finding in the study where both Rachael (Chap. 5) and Christine (Chap. 7) are principals of schools in communities similar to those in which they spent all, or parts, of their childhoods. Habitus generally operates ‘beneath the level of consciousness and discourse’ and is therefore not necessarily obvious to individuals. This is one of the more contentious ideas in Bourdieu’s work (Yang, 2014). Nick Couldry (2005) argues that in Bourdieu’s definition of habitus, an agent has limited ‘possibilities for action, by constraining the resources he or she has to act in the situations he or she encounters’ (p. 356). Again, the deterministic nature of Bourdieu’s ideas is a criticism levelled because, so the argument goes, notions of habitus ignore individual reflexivity and an individual’s capacity to behave contrary to the expectations of dominant social relations or discourses (Sayer, 2010). Sayer’s (2010) concern is that there is little discussion of ethical or moral values in Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but suggests that modification of the concept is fruitful, rather than an outright rejection. Feminist scholars such as Butler (2014), Lovell (2000), McLeod (2005) and Moi (1991) have also critiqued Bourdieu’s rendering of habitus as deterministic and reproductionist. McLeod (2005) argues, for example, that the relationship between the habitus and the structure of the social field appears ‘too seamless and coherent’, and thus deterministic, to account for change and continuity in gender relations and identities (p. 11). Likewise, Lovell (2000) finds that ‘subjective dispositions are too tightly tied to the social practices in which they were forged’ representing an ‘overdetermined view of subjectivity’ (p. 11). Bourdieu strenuously denied these accusations, arguing that his critics ‘reacted not to what I wrote but to what they thought they had read’ (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 133). Feminist critique of habitus also shines a light on his focus on class at the expense of considerations of gender, a criticism Bourdieu took seriously and attempted, somewhat unsatisfyingly, to address in Masculine Domination (Bourdieu, 2001). Rather than reject his work, there has been significant feminist research extending and further developing his social theory, just as Bourdieu himself argued for (See, for example, Adkins & Skeggs, 2004; Lovell, 2000; McLeod, 2005; McNay, 2013;

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Reay, 2015; Skeggs, 2004). More recently this feminist research has extended to the consideration of intersectionality, that is, how gender intersects with cultural backgrounds, social class, disability and other marginalised identities (For example, Fathi, 2017; Silva, 2016; S. Webb et al., 2017). Further extension of Bourdieu’s ideas around habitus consider ethnicity, some combining critical race theory (for example, McKnight & Chandler, 2012; Smith, 2012), and have been used in different cultural contexts such as Korea (Jo, 2013), Bangladesh (Mahbub & Shoily, 2016) and Kenya (Ngarachu, 2014). The intellectual contribution of these studies simultaneously challenge the shortcomings of Bourdieu’s work, while extending the boundaries of his theory. This exploration of the boundaries is essential in taking what began as Bourdieu’s understanding of the Algerian Kabyle and twentieth century French society and applying it in other cultural contexts and times. In my study, for example, I take Bourdieu’s minor work on the French Catholic religious habitus and extend it to explore the habitus of one participant, Peter’s, experiences as a counter-culture Christian missionary (Chap. 6). Similarly, the feminist ‘appropriation’ (Moi, 1991) and sculpting of the concepts in Bourdieu’s tool kit is of great significance in exploring Rachael’s (Chap. 5) and Christine’s (Chap. 7) social justice leadership practices as women leaders. Habitus, as an explanatory tool, is not separate from the fields in which agents operate and it is the relationship between habitus and field that becomes the fertile ground for research. Habitus and field are mutually constituting, and both evolve; their relationship is dynamic and ongoing (Wacquant, 2011). In an analytical sense, a researcher does not see habitus, but sees the effects of habitus in the practices and beliefs of individuals; it offers evidence of the structures from which practice is generated (Maton, 2012), suggesting a ‘habitus in action’ (Lingard et al., 2003, p. 67). Habitus has been a useful concept in educational leadership and social justice research and has been used to examine, for example, the development of a leadership habitus (Lingard, et al., 2003) and the relationship between identity formation of women leaders and media discourses on women in leadership (Wilkinson & Blackmore, 2008). Bourdieu’s theory of practice is relational, so that habitus is not a conceptual tool that stands alone, but it is the examination of the relationship between habitus and field that is the key to understanding practice (Maton, 2012). Social justice leadership practice is the key focus of my research, so understanding Bourdieu’s conception of the field is critical. In the following sections I examine his concept of field, including the structured objective mechanisms of the field along with the subjective conditions of the field.

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3.3 Field A field is the social space in which interactions occur (Bourdieu, 1998b). Bourdieu envisioned these social spaces in our social worlds as relatively autonomous, multiple, interlocking and overlapping, consisting of both the social and cultural, as well as material (Thomson, 2017, pp. 40–41). Bourdieu described a field as: a structured space, a field of forces, a force field. It contains people who dominate and others who are dominated. As a field of power, constant, permanent relationships of inequality operate inside this space, which at the same time becomes a space in which the various actors struggle for the transformation or preservation of the field. All individuals in this universe bring to the competition all the (relative) power at their disposal. It is this power that defines their position in the field and, as a result, their strategies. (Bourdieu, 1998a, pp. 40–41)

Many fields exist, such as education, literary or media, and within fields there may be subfields. In the field of education, subfields could include for example, policy, higher education, early childhood, etc. Each of these subfields, while following the logic of the broader field, contains its own internal logic. Bourdieu, at times, used an analogy of game play (often rugby, a game he played as a young man) to explain the field: a field has boundaries, there are rules that new players must learn, each player has a field position and the conditions on the field can influence game play (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu, 1990a, 1990b, 1993a, 1993b, 1996). Bourdieu argues that within the field, the game is competitive,1 and that players use strategies to change their positions through the amassing of capitals. In Bourdieu’s treatment, strategy is not conscious, but rather related to players’ implicit understanding of the rules of the game. The field, then, is ‘a field of struggles, a socially constructed field of action, in which agents endowed with different resources confront one another to conserve or transform the existing power relations’ (Bourdieu, 2004, pp. 34–35). What is crucial in the game analogy of field is that it is not a level playing field. Players who enter the field with particular forms of capital are advantaged over players with different capitals (Thomson, 2012). This is a key point in relation to my research in educational leadership and social justice in understanding how educational leaders have learned to ‘play the game’ of leading in the Victorian public education system in terms of attempting to amass particular forms of cultural and economic capital in order to benefit their highly disadvantaged school communities. In our social worlds we encounter multiple fields and subfields and together these constitute the field of power (Bourdieu, 1983; Thomson, 2017). The field of power, a meta-field, is abstract and ‘is the space of relations of force between agents or between institutions having in common the possession of the capital necessary to occupy the dominant positions in different fields (notably economic or cultural)’ (Bourdieu, 1996, p. 215). Pat Thomson argues that Bourdieu’s field of power is ‘geared to support the (re)production of national/global economic and social regimes’ (2017, p. 9). Some fields are dominant, and some fields influence, or are dependent on, others. In the UK and Australia, the education field, for example, is subordinated to 1

For an alternative view see Wilkinson (2010).

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other fields because most fields have an interest in the practice within it, both because it produces future agents and also because it reproduces social and cultural conditions favouring the dominant elite (Thomson, 2017). The domination or subordination of different fields may vary in different cultural, political and geographical contexts (Houtsonen & Antikainen, 2008). Within fields, hierarchies ensure that dominant agents (with the appropriate capitals) have the power to regulate what happens. In the field of educational leadership, it is contended that principals are in thrall to the dominance of the policy agents within the governing bodies (Gobby et al., 2017; Lingard et al., 2015). Individual players, it is asserted, retain agency and the ability to enact change in accordance with their ability to understand the game, and draw on their capitals to influence their field positions (Thomson, 2017). In my research, for example, it has emerged that principals may resist such regulation. All three participants in my study used their knowledge and understanding of the Victorian public education system to advocate for their marginalised communities. Bourdieu’s theory of practice suggests that within the field, structure is provided through a series of objective mechanisms, such as capital, doxa, hysteresis, and social class (Grenfell, 2012). These are discussed in the following section. These mechanisms are critical in exploring the complexities in how principals navigate the educational field, particularly how they may conform to and/or resist the logics of practice.

3.3.1 Mechanisms of the Field The third key concept of Bourdieu’s thinking tools is capital, a crucial mechanism of the field. Together, habitus, field and capital are the triptych of Bourdieu’s thinking tools in that they are the most commonly used and, perhaps, misused. Moore (2012) describes capital as ‘the ‘energy’ that drives the development of a field through time’, and it is also the realisation of power within the field (p. 102). Bourdieu developed a multi-dimensional view on capital in order to understand the structuring of social fields, and the stakes of competition within fields (Rawolle & Lingard, 2013). Bourdieu theorised capital in two overlapping ways. Firstly, he suggested that each distinct field has a specific capital located within it, such as scientific capital in the field of science (Rawolle & Lingard, 2013). Competition in the science field will be focussed on acquiring or accumulating that capital (scientific capital) and some individuals will be more successful in their strategies for accumulation and in their implicit understanding of the rules of the game (Rawolle & Lingard, 2013). On the other hand, Bourdieu argued that field-specific capital could be analysed into elementary forms (Bourdieu, 1986). These elementary forms were conceptualised as different ‘species’ of capital: economic, social, and cultural capitals, which may exist in either an embodied, objectified, or institutionalised state (Bourdieu, 1986; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). A further form, symbolic capital, results when the specific logic of other forms of capital are recognised, or misrecognised. Symbolic capital is ‘the form

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that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate’ (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 17). Economic capital is a ‘mercantile exchange’ in which the ‘instrumental and self-interested nature of the exchange is transparent’ (Moore, 2012, p. 100). Economic exchange does not have an intrinsic value, but is a means to an end (Bourdieu, 1990b). Social capital is the ‘sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119). Cultural capital is the collection of symbolic elements such as skills, taste, competencies that are acquired and accumulated through identification with, and position within, groups allowing an individual to search for distinction or similarities (Bourdieu, 2010a). Importantly, ‘a capital does not exist and function except in relation to a field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 101). Cultural agents are the bearers of capitals within fields and, as a result of their social positioning and accumulation of capitals, they may orient themselves ‘toward the preservation of the distribution of capital or toward the subversion of this distribution’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 109). This distribution of capitals and the extent to which agents preserve or challenge the status quo is a crucial point in relation to the educational leadership and social justice research I report on in this book. The research had a focus on the degree to which principals working in highly disadvantaged communities leverage their own positioning and capitals to challenge the distribution of capitals in terms of their communities. Each of the participants in my study, for example, used their own social and cultural capitals in ways that acted to challenge the status quo. Rachael uses her personal networks (social capitals) to build symbolic capital to address deficit views in the broader community and link children to medical professionals (Chap. 5). Peter uses his networks to link the children and families with necessary legal support and enriches the school with his contacts in The Arts (Chap. 6). Christine uses her cultural capitals to successfully campaign for grants to support expanding the capitals in her community (Chap. 7). Bourdieu (1986, 2010a) suggested that different forms of capital could be converted by agents under specific circumstances, and with different exchange rates. These conversions and exchange may be dependent on ‘the gatekeepers and dominant agents located within each field’ (Rawolle & Lingard, 2013, p. 125). Capital conversions in the field change the field positions of agents: economic capital can be ‘immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized as property rights’; cultural capital may be convertible ‘into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the forms of educational qualifications’; and social capital, which comprises social obligations (or connections), may be convertible to economic capital and may be institutionalised as ‘nobility’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 243). Educational leaders operating in complex and competing fields mobilise different capitals in order to maintain or change their field positions. Educational leaders who are aware of the different capitals at play in different fields may be more adept at leadership in challenging contexts. For example, they may use social capital in the form of networks of social relationships (principal networks, family networks) to support their socially just leadership. This is how one participant, Rachael (Chap. 5), has

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built networks for the benefit of the children in her school. Both Peter (Chap. 6) and Christine (Chap. 7) also use such networks in leading for social justice. Other mechanisms of the field include doxa, hysteresis and social class. Bourdieu defines doxa as ‘a set of fundamental beliefs which does not even need to be asserted in the form of an explicit, self-conscious dogma’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 15). This process acts to naturalise arbitrary social conditions, practice and attitudes (Bourdieu, 1977). Doxa reproduces itself in social institutions and structures, as well as in minds, bodies, expectations and behaviour (Deer, 2012a). It is the unquestioned and unquestionable opinions and perceptions that determine what is ‘natural’ in practice, attitudes and opinions linked to the habitus and field. It is embedded in the field while also helping to define and characterise it (Deer, 2012a). Uncovering doxa through the underlying implicit logic of practice, expectations and relations of those operating in fields helps to make explicit forms of misrecognition of symbolic power. For educational leaders working in challenging contexts, doxa, for example, may take the form of the ‘common sense’ discourses around the educational disadvantage experienced by children in areas of social disadvantage. For example, lack of aspiration is commonly misrecognised as the reason for lack of class mobility. This is related to hegemonic influences around beliefs of merit, and are misrecognised by some educational leaders that then helps to perpetuate the reproduction of particular ideologies of educational ‘success’. In this study, doxic understandings of, for example, merit and aspiration is a feature of each of the participants’ habitus encountering the field. Bourdieu’s (1977) hysteresis of habitus is ‘one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grab them which is the cause of missed opportunities’ (p. 83). Hysteresis is the consequence of the mutually generating and generated nature of habitus and field; it highlights the disruption between habitus and field as these are influenced by indeterminate change (Hardy, 2012). As the field changes, and it is in a constant state of change, individuals whose dispositions allow them to perceive change and with the capital to act, may or may not recognise, grasp and occupy the new field positions created by change. Hysteresis is experienced at a personal level, and while this may allow some to improve their field positions many, such as those in dominated positions, may remain in economically and deprived field positions (Bourdieu et al., 1999). For example, in his examination of the hierarchisation of schools through policy intervention in the UK which created new conditions in the field, Courtney (2017) argued that certain types of educational leaders, i.e., those who readily take on the new corporate habitus, were advantaged over those who were welfare focused. He argued that through hysteresis the educational authorities were in fact manipulating the field so that a particular state-approved leadership habitus was privileged (Courtney, 2017). Courtney’s research exposes a limitation in Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis as negative and asserts that in some educational leaders it may be a permanent manifestation of ‘strategic resistance to the dominant discourse’ (Courtney, 2017, p. 1065). Indeed, in my research with Christine (Chap. 7), hysteresis has been a useful tool in examining her reluctance to let any opportunity pass her by, thus hysteresis defines the opposite of her practice. Social class is one of the field mechanisms identified by Bourdieu, however he is careful to emphasise his specific understandings around the concept (Bourdieu,

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2010a). How an individual is located in social space shapes their experience, life chances and habitus. All people have an objective position in social space influenced by their accumulation of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital. The value of any capital depends on social recognition of that capital. Bourdieu envisaged social space as a map or graph where each individual was placed according to their accumulation of capitals, or capital assets (Bourdieu, 2010a). Individuals who are close in social space, whilst they do not necessarily identify with each other or act collectively, share many of the same conditions of work and life. As a result, they may also share similar dispositions, tastes, outlooks, and therefore, similar habitus. For Bourdieu, they are only a theoretical class, until they act and identify as a group collectively, for example, when dominant groups act to reproduce their advantage through education narrowing access for the children of dominated groups (Crossley, 2012). The relationship between class and habitus offers a key insight into the effects that class mobility afforded both Rachael (Chap. 5) and Christine (Chap. 7) through their education as teachers and then principals. Whilst field mechanisms highlight the structures and operation of fields in an objective way, the field conditions are more subjective dimensions of fields, and shed light on how fields are present in individuals, and how this impacts on them (Grenfell, 2012). These subjective dimensions of fields are critical in examining social justice leadership practice because they illuminate the ways in which educational leaders either resist, or accept, the logics of practice of the education field. The field conditions are influenced by interest or illusio, suffering/symbolic violence, and reflexivity and are discussed in the following section.

3.3.2 Conditions of the Field Illusio, or interest, has a key function in the relationship between field and habitus. Bourdieu used the idea of illusio to indicate the stake in the game that agents have when operating in fields, contending that ‘to be interested is to accord a given social game that what happens in it matters, that its stakes are important…and worth pursuing’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 116). Different fields have different forms of interest, allowing agents to act in certain ways, in the circumstances they find themselves, so as to improve their field position. As with doxa, illusio appears to be natural, but it is ‘a product of the field, as a collective act, apprehended by individuals according to their own socially constituted habitus’ (Grenfell, 2012, p. 158). Bourdieu argues that illusio is the interface between the habitus and field and argues that those entering a field have a relationship with it even if they want to disrupt it; they still recognise it as important, ‘they grant recognition to the stakes’ (Bourdieu, 1998b, p. 78). The illusio, the stakes in the game, of the educational leadership field for Victorian principals are outlined in more detail in the following section (Sect. 3.5). Symbolic violence is a key concept in Bourdieu’s theory of practice. Symbolic violence is ‘the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 167). Social hierarchies, and

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social inequality are produced and maintained through symbolic domination, where language is an instrument of power and domination (Bourdieu, 1991). Symbolic violence is not perceived by those who are dominated, and the dominant tend not to need to exert energy to maintain their dominance and privilege, which Bourdieu describes as misrecognition (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Symbolic violence results in suffering, which is often misrecognised by agents and can be internalised thereby perpetuating symbolic systems of domination (Bourdieu et al., 1999). Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992) argues that symbolic domination is both everywhere and nowhere, ‘it is something you absorb like air’ (p. 115). Because symbolic violence is difficult to recognise and resist, Bourdieu argues that this form of domination ‘tends to take the form of a more effective, and in this sense more brutal, means of oppression’ (Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992, p. 115). As a key thinking tool, making visible symbolic violence and the suffering it causes is a significant aim of this research. An awareness of symbolic violence in the context of children in marginalised communities is an important aspect of leadership for social justice. Deficit discourses are commonly used when referring to schools in areas of disadvantage (Francis & Mills, 2012a, 2012b). For example, the clear gap in school achievement between the children of the middle and working class is explained as a lack of aspiration on the part of the working-class children (Francis & Mills, 2012a), or the racist notion that racialised urban students are somehow lacking (Pitzer, 2014, 2015). These discourses, with racist and classist ideologies, frame deficit with poverty and relate to the ideas of meritocracy (Gorski, 2005). Gorski (2011) defines deficit ideology as a ‘worldview that explains and justifies outcome inequalities—standardized test scores or levels of educational attainment, for example—by pointing to supposed deficiencies within disenfranchised individuals and communities’ (p. 153). This typifies neoliberal policy practice and projects ‘responsibility for failure away from social structures and institutions and on to individuals’ (Francis & Mills, 2012a, p. 256). What follows is the notion that we ‘fix inequalities by fixing disenfranchised communities rather than that which disenfranchises them’ (Gorski, 2011, p. 156). The symbolic violence that is visited upon marginalised communities is done so, with their complicity, because attention is drawn away from the systemic conditions that created the inequality. Understanding the cause and effects of symbolic violence on marginalised children and their communities is essential for educational leaders who lead in socially just ways. A failure to recognise symbolic violence is likely to continue to reproduce such violence. In this study, the participants’ ability to recognise some facets of symbolic violence varies according to their reflexivity.

3.3.3 Reflexivity and Positionality Reflexivity is a further condition of the field. Bourdieu’s concept of reflexivity asks researchers to consider how their own understanding of the world might colour their understanding of the social practices that are the focus of their research. He asks,

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‘how can we claim to engage in the scientific investigation of presuppositions if we do not work to gain knowledge…of our own presuppositions?’ (Bourdieu, et al., 1999, p. 608). Importantly, Bourdieu’s call is to recognise that ‘ethical neutrality’ is a myth (Bourdieu, 2010b, p. 257). This means that the researchers own doxic understandings need to be interrogated. In his calls for reflexivity, Bourdieu argues that socioanalysis helps us to ‘unearth the social unconscious embedded in institutions as well as lodged deep inside of us’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 49). Reflexivity, then, aims to interrogate three limitations: personal, positional and theoretical (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The personal bias is related to the social origins of the researcher, and takes account of the intersection of social and cultural origins such as class, gender, ethnicity and generation (Schirato & Webb, 2003; Wacquant, 1992a). The positional bias relates to the location that the agent occupies in the field, where they define themselves in ‘relational terms, by their difference and distance from certain others with whom they compete’ (Wacquant, 1992a, p. 39). The theoretical bias, which Bourdieu termed intellectual bias, is more profound than the previous two because, as he argues, it requires a systematic exploration of ‘unthought categories of thought which limit the thinkable and predetermine what is actually thought’ (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 178). This reflexive move is focussed on unearthing the epistemological unconscious of a discipline (Wacquant, 1992a). Critically, in this third limitation, reflexivity is not just an individual enterprise, but a common and shared effort, and Bourdieu argues that ‘reflexivity takes on its full efficacy only when it is embodied in collectives which have so much incorporated it that they practice it as a reflex’ (Bourdieu, 2004, p. 114). In educational leadership, the theoretical bias is addressed in the ways in which critical researchers challenge, for example, the hold that New Public Management and neoliberal techniques of governmentality and performativity have had on the educational leadership field (Eacott, 2018; Lakomski, et al., 2017; Niesche, 2017). Bourdieu argued that a reflexive approach supports researchers in a systematic exploration of the ‘…unthought categories of thought which delimit the thinkable and predetermine the thought’ (Bourdieu, 1990a, p. 178). As Deer argues, this reduces the ‘…unconscious failure among researchers to recognise and control the effects and influence of their own relation to the object of research (eg. social positioning, internalised structures (…doxa)’ (Deer, 2012b, p. 167). Bourdieu asks researchers to consider how their own understanding of the world might colour their understanding of the social practices that are the focus of their research: in other words, to practice against one’s sociological training as much as with it (Bourdieu, 1990a). As discussed above, Bourdieu’s reflexivity is an interrogation of three types of limitations of the habitus: social position, our position in the field, and scholastic point of view (Bourdieu, 1990c). Ortiz (2016) contends that Bourdieu’s reflexivity offers the opportunity to correct or erase biases and allows us to ‘come closer to the absolutely universal point of view from everywhere and from nowhere that science strives for’ (p. 131). In contrast, Reed-Danahay (2009) argues that Bourdieu’s reflexivity allows us to critically examine our own position within the field ‘not in order to be more objective and less subjective, but rather to understand the false distinction between

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these two categories’ (p. 30). As a developing researcher it is helpful to consider reflexivity in positional, theoretical and personal terms (Supple, 2013). The value of positional reflexivity lies in interrogating how our biographies and ideologies locate us in relation to our research, our participants and our data. It helps us to understand how we see things and influences what we see (Pillow, 2003; Webb et al., 2002). My passion for educational justice for children in marginalised communities is derived from my own experiences growing up in rural Australia (our family are white settlers who came to Australia from Scotland in the1860s) as the daughter of a man whose body and mind were transformed, as a young boy, by polio. My father’s refusal to see the limitations of his body as a limitation to the richness of his life provided lessons of resilience to my siblings and I, but the difficulties of navigating a life in remote rural Australia as a person with a disability made clear to me the indifference of broader society. When my son was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder with associated mental health conditions, this indifference towards marginalised Australians became even starker for me. My teaching career began in a public primary school in one of the most advantaged locations in Australia. After three years teaching, I wanted to gain wider experience and I was fortunate that my principal gave me two years leave to work in other schools. I specifically chose to work on contract and as a Casual Replacement Teacher in schools known locally as ‘difficult’, located in pockets of disadvantage in otherwise very wealthy areas. It was in these schools where the injustices that play out in our education system became real for me and led me to undertake postgraduate studies and the research explored in this book. Whilst as an analytical tool, Bourdieu’s conception of reflexivity is chiefly concerned with foregrounding personal, positional and theoretical limitations of the researcher. It has also been used to examine the awareness of research participants of their own practice. In the educational leadership field Jill Blackmore and Judyth Sachs, for example, found that the ‘othering’ experienced by women leaders in masculinist cultures of leadership led to a heightened awareness and a continual reassessing of themselves as leaders, ‘seeking to understand how to work strategically and ethically in that context’ (Blackmore & Sachs, 2007, p. 147). Bourdieu argues that when the unconscious habitus is confronted with challenging events within fields, a self-questioning is generated making the unconscious conscious leading to greater reflexivity (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In this study the reflexivity of the participants has been an important aspect in investigating how they understand and practice in socially just ways. Drawing on research from the disability field, for instance, was important in exploring Rachael’s high levels of reflexivity through her experiences as the parent of a young man with complex disabilities, and how this has influenced her leadership at her school (Chap. 5). There are a number of implications of the preceding examination of Bourdieu’s theory of practice for this study. In particular, understanding the habitus of educational leaders is crucial because I examine how their life and career histories have led them to their schools. Their primary and secondary habitus formation is a key aspect of addressing how they understand and practice social justice. The notion of the field matters because each participant is operating within the field of public

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education, whose logics are influenced by the meta-field of power, dominated by neoliberal economic and geopolitical logics. I examine how the participants navigate the field and how they ‘play the game’ to benefit the marginalised communities in which they work. The objective mechanisms of the field and in particular, capital, is significant in relation to the way in which the participants were able to leverage their own positioning, their social and cultural capitals, to benefit these communities in socially just ways. Likewise, other mechanisms of the field such as doxa, hysteresis and social class illuminate the ways in which participants understand the structuring of field. The subjective field conditions, illusio, symbolic violence and reflexivity, are important because they indicate how the participants may resist, and/or comply with the logics of the field. In the next section I examine the current state of the educational field in Australia, particularly in terms of how educational leaders are positioned within it. It is crucial to explore this field before turning to the subsequent chapters because the public education field is a complex and fast moving game influenced by the neoliberal public pedagogies of crisis. Other fields, particularly the political field, intersect the public education field and the policy landscape is influenced by global and national happenings. These fields exert external pressures on Australian principals, such as responsibilisation and increasing accountability (Gobby, et al., 2017; Keddie, 2018). The principals in this study work in highly disadvantaged communities adding further complexity to their roles. This complexity means that they are also navigating other fields in the service of their communities, such as the field of welfare. Understanding the field that the principals in this study must encounter is crucial in understanding how their leadership habitus has been shaped and in turn shapes their social justice understandings, the implications of the encounters between habitus and field in terms of their subsequent social justice practices, and the possible disjunctures between their habitus, their encounters with the field and their subsequent practices.

3.4 The State of the Field—Education in Australia Schooling in Australia, like many affluent and first world countries, has been heavily influenced by global policy such as the PISA testing regime coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The global shift from government to governance (Thomson, 2017) reflects a shift from government with a social contract to the unleashing of free markets, deregulation and privatisation (Mudge, 2008). Public schooling across the world has been impacted through these neoliberal ideas, particularly in the UK, the US and Australia. In the UK, this is characterised through interventions such as Academy system (Kulz, 2017). Likewise, Giroux (2012) argues that in the US the impact of neoliberalism on public schooling has resulted in government reducing funding to public schools, encouraging charter schools, the private funding of education and a move towards the withdrawal of the state from public education. In Australia, we have seen successive governments

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increase the funding of private schools, the highest of any advanced economy in the OECD, at the expense of increasingly segregated public schools (Cobbold, 2018; MacDonald et al., 2023; Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development, 2018; Perry, Rowe, & Lubienski, 2022). These global economic trends have had concurrent effects on the field of education (Keddie et al., 2020). This can be seen through the set of ‘narrowly conceived and instrumentalist market-oriented reforms’ such as ‘school choice, competition, national testing, league tables, national curricula, back-to-basics, vocationalization, performance pay for teachers, standards and standardization, benchmarks, discipline, entrepreneurship, citizenship education’ (Smyth et al., 2014, p. 118). This can be thought of as the rupturing of the borders of the public education field (a subordinate field) influenced by the fields of media, economics and politics (Gunter & Mills, 2017). Gunter and Mills (2017) argue that the game of the privatising of public services, such as within the field of education, is not ‘rational or coherent’, but that there is a ‘creation and interpretation of situations as crises that require particular types of solutions…where the solution is de facto restructuring and reculturing through the doxa of the private’ (p. 122). The idea of an education system in crisis positions the privatisation of public goods and services by neoliberal reformers as the ‘mechanism for recovery’ (Slater, 2015, p. 1). The idea of a neoliberal creation of crisis is important in understanding the state of the field in education (Pinto, 2015). The moral panic about teacher quality and Initial Teacher Education in Australia, for example, is an ongoing problem in need of a solution, continuously fuelling distrust in universities and creating new (private) industries in educational consultants and professional development. Likewise, deploying ‘leadership’ as the answer to the problems of education is a similar tactic (Niesche, 2014). The public pedagogy of a system in crisis is all-pervasive in the work that educational leaders are doing in schools because it creates a sense of urgency about the necessity of continuous improvements and educational reform. The creation of private recovery solutions has influenced a push towards the de-professionalisation of the education workforce and has, in essence, lead to a shift in the logic of practice ‘from the logic of the professional to the logic of the private’ (Gunter & Mills, 2017, p. 124). Gunter and Mills (2017) argue that the logic of the private is evident in three interlocking ways: individualisation, regulation and responsibilisation. Individualisation, Gunter and Mills (2017) contend, causes the educational professional to be ‘reworked in regard to identity and practice through how they demonstrate performance, or how they have made a measurable difference to an individual student’s learning in ways that meet funder approval (parents, taxpayer)’ (p. 125). The rise of individual accountabilities in education is connected to the high stakes nature of data collection. Thomson (2005) argues that this kind of data collection allows easy identification of non-conforming agents (schools and individuals) who may be subject to disciplinary action as a result. In fact this sort of discipline acts as a form of symbolic violence for educational leaders who are held to account by their line managers in government education portfolios. Indeed Petrovic and Kuntz (2018) argue that the neoliberal ethos driving schooling ‘should be considered acts of violence,’ (p. 958) because of the loss of public institutions and questions around

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whose interests are being served. Heffernan’s (2016) longitudinal research with principals shows that these external accountabilities do indeed have a direct impact on their daily work suggesting that ‘in a climate of performativity, complex work undertaken in schools is reduced to quantifiable or measurable data sets, and judgments are made about the quality of the educator based on these data’ (p. 379). In a performative environment with an expectation of continuous school improvement, Heffernan (2016) found that educational leaders’ behaviours ‘have changed to align with the emphasis on data, but more than this so have their beliefs’ (p. 386). What this means for educational leaders is that success, or conformability, is measured by narrow indicators like high stakes tests such as NAPLAN, dismissing other critical functions of schools in the lives of children and their families. This potentially narrows the curriculum as schools focus on the areas of the testing regime that produce results (Heffernan, 2018), while also changing the relationship of teachers with their work. As Braun and Maguire (2018) argue, ‘the necessity of compliance with performative policy demands could lead to an underlying sense of disorientation and estrangement from some core values in primary school teaching’ (p. 11). This narrowing of educational focus from the broad and noble desires of holistic education (evident in most curriculum documents, school mission statements and in teacher philosophy statements) to a focus on the datafication of children is an anathema to the moral beliefs about education that most educators hold. In essence, this datafication reduces the complexity of human consciousness to an abstract quantity (DeLissovoy & McLaren, 2003). Reconciling system demands with individual beliefs about educating children creates tensions for educators. Concurrent with the shifts in the focus of education on to data, Niesche and Thomson (2017) argue that there has been a narrowing of who can become a principal and that ‘that the principal’s role has been corporatized and largely stripped of its educational purposes’ (p. 194). The individualisation effects of the logic of the private imposed on the field of public schooling has led to an intensification of principals’ work. Gunter and Mills (2017) suggest that the logic of the private can also be seen through regulation. They suggest that self-regulation ‘is structured by and interplays with external forms of regulation within quasi forms of markets that operate through government control of standards’ (Gunter & Mills, 2017, p. 125). Public schools and public school teachers are ‘controlled through training, accreditation and licensing’, through shifts to ‘delivery of pre-packaged curriculum schemes, lesson plans and assessment tools, and through the production of data that demonstrates performance by the self, team and the organisation’ (Gunter & Mills, 2017, p. 125). The influence of neoliberal ideology on the public educational field has seen a ‘cascade of policy reforms’ (Connell, 2013, p. 103). Principals in Australia are regulated by leadership standards through the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) National Professional Standard for Principals. These standards ‘are performative, disciplinary technologies aimed at suppressing difference and normalizing principals’ (Niesche & Thomson, 2017, p. 200). Niesche and Thomson (2017) argue that anyone falling outside of the narrow focus of the standards, such as those who work as advocates in marginalised communities, may ‘find themselves both resisting the expected compliance to neoliberal technologies and also surreptitiously being

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normalized into working in particular ways that satisfy these disciplinary requirements’ (p. 200). Heffernan’s (2017) research with new generation principals, whom she calls the ‘accountability generation’ because they have become leaders after the introduction of high stakes testing, reinforces this view. In the UK, Courtney (2017) notes the ways in the state can intervene in privileging leaders who conform to normalised corporate ways of leading. As a further measure of the shift to the logic of the private, through responsibilisation, Gunter and Mills (2017) argue that the education professional is ‘reworked to accept externally shaped identities that economise the person as responsible, and to enthusiastically undertake practices that were previously the responsibility of others in a public education system’ (pp. 125–126). The term ‘responsibilisation’ comes from the early work on governmentality in the 1990s (Barry et al., 1996) and is ‘the practical link that connects the ideal typical scheme of governance to actual practices on the ground’ (Shamir, 2008, p. 7). In the rhetoric of the pervasive crises in education Slater contends that responsibilisation demands that recovery is externalised to schools, teachers, students and their families (Slater, 2015). Responsibilisation is expressed as personal choice and freedom (Keddie, 2018), and can be linked to the politics of aspiration (Brown, 2013). The rhetoric of aspiration is common to governments in the UK, the US, and Australia (Reay, 2013; Simmons & Smyth, 2018; Spohrer et al., 2018). The rise of the rhetoric of aspiration has coincided with the reduction in welfare spending and the responsibilisation of individuals to become self-reliant (Spohrer, et al., 2018). In schooling, therefore, underachievement can be viewed as the result of the lack of aspiration of children and their parents and they come to be viewed as ‘flawed consumers in the educational marketplace’ (Best, 2017, p. 47). For principals, who in current times ostensibly have more autonomy and freedom in their work, but are in fact managing more with less, this creates a ‘powerful double movement of autonomy and responsibility that binds the subject to specific truths, rationalities, norms and ideals’ (Gobby, et al., 2017, p. 3). Likewise, Perryman and colleagues (2018) note that in a performative culture of surveillance ‘that senior leaders and teachers position themselves in particular ways to act upon their own conduct in order to fit the system, and adapt to changing policy contexts such as changing inspection frameworks’ (p. 149), thus responsibilising themselves. The shift to the logic of the private seen through the moves of individualisation, regulation and responsibilisation has had a devastating effect on public education and the role of educational leaders who have a social justice focus in marginalised communities. On the one hand, educational leaders are expected ‘to run schools as businesses, negotiate the uneasy tensions between forms of decentralization and recentralization, liaise directly with different community stakeholders, be visionary and instructional leaders, distribute leadership activity to staff and create leadership density in schools and more’ (Niesche & Thomson, 2017, p. 199). On the other hand, as Courtney (2017) reports, those educational leaders who are concerned about social justice find themselves ‘out of sync’ (p. 1061) with the logic of the field, making their work intensive and precarious. In fact, both Richard Niesche and Pat Thomson describe educational leadership in these times as a ‘high risk activity’ (Niesche & Thomson, 2017, p. 202).

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In 1998, in his later years as a vocal and public activist against the menace he saw in the ‘neoliberal revolution’, Bourdieu foresaw four fields in danger: ‘the welfare state and its functions …the unification of trade unions …the harmonization and modernization of education systems and …the articulation between economic and social systems’ (Bourdieu et al., 2008, p. 292). In Australia, as in other advanced economies, these threats are still playing out two decades later in the push to destabilise and nobble the power of the unions, underfund and privatise aspects of the welfare system and to change the education landscape through changing the balance of funding between public and private schools, and interfering with curriculum. Bourdieu argues that ‘we have to develop new forms of struggle to counteract by appropriate means the violence of symbolic oppression that has established itself bit by bit in the Western democracies’ (Bourdieu, et al., 2008, p. 300). The previous discussion paints a picture of the public education field as high stakes, performative and precarious. While bleak, there are educational leaders who challenge, reject and resist. Heffernan (2018), for example, explored the resistance strategies of an exemplary principal who championed a holistic focus on education in her school. Such principals use their understandings of the field, and the capitals they bring to the field, to work within the system without sacrificing their own moral educational imperative. Resistance can manifest itself in a number of ways. Thomson, for example, suggests that educational leaders may simulate consent to external policies while modifying it to suit their contexts, may overtly act counter to policy, or act as a public voice against policy. Similarly teacher and principal unions may act as a countervailing voice leading larger social movements against the neoliberal logics of the education field (Australian Education Union, 2018; Maguire et al., 2018). Indeed, social movements in Australia, such as Save Our Schools (http://www.sav eourschools.com.au/), an organisation including education professionals and parents, also actively resist such logics. Thomson (2008) argues that shrewd leaders ‘do just enough of what is required to maintain good relations and minimise interference’ (p. 88). This represents a strategic resistance. Amanda Heffernan reports, for example, that the resistant principal in her study felt she was only able to do so because she had a ‘good track record’ with her supervisors which allowed her to maintain her focus on holistic schooling (Heffernan, 2018, p. 9). Educational leaders in marginalised communities who are dedicated to leading in socially just ways tread a fine line between managing the external performative and accountability regimes of the public education field and how to best serve their communities. Resistance therefore has implications for job security, career stage and longevity. For those educational leaders working in highly disadvantaged communities this risk is intensified when success is measured on narrow measures such as high stakes testing like NAPLAN. For educational leaders who are concerned about social justice, navigating the field can mean increased complexity, especially if they challenge or are resistant to the logics of the field.

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3.5 Conclusion In this chapter I have introduced the key concepts that are important to the research from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. These concepts are crucial in foregrounding issues of power and social injustice and how the fields that they encounter shape the educational leaders who participated in this study. I have outlined the prevailing logics of the public education field that the educational leaders in my study must navigate. The field is complex and potentially risky depending on the degree to which educational leaders comply with, and/or resist, these logics. In Chaps. 5, 6 and 7 I introduce ‘Rachael’, ‘Peter’ and ‘Christine’2 who are principals of primary schools in three of the most marginalised locations in Victoria. In each chapter I introduce their school and community contexts, I outline and discuss their primary and secondary habitus through exploring their early lives, work and life experiences and I explore their social justice leadership practice through examining their encounters with the public education field. These explorations are mediated through the harnessing of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to analyse and make sense of each participant’s social justice leadership practice.

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DeLissovoy, N., & McLaren, P. (2003). Educational ‘accountability’ and the violence of capital: A Marxian reading. Journal of Education Policy, 18(2), 131–143. https://doi.org/10.1080/026809 3022000043092 Eacott, S. (2010). Bourdieu’s strategies and the challenge for educational leadership. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 13(3), 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1080/136031209034 10587 Eacott, S. (2017). Beyond leadership: Towards a ‘relational’ way of thinking. In Questioning Leadership: New directions for educational organisations (pp. 31–44). Routledge. Eacott, S. (2018). Social epistemology and the theory turn: A response to Niesche. Journal of Educational Administration and History, pp. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2018.150 8128 English, F. W. (2012). Bourdieu’s misrecognition: Why educational leadership standards will not reform schools or leadership. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 44(2), 155– 170. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2012.658763 Fathi, M. (2017). Intersectionality, class and migration: Narratives of Iranian women migrants in the UK. Springer. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. The Harvester Press. Francis, B., & Mills, M. (2012a). Schools as damaging organisations: Instigating a dialogue concerning alternative models of schooling. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(2), 251–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2012.688765 Francis, B., & Mills, M. (2012b). What would a socially just education system look like? Journal of Educational Policy, 27(5), 577–585. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2012.710014 Giroux, H. A. (2012). Can democratic education survive in a neoliberal society? Truthout.org. Retrieved October 16, 2012. Gobby, B., Keddie, A., & Blackmore, J. (2017). Professionalism and competing responsibilities: Moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform. Journal of Educational Administration and History, pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2017.1399864 Gorski, P. C. (2005). Savage unrealities: Uncovering classism in Ruby Payne’s framework. Rethinking Schools, 21(2), 16–19. Gorski, P. C. (2011). Unlearning deficit ideology and the scornful gaze: Thoughts on authenticating the class discourse in education. Counterpoints, 402, 152–173. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib. monash.edu.au/stable/42981081 Grenfell, M. (Ed.). (2012). Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts (2nd ed.). Routledge. Gunter, H. M. (2002). Purposes and positions in the field of education management: Putting Bourdieu to work. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 30(1), 7–26. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0263211x020301005. http://ema.sagepub.com/content/30/1/7.abstract Gunter, H. M. (2010). A sociological approach to educational leadership. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 31(4), 519–527. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2010.484927 Gunter, H. M., & Mills, C. (2017). Consultants and consultancy: The case of education. Springer. Hannus, S., & Simola, H. (2010). The effects of power mechanisms in education: Bringing Foucault and Bourdieu together. Power and Education, 2(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2304/power.2010. 2.1.1 Hardy, C. (2012). Hysteresis. In M. Grenfell (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu: Key concepts (2nd ed.). Routledge. Heffernan, A. (2016). The Emperor’s perfect map: Leadership by numbers. The Australian Educational Researcher, 43(3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-016-0206-7 Heffernan, A. (2017). The accountability generation: Exploring an emerging leadership paradigm for beginning principals. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, pp. 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2017.1280001 Heffernan, A. (2018). The influence of school context on school improvement policy enactment: An Australian case study. International Journal of Leadership in Education, pp. 1–12. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2018.1463461

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Niesche, R. (2014). Deploying educational leadership as a form of governmentality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1), 143–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306. 2013.805018 Niesche, R. (2017). Critical perspectives in educational leadership: A new ‘theory turn’? Journal of Educational Administration and History, 50(3), 145–158. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620. 2017.1395600 Niesche, R., & Thomson, P. (2017). Freedom to what ends? School autonomy in neoliberal times. In D. Waite & I. Bogotch (Eds.), The Wiley international handbook of educational leadership (pp. 193–206). Wiley-Blackwell. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2018). Education at a Glance 2018: OECD Indicators. OECD Publishing Ortiz, H. (2016). Wittgenstein’s critique of representation and the ethical reflexivity of anthropological discourse. In T. Evens, D. Handelman, & C. Roberts (Eds.), Reflecting on reflexivity: The human condition as an ontological surprise (pp. 124–141). Berghahn Books. Perry, L. B., Rowe, E., & Lubienski, C. (2022). School segregation: theoretical insights and future directions (Vol. 58, pp. 1–15). Taylor & Francis. Perryman, J., Maguire, M., Braun, A., & Ball, S. (2018). Surveillance, governmentality and moving the goalposts: The influence of Ofsted on the work of schools in a post-panoptic era. British Journal of Educational Studies, 66(2), 145–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2017.137 2560 Petrovic, J. E., & Kuntz, A. M. (2018). Invasion, alienation, and imperialist nostalgia: Overcoming the necrophilous nature of neoliberal schools. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(10), 957–969. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1198249 Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16, 2(175–196). https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839032000060635 Pinto, L. E. (2015). Fear and loathing in neoliberalism: School leader responses to policy layers. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 47(2), 140–154. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00220620.2015.996869 Pitzer, H. (2014). Deficit discourse. Syracuse University. Pitzer, H. (2015). Urban teachers engaging in critical talk: Navigating deficit discourse and neoliberal logics. Journal of Educational Controversy, 9(1), 1–16. Rawolle, S., & Lingard, B. (2013). Bourdieu and educational research: Thinking tools, relational thinking, beyond epistemological innocence. In M. Murphy (Ed.), Social theory and education research: Understanding Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu and Derrida. Routledge. Reay, D. (2013). Social mobility, a panacea for austere times: Tales of emperors, frogs, and tadpoles. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 34(5–6), 660–677. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692. 2013.816035 Reay, D. (2015). Habitus and the psychosocial: Bourdieu with feelings. Cambridge Journal of Education, 45(1), 9–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0305764X.2014.990420 Reed-Danahay, D. (2009). Anthropologists, education, and autoethnography. Reviews in Anthropology, 38(1), 28–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00938150802672931 Riveros, A., Newton, P., & Burgess, D. (2017). Leadership standards and the discursive repositioning of leadership, leaders, and non-leaders: A critical examination. In G. Lakomski, S. Eacott & C. Evers (Eds.), Questioning leadership: New directions for educational organizations. Routledge. Sayer, A. (2010). Bourdieu, ethics and practice. In E. Silva & A. Warde (Eds.), Cultural analysis and Bourdieu’s legacy: Settling account and developing alternatives (pp. 87–101). Routledge. Schirato, T., & Webb, J. (2003). Bourdieu’s concept of reflexivity as metaliteracy. Cultural Studies, 17(3/4), 539–553. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238032000083935 Shamir, R. (2008). The age of responsibilization: On market-embedded morality. Economy and Society, 37(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140701760833 Silva, E. B. (2016). Unity and fragmentation of the habitus. The Sociological Review, 64(1), 166–183. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12346

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Chapter 4

Spatial Injustices and the Context for Research

Abstract This Chapter provides a context for the case studies in this book. It firstly outlines how advantage and disadvantage are spatially distrubuted in Australia, outlines the impact of this maldistribution on educational outcomes for children. It theorises this maldistribution through the critical geographies of Edward Soja. It then introduces the contextual details for the case studies canvassed in this book. They are some of the most marginalised and under-resourced areas in Victoria: two primary schools in outer suburban areas, and one in a rural area. It then briefly introduces the three primary schools lead by the key participants in this research, principals Rachael, Peter and Christine, and secondary participants, Lucy and Steven. Keywords Dis/advantage · Spatial justice · Spaciality · Edward Soja · Educational disdvantage

The most recent Education Goals for Australian Children, the 2019 Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration, recognised that disadvantaged students in Australia, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children from low socio-economic backgrounds, children from remote areas, refugees, homeless young people and children with disabilities often experience educational disadvantage (Education Council, 2019). The fundamental principle of the Melbourne Declaration is that ‘education has the power to transform lives’ (Education Council, 2019, p. 2). It argues that improving educational outcomes for all children ‘is central to our nation’s social and economic prosperity and will position our young people to live fulfilling, productive and responsible lives’ (Education Council, 2019, p. 4), aiming to address this through two goals ‘to promote excellence and equity’ and that young Australians become ‘confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members of the community’ (Education Council, 2019, p. 4). Despite record spending on education,1 attempts to account for the student and community-based indicators of disadvantage, principally through equity

1

For a more detailed view of school funding in Australia see MacDonald et al. (2023).

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funding, have done little to improve equity cohort student outcomes (Productivity Commission, 2022). In signatory countries of the OECD, inequality is the highest it has been since data collection began (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2015, p. 1). Researchers, government and policy makers in Australia, US, Canada and the UK have recognised that the link between overall disadvantage and the resulting educational disadvantage is a major issue for society (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2015). Attempts to ameliorate the problem of inequality, policy interventions have been at a range of scales: macro (society-wide), meso (local), or micro (individual) scale (Kerr et al., 2014). Evidence shows, however, that despite policy and funding interventions over many years, educational disadvantage continues unabated (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2015). In this Chapter I outline how inequality impacts on the educational outcomes of children growing up in areas of concentrated disadvantage. I link this to literature that outlines the inequities evident in geographically defined areas in Australia, particularly considering spatial in/justice through the theorising of Edward Soja. Following this I introduce the marginalised communities in which the participants in this research were school leaders. These schools are located in suburbs and towns where there is entrenched, and multi-layered disadvantage: two outer suburban suburbs and a rural location. I introduce the key participants, three principals (Rachel, Peter and Christine), and two secondary participants (Lucy and Steven).

4.1 Educational Disadvantage in Australia As argued in Chap. 1, multi-dimensional, deep and persistent disadvantage is often manifested in geographically defined areas. This geographic pattern of marginalisation becoming concentrated in particular neighbourhoods in turn has an impact on the educational futures of children in these communities. In Australia, there is a demonstrated connection between the educational attainment of young people and their geographic location, social background and educational experiences (Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2015; Kerr et al., 2014; McLachlan et al., 2013). The spatial concentration of disadvantage is not just an Australian phenomena; it is recognised as a pattern worldwide in many affluent countries and is a feature of developed wealthy countries where inequality has been growing since the 1970s. The spatial expression of this disadvantage has consequences for schooling. In Australia, the process of increasing marketisation of education operates with policies of autonomy, decentralisation, and parental choice (Keddie, MacDonald, Blackmore, Eacott, et al., 2020a, 2020b; Keddie, MacDonald, Blackmore, Wilkinson, et al., 2020a, 2020b; MacDonald et al., 2021) and has led to a funding model that has precipitated an exodus from the public sector schools to private schools (Bonner & Shepherd, 2017; MacDonald, et al., 2023). Increasing accountability

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demands, through high stakes testing such as the National Assessment Program – Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN) and PISA,2 along with the initiatives such as the MySchool website,3 ensure that school can be compared to school, and parental choice can be exercised by those that have the material and cultural capital to do so (Keddie & Holloway, 2019). Bourdieu (2006) argues that cultural capital, which is defined as the ‘instruments for the appropriation of symbolic wealth socially designated as worthy of being sought and possessed’ (p. 259) acts as a mediator in educational participation. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction holds that the education system legitimises class inequalities and reproduces the existing dominant society (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Increased marketisation of education leads to increased socio-economic segregation among schools, leading to further negative impacts on equality. Australia has one of the most segregated public schooling systems of any advanced economy in the world (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, 2019; Perry et al., 2022; Rowe & Perry, 2022; Thompson et al., 2019). These spatial injustices have been of concern in rural education research in Australia (Chesters & Cuervo, 2021; Roberts & Cuervo, 2015) with researchers asserting there has been a geographical blindness (Green and Letts, 2007) to the ‘particularities of (rural) places’ (Roberts and Green, 2013, p. 765). The unique geography, and colonial histories which have influenced the political boundaries within Australia presents a significant challenge for sustaining equitable education systems related to both the country’s centralised urbanicity, and the nature of provincial, rural and remote communities. These spatial injustices also are evident within urban and regional cities, with the distribution of advantage and disadvantage spatially expressed across different suburbs and linked to the segregation of schooling discussed above. A range of Australian and international studies on children and educational achievement have demonstrated that lower educational achievement means young people are vulnerable to poorer longer term earning capacity, poorer mental and physical health, and increased incidence of homelessness, and a lack of resources for families to support children leading to poorer educational outcomes for children, all of which reinforce a cycle of disadvantage (Camina & Iannone, 2014; Keddie, 2015; Pawson, Hulse, & Cheshire, 2015). Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. Connell and colleagues (1982) foundational work in the mid-1970s examining the educational outcomes of secondary students and their families highlighted this problem decades ago. In revisiting her earlier work, Connell (2002) argues that the cultural basis of education, that of the common good, has continued to erode. In fact, she contends that the compensatory education policies designed to address disadvantage in the past decades have, in fact, ‘turned 2

NAPLAN is an Australian high stakes annual assessment for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. It has been conducted since 2008. PISA is an OECD international assessment programme conducted triennially in Australia testing students’ mathematical, reading and scientific literacy, the results of which are key data for policy formation. 3 My School contains data on a school’s student profile, NAPLAN performance, funding levels and sources, other financial information, enrolment numbers and attendance rates. The site acts as a leagues table.

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our eyes away from the education of the privileged’ (Connell, 2002, p. 325). This is more important now than ever in terms of how the three sectors of schooling4 in Australia are funded. Indeed, Bonner and Shepherd (2017), in their analysis of the state of Australian schooling in 2017 assert that we are ‘incrementally growing social class hierarchies amongst our schools and students’ where the ‘social diversity which previous generations witnessed within schools is increasingly evident between them’ (p. 34).

4.2 Consequential Geographies—Theorising the Spatial Distribution of Advantage and Disadvantage With the exception of explicit explorations in rural education and rurality, spatiality is often overlooked in education research. Edward Soja’s (2009, 2010) theorising of spatial justice explored the uneven development of advantage and disadvantage. He argued that however justice is defined, it has a ‘consequential geography, a spatial expression that is more than just a background reflection or set of physical attributes to be mapped’ (Soja, 2010, p. 1). Drawing on the earlier work of Lefebvre (1991) on the social production of space and Michel Foucault’s interest in the relationships between power and space (Foucault, 1980), Soja argued that there is a ‘triple dialectic’ of ‘ontological qualities of human existence, from which all knowledge follows: the social/societal, the temporal/historical, and the spatial/geographical’ (Soja, 2010, p. 70). He suggested that the spatial/geographical is commonly considered to be relatively static, while time and sociality are seen as dynamic, and that the sidelining of the spatial in the triple dialectic necessitates ‘an assertive spatial perspective’ (Soja, 2010, p. 2), without privileging it above sociality and historicity. Foucault argued that thinking about space had been neglected but that an unwritten history of spaces would simultaneously be histories of power ranging in scales ‘from the great strategies of geo-politics to the little tactics of the habitat’ (Foucault, 1980, p. 149). Soja takes up Foucault’s arguments to argue that human spatiality is socially produced and invites examination of how power is exercised requiring: a different form of spatial consciousness, a way of thinking that recognize[s] that space is filled with politics and privileges, ideologies and cultural collisions, utopian ideals and dystopian oppression, justice and injustice, oppressive power and the possibility for emancipation. (2010, p. 103)

Taking an assertive spatial perspective, together with sociohistorical dimensions, allows a theorisation of spatial justice that accounts for unequal development across geographical areas and the inequalities that arise as a consequence: their consequential geographies (Soja, 2010). He argues that we are always ‘enmeshed in efforts to shape the spaces in which we live while at the same time these established and 4

In Australia there are three schooling sectors all funded, to different degrees, by both Federal and State governments: public, Catholic and private.

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evolving spaces are shaping our lives in many different ways’ (Soja, 2010, p. 71). An assertive inclusion of spatiality works towards ‘achieving greater justice …[and] becomes more encompassing, inclusive and feasible than achieving full equality’ (Soja, 2010, p. 23). The mobilising concept, justice, provokes new ‘modes of thinking about the spatiality of (in)justice and the (in)justice of spatiality’ (Soja, 2010, p. 13). Building on Soja’s work, Dikeç (2009, p. 1) argues that the spatiality of injustice emphasises the spatial dimension of justice including how ‘various forms of injustice manifest in space’, while the injustice of spatiality shifts focus ‘to structural dynamics that produce and reproduce injustice through space’. While Soja’s theorising of spatial justice was initially focussed around the distribution of advantage and disadvantage within urban areas, specifically the Los Angeles megacity, he suggested, that the ‘rural milieu cannot be divorced from the urban system which is embedded in it’ (Soja, 1969, p. 284). This has resonance in Australia, because spatiality is critical in understanding the consequential geographies of dis/ advantage. Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, with 80% of the population living in the major cities (less than 1% of the landmass), and 10% in the urban fringe of the major cities, predominantly along the eastern seaboard (Daley et al., 2017). The remaining 10% live in more sparsely populated areas that cover the interior 77% of a country that is 7.688 million km2 (Geoscience Australia, 2020) in regional, rural and remote areas serviced by the urban fringe. The spatiality that is produced by the urbanicity of Australia, in the urban-normative policy rollout, particularly in education, is of particular importance in exploring spatial justice. These consequential geographies are seen not only in remote and rural areas, but in the spread of dis/advantage within urban and regional areas.

4.3 Setting the Scene—Exploring the Locations of Research Educational researchers have long argued that context matters. The haecceity of a school, i.e. taking account of the unique and individual properties of place, matters. Thomson (2000) describes this as ‘thisness’. In the following section I introduce the places in which the research reported on in this book took place. They are some of the most marginalised communities in Australia: two outer suburban suburbs of Melbourne, and one rural community.

4.3.1 Century Heights Primary School (CHPS)—Rachael and Lucy Driving through the leafy bayside suburbs where houses are constructed to make the most of the water views and where the business district is replete with antique shops, upmarket homeware shops and art galleries selling expensive handmade jewellery

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from local artisans, it is difficult to imagine that a pocket of poverty exists within this community. But exist it does. The Century Heights area is clearly separated from the surrounding wealthy suburbs, sandwiched between two large industrial estates, and enclosed by a disused railway line, a recently cleaned-up creek that makes its way through an adjacent industrial area, a six-lane highway and a busy through road. Turning off the highway the uniform modest red brick houses on the small blocks of an ex-housing authority estate, the boarded up shops in a meagre shopping strip, together with the uncared-for gardens of rental houses lead towards CHPS. The suburb was built by the Housing Commission of Victoria (HCV), whose initial role was ‘slum’ clearances in inner city Melbourne from the 1930s up until the 1960s, had the responsibility for the provision of public housing. In the post war years, the focus was on housing the low-income earners of the increased population resulting from the post-war economic boom, and returned soldiers in War Service housing. This was conceived as a way to allow the ‘deserving poor’ a pathway to home ownership. Century Heights was one of the broad acre housing estates built by the HCV that has contemporary consequences for spatial justice. These estates had few amenities, were poorly serviced by public transport, and have tended, over subsequent years, to spatially concentrate community disadvantage. The historical antecedents for Century Heights can be seen in the way households in the suburb experience high levels of socio-economic disadvantage. Many families are single parent families. There are high levels of rented social housing. Households experience high levels of rental stress. The families experience high levels of un- and underemployment, low income, low educational attainment, and there remains lack of public transport. Historical town planning has created ‘socio-spatial gaps’ (Costes, 2014, p. 1) through the uneven spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage and highlight ‘fortified fragments’ of society (Harvey, 2008, p. 32) outside of areas of disadvantage—evident in the way the suburb is ‘contained’ and separated from surrounding privileged communities. Rachael was the principal of Century Heights Primary School (CHPS). She had been principal there for eight years and was previously Assistant Principal for 1.5 years at a large primary school in an adjacent wealthy suburb (Table 4.1). Prior to this Rachael had been a literacy coach who worked with the staff at CHPS. Rachael stated that she would not have wanted to be principal anywhere else. CHPS offered an alternative stream to mainstream schooling, and had around 184 students in ten classes. The Victorian education department has several government schools that run alternative curriculum programs such as Montessori, Steiner, Reggio Emilio, and the International Baccalaureate. The two streams were housed in separate buildings and did not share teachers. Over 10% of the students were on the Program for Students with Disabilities (PSD), ranging from Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) to Severe Behaviour and intellectual disability. The school worked in partnership with local agencies and had the support of a social worker, chaplain and community volunteers to enhance student learning. The school ran extracurricular programs such as: active after schools program, lunchtime club, breakfast club, community circles, friendly families and friendly schools. The primary school had 18 teaching staff and 7 non-teaching staff. Most classroom teachers were part

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Table 4.1 Primary research participants Research Age Highest Classroom Leadership experience School participants@ range degree teaching (years) (years)

School location

Rachael

> 50 MED

25

8 (+1.5 as AP)

Century Outer Heights Metropolitan Primary School

Peter

> 60 MA

5

11 (+1 as AP)

Bonham Outer Hollow Metropolitan Primary School

Christine

> 50 BEd

25

9 (+2 as AP)

Aurora Creek Rural Primary School

@ Participant

and school names are pseudonyms

time staff, a deliberate strategy by Rachael to manage the staffing implications of working in challenging circumstances. Four percent of the students were from a language background other than English, and 4% identified as Indigenous. Students had an 88% attendance rate. CHPS was 22 points below the Australian average in the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)5 in 2014, but in 2017 was only 12 points below. The change is due to the increased interest in the alternative program by wealthy parents who bring their children to the school from outside the area. This had presented difficulty for Rachel in managing the students’ and community needs because as a result of the shift in enrolments in the alternative stream, she had lost the equity funding for disadvantaged schools even though the needs of the mainstream students had not altered. The school had made substantial progress in all measures of NAPLAN over the previous few years. In 2014, students were substantially below the average attainment in all measures of NAPLAN. In the most recent results, the Year Three students are above like schools in attainment measures in literacy, but were substantially above all schools in numeracy. Year Five students had a higher average attainment in numeracy and writing than all schools, but fell below in other measures of literacy. In addition to interviewing Rachael, I interviewed Lucy who was assistant principal at CHPS. Lucy had been assistant principal at CHPS for less than two years and had been working as a classroom teacher in the school (Table 4.2). Lucy grew up in Century Heights herself, and had also gone to school there. She has taught at only one other primary school in her teaching career.

5

ICSEA is a scale developed by the Australian Curriculum and Assessment and Reporting Authority to enable ‘fair’ comparisons between schools. It is based on parent education and occupation, geographic area and proportion of Indigenous students. The average score is 1000 (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, n.d.).

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Table 4.2 Secondary research participants Research Age Highest Classroom Leadership experience School participants@ range degree teaching (years) (years)

School location

Lucy (AP)

< 40 BEd

5

< 2 (AP)

Century Outer Heights Metropolitan Primary School

Steven (AP)

< 40 MEd

5

8 (as AP)

Bonham Outer Hollow Metropolitan Primary School

@ Participant

and school names are pseudonyms; AP = Assistant Principal

4.3.2 Bonham Hollow Primary School—Peter and Steven The urban sprawl relentlessly advances outwards along web-like public transport routes from the city, north and west into the basalt plains, east into the southern reaches of the surrounding mountains, and south around the water. Bonham Hollow, recognised as one of the most impoverished localities in Australia, sits within an arrangement of impoverished suburbs concentrated around the last station on a metropolitan train network on the city fringe. Like Century Heights, Bonham Hollow is an ex-public housing estate that was built by the HCV between the mid 1950s and mid 1960s for low-income families. Like Century Heights, it is one of a series of broad-acre estates built by the authority on the urban fringes of the city, which through a lack of foresight in infrastructure planning and a lack of a commitment from the Authority to continue to improve their housing stock has become residualised. The residualisation of Bonham Hollow has also been hastened through a critical shift from the need to provide public housing to the provision of welfare housing and an inability for government to provide the support necessary for the increasingly multiple and complex needs of the residents (King, 1987; Ministry of Housing and Construction, 1988). The small brick and fibro-cement, conite-rendered houses on small blocks line streets with speed humps and chicanes that were installed in the 1990s to stop the street drag racing common in the area. The suburb retains a local reputation as an area with high crime rates and drug problems that have persisted since the 1970s. In the 1990s, as a result of the policy of the authority to increase home ownership, some state-owned houses were sold to their inhabitants. The subsequent private home ownership, as well as re-sales resulting from the outward pressure from the inner city urban property market has meant that Bonham Hollow has one of the highest rates of low-income private rental creating further stigma (Randolph & Holloway, 2007). Bonham Hollow Primary School (BHPS) is one of two small primary schools located in the area which is in the top band of disadvantage. The community profile for this area showed that only a quarter of the population are in full-time work, and just over half are in any type of work. The Bonham Hollow population had a low school completion rate and more than half the population had no qualifications. There was a low level of car ownership and because there was limited retail infrastructure

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there was a high reliance on public transport for even basic shopping. At the time of my visits in 2016, BHPS had around 150 students, but this number was reasonably fluid because of the itinerancy of the families. The student data showed that 19% of students had a language background other than English, and 7% identified as Indigenous (compared to the 1% of the population in Victoria as a whole). The school worked in partnership with many local agencies and had the support of a social and youth workers, paediatricians, a psychologist who works on site, legal help for families, chaplain, as well as corporate partners who supported the school and community. The school ran extra-curricular programs such as a daily breakfast club, and weekly community teas and provided food parcels for families. An innovative program has provided some students with the opportunity for overseas travel. The school had also received funding to build a community kitchen. The primary school had 20 teaching staff and 17 non-teaching staff. Students had a 91% attendance rate. The school was 74 points below the Australian average school according to the ICSEA. BHPS regularly achieves above the average attainment of like schools, but below the average attainment of all schools, in all measures of NAPLAN. Each classroom has support staff as well as regular access to speech pathologists working with an oral language program to support and enhance student learning. Peter had been principal of Bonham Hollow Primary School (BHPS) for eleven years and was contemplating retirement (Table 4.1). He trained as a teacher on finishing school, but did not teach for long because he was drawn to missionary work for a progressive Christian organisation operating Australia wide. He revealed that he returned to teaching after completing a Masters in sociology after leaving the missionary organisation after his divorce. He taught for five years, was then an assistant principal for one year, before becoming Principal at BHPS (Table 4.1). In addition to interviewing Peter, I had the opportunity to interview Steven who had been a graduate teacher with Peter at Peter’s previous school. When Peter became principal at BHPS, he created a leadership position for Steven. Steven had been assistant principal for eight years and had recently taken on an acting principal role at another school where he had just become the principal (Table 4.2).

4.3.3 Aurora Creek Primary School—Christine Aurora Creek is a small rural town several hours drive from Melbourne hugging a secondary highway linking the city with key tourist destinations. The highway ferries wealthy Melbournians to their weekend holiday houses further down the coast, where nearly 50% of the houses in the region are unoccupied except for weekends and holidays. Most cars drive through Aurora Creek without stopping, drivers and passengers not seeing the town. There is no reason for them to stop here; it is too close to their destination, but a long way from both their Melbourne lives and the coastal villages with their tourist shops, art galleries, restaurants and bars. The rolling hills are forested and farmed: forestry, dairy, horses, and cattle are the primary industries in the region. The strip development of Aurora Creek, a town of only 827 people,

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contains the businesses that rural towns require for survival: farm animal supplies, hardware and fencing businesses and diesel mechanics. There is a network of small villages nestled in the hills around Aurora Creek and like Aurora Creek itself, there is a transient population because the housing is cheap and if they are able to find jobs in the service industries for the tourist areas, they cannot afford to live in those destinations themselves. For a long time the region had been known as a cheap working class retirement location until middle-class Melbournians who couldn’t afford holiday homes in the more traditional holiday areas ‘discovered’ the natural beauty of the coastal and hinterland areas in the late 1990s. As a result, the population in the shire has a median age of 50 and the population age profile is skewed towards retirement and post-retirement (almost 50%). The regional population has grown from 5000 in the 1990s to 32,000 permanent residents in the latest census, with visitors boosting the regional population during holidays. Across the region, only one third of the population is in full time employment and only a quarter finished Year 12. Half of the population have no qualifications at all, 22% have a trade qualification and 5% have a university qualification. Unemployment has been a growing trend in the region. The largest employer in the region is in an expanding health care industry that is overtaking construction as the major employer. The outward housing pressure from Melbourne’s creeping urban fringe has seen some new small low-cost housing developments attracting commuters who work in the industrial areas in the outer suburbs within a 90 min commute. The community in which Aurora Creek PS is located has one of the highest levels of disadvantage in Victoria, being 57 points below the Australian school average in the ICSEA in 2017. Unusually, ACPS is not located in any of the surrounding villages. A rationalisation of small rural Victorian schools in the 1980s saw several schools amalgamated on a new site some seven kilometres from the Aurora Creek township. Its rural setting means that with rare exceptions, all children arrive by bus or car from within a 25km radius. Only one family can walk to school, and it is isolated from any business district or shops. Many children come to school by bus, which makes connecting with families extremely difficult. Turning off the highway on to a winding country road, ACPS appears as you navigate a wide bend. Cattle paddocks surround the school, which is nestled within a natural bush reserve. It is the very definition of bucolic. The school was well resourced when it was built and has its own pool, gymnasium, orchards, and natural wetlands maintained by the children. The school had 11 teaching staff and 10 non-teaching staff, and enrolments of 180 students with around 10% of the students on the Program for Students with Disability. Only 2% of the students are from a language background other than English and 2% have identified as Indigenous. The school population is highly mobile, constantly moving both into and out of the school. Christine, the principal, reports that they often have single parent families coming from the city, to live with their retired parents. She reports that single parents are frequently struggling with long-term unemployment or escaping domestic violence. As Christine notes, ‘the issue has been that once the parents come up and get themselves on their feet a little bit, there’s no work. But worse, there’s no childcare’.

4.4 Conclusion

73

ACPS has built strong partnerships with local agencies and has the support of a social worker, psychologist, chaplain and community volunteers. A breakfast club operates three mornings a week. An innovative oral literacy program has been developed to immerse parents and pre-school children in literacy skills prior to starting school. To enhance the adjacent pre-school, an early childhood hub is being built on site and governance will reside with the school. The school location and population provide a unique challenge for Christine in connecting with the school community. As she observes, ‘our connection with our parents on a daily basis is pretty limited’. Despite the challenges of being an isolated school, Aurora Creek PS regularly achieves above, and substantially above the average attainment of like schools, in measures of NAPLAN. In some NAPLAN measures, such as reading, the students of ACPS have achieved above the average attainment for all schools across Australia. Christine had been the principal ACPS, for nine years (Table 4.1), having previously been the assistant principal for two years. In the years before moving to ACPS, Christine was a leading teacher at a larger school in an adjacent highly disadvantaged region. Christine was close to retirement and had no desire to move on to any other school.

4.4 Conclusion In this chapter I outlined the spatial effects of dis/advantage and the educational dis/ advantage that follows. It introduced Edward Soja’s theorising of spatial justice as a way of exploring the consequential geographies of the distribution of dis/advantage in geographical areas. I explored the haecceity of the schools and their locations where the participants are educational leaders. In the following chapters (Chaps. 5, 6 and 7), I introduce Rachael, Peter and Christine who are principals of primary schools in three of the most disadvantaged locations in Victoria. In each chapter I introduce their school and community contexts, I outline and discuss their primary and secondary habitus through exploring their early lives, work and life experiences and I explore their social justice leadership practice through examining their encounters with the public education field. These explorations are mediated through the harnessing of Bourdieu’s theory of practice to analyse and make sense of each participant’s social justice leadership practice.

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References Australian Institute of Family Studies. (2015). Growing up in Australia: The longitudinal study of Australian Children, Annual statistical report 2014 (978-1-76016-000-5). Retrieved from Australian Institute of Family Studies Canberra: http://www.growingupinaustralia.gov.au/ Bonner, C., & Shepherd, B. (2017). Losing the game: State of our schools 2017 Centre for Policy Development. Centre for Policy Development, Sydney. Bourdieu, P. (2006). Cultural reproduction and social reproduction. In D. B. Grusky & S. Szeleny (Eds.), Inequality: Classic readings in race class and gender (pp. 257–271). Westview Press. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J.-C. (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture (R. Nice, Trans.) (2nd ed.). Sage Publications Ltd. Camina, M. M., & Iannone, P. (2014). Housing mix, school mix: Barriers to success. Journal of Education Policy, 29(1), 19–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.783933 Chesters, J., & Cuervo, H. (2021). (In)equality of opportunity: Educational attainments of young people from rural, regional and urban Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s13384-021-00432-0 Connell, R. W. (2002). Making the difference, then and now. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 23(3), pp. 319–327. https://doi.org/10.1080/0159630022000029812 Connell, R. W., Ashendon, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference: Schools, families, and social division. Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Costes, L. (2014). Neoliberalization and Evolution of the “Right to the City”. Justice Spatiale-Spatial Justice, 6. Daley, J., Wood, D., & Chivers, C. (2017). Regional patterns of Australia’s economy and population. Grattan Institute Melbourne. Dikeç, M. (2009). Space, politics and (in)justice. Justice spatiale-Spatial justice(1). http://www. jssj.org/article/lespace-le-politique-et-linjustice/ Education Council. (2019). Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. Education Services. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge. The Harvester Press. Geoscience Australia. (2020). Area of Australia-states and territories. Canberra, Australia: Australian Government. https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/national-location-information/ dimensions/area-of-australiastates-and-territories Green, B., & Letts, W. (2007). Space, equity, and rural education. In K. N. Gulson & C. Smes (Eds.), Spatial theories of education: Policy and geography matters (pp. 57–76). New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (2008). The right to the city. New Left Review, 53, 281–289. Keddie, A. (2015). School autonomy, accountability and collaboration: A critical review. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 47(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2015. 974146 Keddie, A., & Holloway, J. (2019). School autonomy, school accountability and social justice: stories from two Australian school principals. School Leadership & Management, 1–15. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2019.1643309 Keddie, A., MacDonald, K., Blackmore, J., Eacott, S., Gobby, B., Mahony, C., Niesche, R., Wilkinson, J. (2020a). School autonomy, marketisation and social justice: the plight of principals and schools. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 1–16. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00220620.2020.1818699 Keddie, A., MacDonald, K., Blackmore, J., Wilkinson, J., Gobby, B., Niesche, R., Eacott, S., Mahoney, C. (2020b). The constitution of school autonomy in Australian public education: areas of paradox for social justice. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2020.1781934 Kerr, K., Dyson, A., & Raffo, C. (2014). Educational disadvantage and place: Making the local matter. Policy Press. King, R. (1987). Monopoly rent, residential differentiation and the second global crisis of capitalism—the case of Melbourne. Progress in Planning, 28, 195–298. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell Publishing.

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MacDonald, K., Keddie, A., Blackmore, J., Mahoney, C., Wilkinson, J., Gobby, B., Niesche, R., & Eacott, S. (2021). School autonomy reform and social justice: A policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present). The Australian Educational Researcher. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s13384-021-00482-4 MacDonald, K., Keddie, A., Eacott, S., Wilkinson, J., Blackmore, J., Niesche, R., & Gobby, B. (2023). The spatiality of economic maldistribution in public-school funding in Australia: Still a poisonous debate. Journal of Educational Administration and History McLachlan, R., Gilfillan, G., & Gordon, J. (2013). Deep and persistent disadvantage in Australia. Canberra: Productivity Commission. Ministry of Housing and Construction. (1988). New houses for old: Fifty years of public housing in Victoria 1938–1988. Ministry of Housing and Construction. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2015). In it together: Why less inequality benefits all. OECD Publishing. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2019). Education at a Glance 2019. Pawson, H., Hulse, K., & Cheshire, L. (2015). Addressing concentrations of disadvantage in urban Australia. Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Perry, L. B., Rowe, E., & Lubienski, C. (2022). School segregation: theoretical insights and future directions (Vol. 58, pp. 1–15). Taylor & Francis. Productivity Commission. (2022). Review of the National School Reform Agreement. Australian Government. Randolph, B., & Holloway, D. (2007). Commonwealth rent assistance and the spatial concentration of low income households in metropolitan Australia (AHURI Final Report No. 101). Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, UNSW-UWS Research Centre. Roberts, P., & Cuervo, H. (2015). What next for rural education research? Australian and International Journal of Rural Education, 1–8. Roberts, P., & Green, B. (2013). Researching rural places: On social justice and rural education. Qualitative Inquiry, 19(10), 765–774. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800413503795 Rowe, E., & Perry, L. B. (2022). Voluntary school fees in segregated public schools: How selective public schools turbo-charge inequity and funding gaps. Comparative Education, 58(1), 106–123. Soja, E. W. (1969). Rural-Urban Interaction. Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines, 3(1), 284–290. https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.1969.10803551 Soja, E. W. (2009). The city and spatial justice. Justice Spatiale/Spatial Justice, 1(1), 1–5. Soja, E. W. (2010). Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, G., Hogan, A., & Rahimi, M. (2019). Private funding in Australian public schools: A problem of equity. The Australian Educational Researcher, 46(5), 893–910. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s13384-019-00319-1 Thomson, P. (2000). Like schools’, educational ‘disadvantage’ and ‘thisness. The Australian Educational Researcher, 27(3), 157–172. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03219737

Chapter 5

Mission, Macrocosms and Mothering—Rachael’s Story

I thought if this school ever came up I’d love to have a go, but I still had in the back of my mind that it would take a pretty experienced Principal to get this school up and going (Rachael) I was frightened out of my mind. Nothing can ever prepare you for the role of Prin[cipal] (Rachael)

Abstract In this chapter the rich narratives and life histories of primary participants begin. These narratives are explored through metaphors. Drawing on the methodological tools of narrative inquiry I sought to understand the life experiences of the participants of this study. These are explored and analysed through Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field and the field mechanisms of capitals, social class, and doxa, as well as field conditions such as illusio, to consider how these life histories can be understood in light of the participants’ crucial roles in leading in primary schools in marginalised communities. In so doing, these chapters explore what educational leaders understand by social justice, how these understandings influence their social justice leadership practices. It uncovers disjunctions between participant articulated understandings of social justice and the social justice leadership practices they report on. For Rachael, this chapter explores aspects of her leading practices through the metaphors of mission, macrocosms, and mothering. ‘Mission’ explores Rachael’s moral understandings of her work as a principal in a school located in a highly disadvantaged community. ‘Macrocosms’ explores her relationship and work for and with her community. ‘Mothering’ explores Rachel’s ethics of care through a feminist lens and exposes the enormous workload she has taken on. A disjunction in Rachael’s articulations of socially just leading practices is uncovered in her adherence to the discourses of meritocracy, a function of her experiences as an immigrant to Australia. Keywords Ethics of care · Habitus · Field · Capitals · Work intensification · Reflexivity

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7_5

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In this chapter I introduce Rachael, the principal of a primary school located in a highly disadvantaged suburb, Century Heights Primary School (CHPS). The chapter explores how her early family life and life experiences influence her primary and secondary habitus and her social justice understandings. In particular, it uncovers how Rachael has interpreted the key issues in her leadership at CHPS and how she leverages her own social and cultural capital to navigate the intersecting fields of public education and social justice for marginalised communities. The chapter commences with a sketch of the context of Rachael’s principalship through description of CHPS and outlines her social justice leadership through the lens of three key themes: her strong commitment to social justice for students which I have termed ‘mission’, her focus on community building in the wider community labelled ‘macrocosms’, and her approach to relationships within and outside of her school and community, an approach which adopts discourses and practices of maternal care or ‘mothering’.

5.1 Context—Century Heights Primary School As outlined in Chap. 4, the households in the catchment area for the school were characterised by a high level of socio-economic disadvantage: a high degree of singleparent families, rented social housing, rental stress, high unemployment, low income, low educational attainment and lack of transport. Despite the challenges, as I entered the school grounds on a Tuesday morning before the morning bell, I felt the energy of a busy school. Staff and children smile at me, though they don’t know me, and it felt warm and welcoming. The school grounds were well cared for with signs greeting visitors. In the school office the administration staff are busy with children and parent requests, but they were quick to acknowledge me and direct me to Rachael who is outside doing yard-duty where she introduced me to groups of children and parents as she made her way around the yard. She appeared to have warm relationships with parents and children as she laughed and made jokes with many of them. Across the three years in which I visited Rachael and the school the foyer has had an ever-changing display of children’s artworks and collaborative community works. Rachael’s office has children’s artwork on the wall, a collection of children’s scooters and toys (children leave them in her office for safe keeping) and display folders of ‘good news’ stories about the school and community. Older school buildings at CHPS are well maintained and there is new building courtesy of the Building the Education Revolution programme. This programme was designed as a nation-building stimulus package at the beginning of the global financial crisis (Australian National Audit Office, 2010). However, it wasn’t always like this. When Rachael began her tenure as principal at CHPS, she reports that the school was in decline. The enrolments had been dropping over the preceding years and there was great uncertainty regarding future staffing and program delivery. The buildings were very run down, there was a lot of graffiti and the programs were limited (for example, there were no art, music or physical education classes offered

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and the library had been closed). Rachael noted that the parent opinion and student attitudes to school surveys were very poor. She reflected that: The perception of the school was that all the feral kids came here so anybody who lived here in the area that thought that their family was better than the other families would go down to [nearby local school]. The look of the school was like a war zone. In fact, one of the parents came and said, ‘I actually thought this was a derelict school. I couldn’t believe that any school was even functioning here’. So that’s how bad the school was.

Rachael’s use of metaphor and simile to paint a picture of what the school was like ( feral kids, like a war zone) mirror Pat Thomson’s research in rustbelt schools that characterises perceptions of marginalised schools as trouble (Thomson, 2002). This, in fact, had been a long-standing belief about the school. There had been a powerful community perception of deficit, a fossilised discourse held by both the larger community, at a regional level not just locally, and within the school culture. Such deficit perceptions are commonly held about schools in areas of concentrated disadvantage (Francis & Mills, 2012; Francis et al., 2017; Reay, 2012). As Lucy, Rachael’s assistant principal who herself grew up in Century Heights in the 1980s and 1990s and attended CHPS for her primary schooling, remarked: I did not know that my family lived in a lower socio economic area …until I was told this by other students on my first day of high school. … I do feel looking back that it made me more determined because I felt I had to prove my worth to people all the time and that being from Century Heights didn’t mean you were no good.

Rachael’s first experience with CHPS was when she was working full-time as a Literacy Coach at CHPS and two other schools in marginalised locations and had just begun a Masters in School Leadership: At the same time I applied to do a Masters in School Leadership. I really wanted to know what it was all about. I had a variety of different leaders over the years from dictatorial bullies to child-centred fabulous educators. By chance the new role as Literacy Specialist saw me working in three different schools with three very different leaders, each at different stages of their careers. It was then that I realised that the leader makes a big difference to the school. I’m not sure how the schools were chosen for inclusion into the project but not one of these schools needed a Literacy Coach.

Rachael notes that instead of literacy coaches, she thought that her coaching schools might need different leadership approaches. In her estimation, the Literacy Coach initiative was not working and she became frustrated that the DETV was not admitting this. Consequently, she took on the assistant principal role at the adjacent Brookville PS, a government school in a nearby wealthy suburb where she had taught for many years. With eighteen months experience as an assistant principal, when the principalship of CHPS became available, she applied and was the successful applicant. As she notes in the epigraph to this chapter, this was a school where she really wanted to have a go at being principal. Because she had spent time in the school as a literacy specialist and lived within the region, she began her tenure as principal with an understanding of the view of the school in the community, the reduced program delivery and knowledge of the capabilities of the staff already there.

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5.2 Rachael—Primary and Secondary Habitus Bourdieu argued that the habitus ‘is an open system of dispositions that is constantly subjected to experiences, and therefore constantly affected by them in a way that either reinforces or modifies its structures’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 133). The primary habitus is formed in our earliest socialisation in childhood and is linked to our parent’s location in social space (Bourdieu, 1977). Our habitus is, then, ‘embodied history, internalized as second nature and so forgotten as history’ (Bourdieu, 1990b, p. 56). Our secondary habitus is built on our primary habitus and results from our experiences with schooling, university and other life experiences (Bourdieu, 1977). An exploration of Rachael’s primary and secondary habitus formation illuminates her social justice understandings and leadership decisions at CHPS. In interviews and her autobiographical account, Rachael recounted her attachment to CHPS and the Century Heights community and this is connected to two key influences. The first was her childhood growing up with working-class parents (primary habitus). The second was her first teaching experiences in a marginalised suburb of Melbourne, where she grew up (secondary habitus). In relation to her early life and working-class origins, Rachael explained that she was born in Northern Ireland in the late 1950s. At this time in Northern Ireland, the burgeoning civil rights movement began to challenge the discrimination and inequalities faced by Catholic minorities. The resulting civil unrest became known as The Troubles, a period of political violence and armed conflict. Rachael explained that her extended family were involved and her police officer uncle was later sent to Australia for his safety in the late 1970s. Rachael’s parents were poor in Ireland and migrated with Rachael and her older brother to Australia during the Bring Out a Briton (BOAB) campaign under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme in 1963. The BOAB campaign aimed to boost the numbers of white British immigrants to Australia in the face of post-war immigration and growing public anxiety about nonwhite immigrants (Hassam, 2007). Australia was advertised to British subjects as an attractive destination for immigrants because of post-war economic growth and the promise of jobs, and a better life. The advertisements promised much: ‘Come on Down Under and share in this exciting adventure of building a nation. This young expanding British country has a limitless future’ (Hassam, 2007, p. 822). Rachael was five years old and she recounted her family arrived ‘with nothing to their name’ and argued that as a result her parents ‘taught me the value of hard work and on-going learning’. Her family settled in the western suburbs of Melbourne where her father worked as a carpenter and her mother in a dry-cleaning factory and she remembers her mother, ‘carrying heavy bags of damp clothes to iron through her lunch time’. Rachael’s parents eventually bought their own home and Rachael described her childhood with her older brother as idyllic, ‘I had two loving supportive parents’. Her parents worked at night to make their homes comfortable—her father often building cabinetry or painting, her mother sewing soft furnishings. For Rachael, these memories reinforced the values that her parents instilled in her and her brother,

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her parents telling them ‘anything is possible with hard work and knowledge’, and that ‘money doesn’t necessarily solve any problems’. Rachael’s primary habitus narrative around the lessons she takes from her working-class parents and her childhood reflect a classic meritocracy discourse, including education as a social equaliser (Mills & Gale, 2010). Rachael’s family emigrated during the post-war boom years in Australia where continuous economic growth had provided work and life opportunities to immigrants that were not otherwise available in their home countries. The Australian mythscapes of egalitarianism and fairness ‘for the working man’ promised opportunity accorded to those who worked hard (Elder, 2007, p. 53). The idea that talent combined with effort affords all people the opportunity to navigate across social, cultural and economic boundaries is entrenched in meritocracy discourses around the world (Littler, 2017; Sandel, 2020). This is particularly potent in discussions about education and marginalised communities because it places the responsibility of social conditions squarely on the marginalised as a failure of ‘losers to learn the right skills’ (Thomas Frank in Sandel, 2020, p. 88). Tragically these neoliberal public pedagogies continue to inform government policy and decision making (Giroux, 2005; Sandel, 2020). In wealthy nations such as Australia, rising inequality coupled with stagnating social mobility belies meritocratic success. Meritocracy, in fact, benefits the ruling elite (Littler, 2017) and is a form of cultural reproduction (Bourdieu, 2006), perpetuating misrecognition and symbolic violence (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Rachael’s primary habitus is steeped in the ideology of merit and she expresses this through her stated belief in the value of hard work and learning to get ahead. As her family did not have a lot of money, when she turned 15, Rachael commenced part-time employment at milk bars and fast-food restaurants so, she reported, she could buy herself fashionable clothes because she knew that her parents couldn’t provide them. Fashionable clothing and appearance was still important for Rachael and she was always immaculately and formally dressed when I met with her (a feminine professional dress or suit, stilettos). Two readings are important here. Firstly, clothing can be read as a signifier of social class. Rachael’s education and career in teaching provided her class mobility, forging ‘a new external [class] positioning’ (Hawthorne, 1999, p. 199). Her new class positioning is external, because her internal positioning is based on her primary habitus developed with her working-class family (Hawthorne, 1999). Rachael’s attention to her appearance, reflecting the legitimised symbolic and cultural capitals of the middle-class (Bourdieu, 1993, 2006, 2010), is similar to the experiences of other socially mobile working-class women. Steph Lawler (1999) for example, suggests that such women acquire middle-class cultural competencies so as to ‘pass’, but inevitably retain some anxieties ‘which arise out of a sense of being ‘impostors’ in a bourgeois world’ (p. 11). Rachael’s dress and appearance, speaks to ‘fashion signalling’, a nonverbal communication of her external class location (Maguire, 2005b; Raymond, 1999). Secondly, Rachael’s attention to her appearance can be read as ‘impression management’ (Blackmore, 1999; Heffernan & Thomson, 2020). Sinclair (2005) argues that ‘leadership is a bodily practice’ (p. 387). Women leaders report that attention to how they use their bodies, how they dress and how they ‘perform’ leadership is necessary (Blackmore, 1999; Blackmore & Sachs,

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2007; Heffernan & Thomson, 2020). This is particularly important in educational quasi-markets where, as the face of the school, Rachael is marketing herself as professional and in control. Her appearance, however, may create a social distance with the surrounding school community (Cummins & Blum, 2015). Even though Rachael stated that she had only ever wanted to be a teacher, as a high performing student her secondary teachers encouraged Rachael to keep her options open and consider university rather than teachers college. She began a science and economics degree at an elite Australian university while also working full time at the fast-food restaurant where, at 18 years old, she was already manager. Rachael’s first attempt at university was short-lived. She stated that she found it to be too big, with too many people, and recalled, ‘mum reckons I was home before lunch, so she said she knew I wasn’t going to any classes’. She related that she felt uncomfortable on campus and knew that the science and economics degree did not suit her, so she quit within six months to focus on her full-time work managing the fast-food restaurant, thinking that this was where her future lay. Rachael’s parents were loving and supportive and she faced no pressure from them to remain at university, stating, ‘there was never any pressure to do anything’. However, she quickly realised that managing the shop was also not what she wanted, and that teaching was still her dream. After an argument with her boss, she quit and drove across the city to a teachers college and spoke to the first person she saw, who happened to be the Admissions Officer, about her dream to teach. Despite it being well past admission dates to college, she was accepted immediately. These experiences suggest links to Rachael’s primary habitus which relate to her social class and her field positioning in her role at the fast-food restaurant and also at both university and then teachers college. Richards (2017) longitudinal studies with working-class girls and their career aspirations suggest that career choices align with family expectations for their lives ‘irrespective of opportunities presented by schools and other agencies’ (p. 190). To become a teacher was a respectable choice for a working-class girl in Australia in the 1970s (Blackmore, 1999; Wilkinson & Eacott, 2013). Rachael’s desire to be a teacher was one of her first aspirations and she recounted, ‘as far back as I can remember there were two games I played; school and shops’. Diane Reay similarly reflects on her own journey to teaching as a working-class girl in the UK (Reay, 2017; Reay et al., 2010). The Bradley Report into Australian tertiary education found that there are distinct differences in tertiary participation of low Socio-Economic Status (SES) students by field of study, course level and institution, and that low SES students are the most highly represented in education and agriculture (Bradley et al., 2008, p. 30), which suggests that teaching is still a respectable career choice for students who come from areas of disadvantage. Evans’ (2009) research with working-class girls in higher education suggests that careers in caring professions such as teaching is ‘part of the habitus of the working-class girls’ (p. 351). Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) suggests that when ‘habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and takes the world about itself for granted’ (p. 127). Although she was encouraged to go to university by her teachers, Rachael felt ‘like a fish out

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of water’, as opposed to her feelings of connection and belonging (a well-matched fit within the field) that she found when she arrived at teachers college and became a teacher. Floundering (fish out of water) is a common experience for working-class young adults attending universities, who do not have the ‘informational capital’, a combination of social and cultural capitals, to navigate such unfamiliar environments (Lessky et al., 2021). Margaret Somerville’s (2013) research with working-class students suggests that universities feel like ‘foreign territories’. Reay et al. (2010), contend that an institutional effect, characterised as institutional habitus, of universities is a variable influencing the sense of comfort or belonging that working-class students experience. A lack of fit between institutional habitus and the student leads to a feeling of exclusion, and self-limitation (Evans, 2009), such as that experienced by Rachael in her first attempt at university. Successful transition into university and the resulting social mobility may act as a double-edged sword because it can also alienate students from their working-class families (Hanley, 2016; Reay, 2017; Reay et al., 2009; Richards, 2017). Rachael proudly recounted a story where she was with some people she did not know: And one of them worked in the hospital, just as a lady who goes around doing the food for the old people, and then they’ve gone, ‘Oh [you’re] a principal of a school! I just would never have picked it (laugh)’

That this person did not identify Rachael as a principal, presumably tied to stereotypes of accent equating to class (Maguire, 2005b), suggests pride in her workingclass origins and her pleasure at not having been seen as someone who has crossed the boundary into a different class. The embodiment of class, or bodily hexis (Bourdieu, 1977) displayed by Rachael here, can be read as a function of habitus clivé, or cleft habitus. Bourdieu used this term to trouble the contradictions and tensions that can be identified in the dispositions of someone, such as himself, who moved from a lower-class provincial childhood to become educated elite (Bourdieu, 2004, 2007), a path very similar to Rachael’s. In addition, Bourdieu (2000) also argued that some dispositions of the primary habitus may weaken through lack of use, for example, when there is a change in social position, and in particular linked to correction of accents or manners. There is a disjunction with the way that Rachael pays attention to her appearance as a possible signifier of class, discussed above, and her pride in her working-class origins she displayed in this vignette. In the late 1980s, already a step-parent to her husband’s two children, Rachael had two more children. Rachael’s first child was born with cerebral palsy. While Rachael is adamant that being the parent of a child with complex and high needs did not change the way in which she saw the world, research suggests otherwise. As the parent of a young man with a disability myself, my own personal experience attests to this, as does the experience of many other parents (Dowling et al., 2004). Typically, the larger burden of caregiving falls on the mother (Graf, 2018; McLaughlin et al., 2008; Ryan & Runswick-Cole, 2008). McKeever and Miller (2004) argue that hegemonic discourses of motherhood (some mothering is valorised more than others), childhood and disability have an impact on mothers’ social positioning and isolation. They argue that mothers’ responses to ‘discriminatory and exclusionary practices that

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cause them to experience social suffering with their children’ can lead resistance to, and appeasement of, for example, medical professionals, which leads to an ability to ‘play the game’ in order to achieve better social positioning for themselves and their children (McKeever & Miller, 2004, p. 1189). Scambler and Newton (2011) argue that for parents caring for children with longterm needs all aspects of their lives are impacted, particularly on their habitus and capital accumulation. Specifically, they argue that a personal capital is developed through ‘disrupted, transformed or de-legitimated capital flows’ which draw on the parents’ experiences as carers, including such things as exclusion from existing forms of capital (Scambler & Newton, 2011, p. 131). This leads to an acute awareness and reflexivity in their lifeworlds that allow them to ‘reject, harness, filter and ‘trans-value’ other forms of capital to circumvent them in favour of their immediate circumstances’ (Scambler & Newton, 2011, p. 132). While Rachael would apparently reject such an argument, it is her high levels of reflexivity that emerged throughout our conversations that I want to examine here. Bourdieu argued that when the unconscious habitus is confronted with challenging events within fields (in his words: ‘brutally disrupted’), a self-questioning is generated (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 131). This questioning brings the unconscious habitus to the level of consciousness and leads to the development of ‘new facets of self’ (Reay, 2004b, p. 438). What results is resistance to and/or a new awareness which Bourdieu termed socio-analysis (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). The resulting reflexivity makes the unconscious conscious. However, Bourdieu (1990a) argued that ‘consciousness and reflexivity are both cause and symptom of the failure of immediate adaptation to the situation’ (p. 11), and can be related to the flexibility of individual habitus. Those who have ‘habitual reflexivity or a reflective habitus’ (Sweetman, 2003, p. 544) are better able to navigate multiple and complex fields and use their capitals to ‘play the game’ to their benefit. Whether Rachael recognised it or not, parenting a child with complex needs has likely had a critical impact on her reflexivity. Typically, leaders with a keen sense of social justice have encountered events at a personal level that make them reflect on the world and their place in it. They have experienced a shift in consciousness. For example, Sinclair and Wilson (2002) argue that for leaders who have experienced disadvantage, the ‘mechanisms of systematic discrimination [become] more real and observable’ (p. 29). As a result, such leaders, particularly educational leaders, are likely to be more reflexive and more likely to challenge deficit discourses and to understand the reproduction of advantage.

5.3 Encounters Between Habitus and Field—Mission, Macrocosms and Mothering Rachael did not communicate anything specifically in her life story that she considered to be the origin of her ideas around social justice. Her parents weren’t very involved in her own education because they both worked, but she was loved and

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supported by them and her older brother. Nor did she address ‘social justice’ directly. What Rachael said about children, the community, the purpose of education and how she valued the voice of children in her school gives access to her beliefs and understandings, her ‘habitus in action’ (Lingard et al., 2003, p. 67). These shed light on dispositions that are the embodiment of her habitus: a product of her career and her life experiences that had led her to CHPS, at that time. The notion of ‘the game’ and the ability to play it is a strong metaphor in Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu’s use of a game analogy in order to explain how the habitus and field interact (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) is helpful in understanding Rachael’s strategies in the intersecting fields she encounters. Bourdieu argued that within games (fields) there are stakes, describing the competition between players; illusio, describing the investment in the game where ‘players are taken in by the game, they oppose one another, sometimes with ferocity, only to the extent that they concur in their belief (doxa) in the game and its stakes’; when entering a field players agree tacitly that the game is worth playing; they bring their capitals (economic, cultural, social, symbolic) which can be used as trump cards in subversive or conservative plays relating the rules of the game resulting in individual positioning within the game (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 98–99). Rachael’s encounters in intersecting fields shed light on how social justice is embedded in her habitus. This is explored using three metaphors: Rachael’s discussions of the purpose of education and how she manages her personal beliefs and external accountabilities (mission), how she has engaged the whole school community (macrocosms) and how children are considered individuals worthy of respect, and the value of relationships (with students, staff and the community) (mothering). These are discussed in turn below.

5.3.1 Mission The idea of a mission is strongly linked to religious activity, but in this chapter I use it to mean ‘to take on an important task’ as well as denoting a ‘strong commitment and sense of duty to do or achieve something’ (Collins Dictionary Online, 2018). I do, however, suggest that Rachael’s very strong sense of her moral purpose as a principal at CHPS implied a missionary zeal in her tireless work for the children and community. I am therefore troubling a problematic term and linking mission with moral purpose. William Greenfield argues that by its very nature, the act of leading in any school is a moral pursuit, and suggested that the core consideration should be ‘leading and teaching to what ends, and by what means?’ (Greenfield, 2004, p. 174). Rachael considered the purpose of education to be that children can ‘handle themselves in their future, academically, socially, emotionally’. She added, ‘to make the individual, teachers and the children, to just be the best they can be’. Note Rachael’s whole child approach and that she included the teachers in her considerations of educational

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purpose. This pointed to her belief that the school is a community bound to each other, to care for each other and is important in understanding how she viewed relationships. Moral purpose is something that Rachael discussed in all of our interactions, although it was not always couched in terms of ‘moral purpose’. What she did indicate is her doxic understandings about what should happen in schools. Bourdieu (2000) defines doxa as ‘…a set of fundamental beliefs which does not even need to be asserted in the form of an explicit, self-conscious dogma’ (p. 15). For example, in terms of thinking about relationships with children and families, Rachael said, ‘[It’s] compassion, common sense. It’s not rocket science. It’s putting yourself in that child’s shoes. I just think it’s so easy to do. And it’s what we’re supposed to do’. Importantly, she also viewed herself as responsible for all children stating, ‘We work for the department. We actually belong to all the children. That’s just what you do’. When Rachael used phrases like what we are supposed to do, and just what you do, she indicates her unquestioned and unquestionable opinions and perceptions which determine what is ‘natural’ for her in her practice, attitudes and opinions, and these are linked to her habitus (Bourdieu, 1977). Critically, in discussing taking on the principalship at CHPS, in amongst her discussion about the school needing an experienced principal and her perceived lack of experience, Rachael indicated that her fundamental belief was that moral purpose through emotional commitment is key: ‘you know, anyone can do it. You just have to care, that’s all…you just have to care’. Rachael refers often to this relational aspect of her leadership at CHPS and this can be linked to the ideas around the ethics of care (Noddings, 2012a), and maternal thinking (Ruddick, 2009). Rachael navigated various intersecting fields in her role as principal and it is with external accountabilities that her commitment to her own moral understandings of her role in her school (her mission), and her ‘feel for the game’ is clear. As principal, Rachael mediated between external accountabilities such as the governing education authority directives and policy and how these are taken up in her school. She made decisions, for example, to ignore certain directives that she felt were not relevant to her school, students or staff. In these cases, resistance is a factor in Rachael’s relationships to the education authorities. This could be seen as very risky business in light of compliance and accountability measures which places responsibility for school results at the feet of principals (Gobby et al., 2017; Keddie et al., 2020a, 2020b; Keddie et al., 2020a, 2020b). The creeping responsibilisation of principals since the beginning of the current neoliberal reforms in the 1990s (Blackmore, 1999), ‘includes bureaucratic regulation, the discourses and practices of competitive enterprise, and external public accountability measures’ creating a ‘powerful double movement of autonomy and responsibility that binds the subject to specific truths, rationalities, norms and ideals’ (Gobby et al., 2017, pp. 2–3). Rachael related that she rejected these norms, maintaining a focus on the children and their community: ‘I don’t care what Region says, I don’t care what the Department says… [I mean] I stay above the law’. Rachael reported that her resistance actively includes ignoring department directives for programs, leaving her staff to focus on curriculum, and teaching and learning,

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‘Yeah, you just go: you know what? Is this the right thing? Do the staff need something else pushed on them? For nothing? [It] could go away in another twelve months’. Principals’ resistance to performative demands have been described as strategic pragmatism, a creative and sometimes subversive response to reform (Moore et al., 2002; Thomson, 2008). In Rachael’s estimation, principals don’t get a great deal of pressure from their line managers because ‘they don’t care. They’re just worried about their own jobs really. When it comes to it, they don’t care’. Here Rachael suggested that she understands the game that fellow players are playing for their own interest, and she makes strategic decisions about what is and isn’t important in relation to her own context. She said that when she received email directives she often just hits ‘delete’: I don’t care what they say. I don’t always listen. It’s gut instinct. Like if something seems too good to be true, it’s too good to be true. I’ll look into it, and I’ll listen [but] it’s experience of knowing that they’ll come up with these things and you’ll put so much energy into it and then it disappears. So I work out where it is actually coming from. Is this a political thing? Or is this a ‘job for the boys’ that someone’s pushing? So I think, how is this going to help?

In making decisions not to engage with Department initiatives or directives, she stands by her own moral code, and her knowledge of what is required in her context: I do feel supported because they don’t come near you (laugh), unless you get caught (laugh), when you’ve done something really bad. I wouldn’t do that anyway. But I will do what’s right. I always think: if I make this decision and I’m called on it, can I justify this? Yes, I can, I’ll go with it. [Actually] they’re not that organised. One team doesn’t talk to the other, so you can ring one branch and get an answer and ring a different one and maybe get a different answer and ring your leader and get a different answer. Then you take the one you want (laugh). I haven’t had to do that too much. But I know which ones to ring that I will get support from.

In the example above, Rachael recounted how she quickly learned how to get the answer she wanted and this clearly illustrates how she uses her amassed capitals, the realisation of power within the field (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), and knowledge of the field of play in ‘gaming the system’ to benefit the children and community at CHPS. As a principal who is towards the end of her career, she felt she had the power to make dangerous decisions, and she laughed when she said, ‘What are they going to do? Sack me?’ This indicated both her intimate knowledge of the rules of play, and her subversion of the rules in the interest of her community, but also in her apparent lack of concern for her career, she delegitimised the symbolic power of external accountabilities. The construction of the state (the education authority) through meta-capitals developed in fields defines the specific power of the state, and Bourdieu argued that ‘holders of various forms of capital struggle in particular for power over the state’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 114). Rachael indicated, in her apparent lack of concern for her career, that external accountabilities had little to no power over her. However, at other times, Rachael did show a concern for such accountabilities (I stay above the law) suggesting a disjunction between her habitus and the fields she navigated. In her apparent repudiation of some of the policies and controls placed on her by external bodies, Rachael adhered to her own moral understandings of her role as a

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principal: her mission. She indicated that her mission included, not just the children and the community, but her staff too, and this is further explored in the following sections.

5.3.2 Macrocosms I use the metaphor macrocosms to indicate the role that Rachael believed that CHPS had in the broader community, as a smaller part of a whole. As discussed in the previous section, Rachael saw the school as important for the children, the staff and the community. In this section I discuss how Rachael addressed the deficit views held of the school in the community, by the teachers of the children, as well as by the children about themselves. Because Rachael had been a literacy coach at CHPS prior to her appointment as principal, she was very aware of the deficit perceptions in the community and region. She noted that when she took on the role that families were bypassing CHPS in order to attend other nearby schools: There were a lot of programs that were cut out. There was no art. There was no music…Children who enjoyed those subjects and parents of those children who wanted a well-rounded education just thought, ‘We’ll go somewhere else’.

These deficit perceptions were highly problematic and had a very real effect on the enrolments of the school, so one of her first tasks as principal was to address the aesthetics of the school (a war zone) and find ways to challenge the dominant narrative in the community. Rachael decided that she needed to begin by working on the aesthetics of the school, relating that ‘the provision of a safe, secure and attractive learning environment is very important to me as it sets the standards for the children. It is really important for them to have respect for the school and feel proud’. Sergiovanni (2001) argued that the symbolic and cultural aspects of schooling are powerful in creating connection to school and a sense of belonging. Rachael believed that the children ‘deserve it [a beautiful looking school]’. In aiming to build the symbolic capital of the school, Rachael remarked, ‘I’ve got to, you know, network to get as much help as I can, [to] show the kids that I care’. Rachael was appointed at the end of the year, so she addressed the physical appearance of the school in the Christmas holidays through drawing on her own personal networks for assistance. She stated that she accepted that the education authority did not have ‘a bucket of money’ to give her, so she would have to solve the problem herself. She reported that she had paints, plants and materials donated by some local and Australia-wide businesses, and put in a call to the navy which resulted in a workforce to help repair and paint the school and build some new gardens. In my first visit to the school, Rachael was keen to show me the transformation of the school resulting from this work. She had a display folder in her office that included before and after photographs of the school. Her pride in these transformations was clear, but the marketing value of this work cannot be underestimated. The market

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principles that operate in Australian public schooling, of parental choice and competition between schools, shape leadership practices. Creating competition for students between schools means principals need to become entrepreneurial in attracting and retaining students (Keddie et al., 2020a, 2020b). A school that is like a war zone, as Rachael noted, is not likely to attract students, which would ultimately lead to school closure: a very real risk for a small school like CHPS. Rachael began to address the damaging fossilised deficit beliefs through her partnership with a local real estate agent who financed regular publications in the local paper containing positive stories about the students and families, building symbolic capital in the school. Additionally, Rachael connected with local church and other community groups sharing positive stories about the school and community: I go out and speak at Rotary dinners and with the church networks and things like that. For instance, last time I went to Rotary to accept $500, there was a lady in the audience that was a psychologist, so she’s coming to donate her time. She said, ‘I heard you speak’, so if you’re passionate enough and you get out there, enough people come.

In the quotation above, Rachael asserted that passion brings rewards, and in the same interview she commented about her work, ‘Anyone can do it. You just have to care’. These comments underplay the idiosyncratic strategies that Rachael has used for the benefit of the children in her school. It is not easy, as Rachael seems to suggest, to bring the social capitals she has into the school. Bourdieu (1990a) uses the term strategy as ‘the practical mastery of logic’ or in his game metaphor, ‘a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse’ (p. 61). Rachael’s comments that anyone can do it suggested that her primary habitus built in working-class suburbs and her early professional habitus built in working-class schools influence the ways in which she sees her work as self-evident. These examples of Rachael’s approach, using her community and personal networks to build symbolic capital to address deficit views of the school and bringing people into the school to benefit the children, suggested a very strategic use of her own social capitals (Bourdieu, 1986). Anderson and White (2011) argue that leaders in socially marginalised schools need to put their social capitals to work entrepreneurially to benefit the students in their schools. Blackmore and Sachs (2007), however caution that this is indicative of the increasing responsibilisation of educational leaders, and inevitably this has consequences for leaders both in their work and personal realms (Heffernan, MacDonald, & Longmuir, 2022; Keddie, 2018; Keddie 2020a). Rachael emphatically stated that she relied entirely on the social capital that she can leverage through her personal networks rather than her professional networks. Rachael had a vast personal network including friends, family, and past parents of children that she had taught. In fact it was a past parent from her previous school who had a navy connection that she drew on for help in the transformation of the physical environment of the school. In another example, Rachael drew on her networks outside of school to connect children and families, for example, to health professionals. She rang her own son’s paediatrician who has shifted his schedules and billing system

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to see children and families from her community: she commented with a laugh indicating his exasperation, ‘[When I ring] he goes, ‘Oh. It’s you!”. Rachael’s strategy in challenging long held wider community beliefs about the school and area over time began to have a measurable impact on the way the school is viewed. For example, local real estate advertisements for buying and rental properties now use proximity to CHPS as a selling point. Rachael suggested that ‘now, the school is used as a draw card for real estate agents to sell in the area’. Her comments here can be linked to the ways in which principals are forced to ‘present the best account possible of their school in systems framed by market views’ (Lingard et al., 2003, p. 70). According to Rachael, prior to her arrival as principal, a culture had developed within the school that was both deficit and punitive. She noted that when she was a literacy coach, she observed that the previous management had little positive interaction with staff or students, and there was little acknowledgement of the contextually difficult working conditions for the teachers: They needed some leadership. Because there was none. The teachers were really amazing. I was just in awe of how they even survived. They would really just get through the day. That’s all they could possibly do. [When I was a coach] I remember being in one of the classrooms, and the kids were throwing sandwiches at us. Like it was just a zoo. The leader, he’d be a big tough man and he didn’t really push the learning very much. He’d growl at [the kids] and walk back into his room. It was hard for them [the teachers]. I don’t know how they did it.

Rachael’s emphasis on the lack of leadership, her use of terms such as just a zoo, and big tough man suggested an environment out of control. Lucy, Rachael’s assistant principal, confirmed this. She had left the school under the previous leadership because, as she stated, ‘The cohesive feel of the school no longer existed. I left … to have my second child and the school was in ruins. I told myself I would never come back’. Despite her vow never to return to the school, when Rachael contacted her, asking her to return as a teacher, Lucy noted that she had ‘a good look around the school. Instantly I noticed that things were changing for the better’. Because Rachael was familiar with the school through her coaching role, she reported that she knew that the staff felt overworked, underappreciated, unsupported, under siege, and judged as inadequate by the education authorities and school leadership because of poor NAPLAN results and the presence of numeracy, literacy and leadership coaches at the school. Coupled with this, the community, including the school management, held deficit views about the staff. Rachael reported that ‘they couldn’t put any more in. They were just trying to keep their heads above water and also just to keep the kids in the class. They had no energy. The leader wasn’t there. The teachers had no one to say, ‘Gee, you’re doing a really good job’. The challenges of working in schools in marginalised communities have been well documented and include conditions such as high staff turnover (Allen et al., 2012; Price, 2016; Smyth, 2012), unsupportive home environments, low literacy levels, motivational and behavioural problems (Day & Hong, 2016). Emotional resilience in teachers working in these contexts is important in managing the ‘constant emotional, intellectual, personal and professional challenges in order to succeed in engaging students

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in learning and achievement’ (Day & Hong, 2016, p. 116). Rachael’s suggestion that the teachers at CHPS were without energy and just keeping their heads above water implied that individual and collective support, especially from their previous principal, was lacking. Lupton and Hempel-Jorgensen’s (2012) research in marginalised schools in the UK found that primary students felt a sense of blame for not meeting school and teacher expectations. Tragically, mirroring Lucy’s experience, Rachael suggested that the CHPS children themselves held a deficit view of the school and themselves. For example, when she started as principal, the children had no expectation that she would be there for any length of time, reflecting the preceding unstable staffing, including a number of short-term principals, and a distrust of the teachers. Rachael reported that ‘the kids said to me, ‘Are you coming next year? Will you be our Principal next year?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, of course I will”. As well as the community (and leadership) mistrust in the teachers and the school, Rachael reported that she also faced a teaching staff of white, middle-class women that held deficit views of the children and the community. Hall and Jones (2013) argue that the invisibility of class as a feature of education normalises middle-class values which schooling reproduces. Rachael shared that she confronted enormous challenges in changing teacher perceptions (their own class habitus) of a deficit and punitive nature to one where the focus is on the children’s learning: [It] was hard to make the staff aware that suspending [the students] was not going to help them [the teacher], and I understood they wanted them [disruptive children] out of the classroom, and I was prepared to have them here [in my office]. But, sending them home was not necessarily an option because you’re sending them home to, you know, more trauma. It took a long time for the staff, especially some of the aides, to get past that punish, punish, punish. ‘What’s the punishment?’ I said, ‘Do you know what the punishment is? They go home every night to a home where there’s no food, where they haven’t got a nice clean bed, where their parents are fighting, where they don’t feel safe’. How much more punishment do you want to give them?

Lampert and colleagues (2016) suggest that many middle-class teachers working in marginalised schools may hold ‘unaligned forms of cultural currencies’ and consequently do not speak the same ‘cultural language’ as their students (p. 37). This lack of alignment suggests that teachers are most comfortable with students and in schools that are most similar to their own backgrounds (Lampert et al., 2016; Yoon, 2016), and many are quick to view working-class students through a deficit lens (Mills & Keddie, 2012; Pitzer, 2015). It is important to emphasise that Rachael did not set about changing the culture through changing the staff. She recognised that she had good teachers who felt as though they were not supported and were operating in difficult circumstances. This could be seen as the most difficult route given that in addressing this she needed to challenge the teachers’ habitus.

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5.3.3 Mothering I use the metaphor mothering to trouble the way in which Rachael relates to the children, staff and community. In Victorian schools, beginning in the 1970s, secondwave feminism coupled with strong unionism gave teachers a platform to act as reformers and activists for change (Blackmore, 1999). Rachael’s schooling through those years and her formative years of teaching during the 1980s coincided with ‘rapid political and social transformations … with deregulation of the economy’ (Campo, 2004, p. 108). In Australia, these were optimistic years in terms of employment, with a strong focus on equal opportunity and there was ‘a broad … concern for social justice’ within the teaching profession (Yates, 2008, p. 473). At the same time that Rachael was developing her teacher identity as part of her secondary habitus there was a push throughout the 1980s for women to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ into management and leadership (Still, 2009). Additionally in Australia, unlike in other parts of the world, feminists worked with the ruling Labor government to ensure that there were women in the public service driving policy development in both education and at a general policy level (Blackmore, 1999; Franzway et al., 1989; McLeod, 1998; Still, 2009). Corresponding with these political and social transformations, cultural feminism, through the moral and ethics of care work of Noddings (1984, 2001) and Gilligan (1982) influenced how women in educational leadership were framed (Blackmore, 1999). In particular, the ethics of care provided a powerful discourse that challenged hitherto accepted ideals of leadership as hard, rational and masculine (Blackmore, 1999). The ethics of care discourse, while criticised as essentialising women’s leadership, dominated thought in Rachael’s early years of teaching, suggesting alternative ways of leading that gave voice to women’s ways of ‘seeing, knowing, organizing and leading’ (Blackmore, 1999, p. 56). Rachael commented that ‘leading with heart’ was a priority for her as a principal. In this section I explore Rachael’s leadership and her relationships within and outside of her school and community, which she expressed through discourses and practices of maternal care or ‘mothering’. This is related to the culture of care espoused by Noddings (1984, 2012a, 2012b), Stone (2018) and to the maternal thinking work of Ruddick (2009). Noddings argued that instead of the ethics of individual virtue, there should be a focus on the relationship between two individuals, one of which cares for the other, leading to a more just society (Stone, 2018). Much of her work on care ethics developed through a focus on the experience of women (Noddings, 2012b), and this has been a particularly potent philosophy for teachers in a largely feminised workforce such as teaching. The ethics of caring is connected to the individuals own memories of caring (Noddings, 1984), and related in Bourdieu’s sociology to the formation of primary and secondary habitus. Noddings (1992, p. 22) has argued that modelling the care ethic is critical because ‘the capacity to care may be dependent on adequate experience in being cared for’. Rachael’s first teaching experiences in the marginalised western suburbs of Melbourne, where she grew up, had clearly stayed with her and throughout her career she wanted to return to a similar context. Maguire (2005a) characterises the

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continuing engagement of women teachers who teach in schools similar to their own working-class backgrounds as ‘their footprints in their past’ (p. 8). Rachel ‘loved’ working at Robinwood PS and felt that she could make a real difference to those children’s lives. She remembered ‘almost needing to be their mum and protector’. The idea of teacher-as-mother, evident in Rachael’s comment, is a long-standing maternal discourse associated with primary teaching (Steedman, 1985). A concern for a culture of care is evident in the way Rachael interacts with the children and families in her community and the staff in her school, although it does raise questions about whether the recipients of that care receive it willingly. Rachael said that trust is a key feature of building relationships with the community (and children and staff). Two significant characteristics of trust for educational leaders, which have a major impact on student outcomes, are honesty (integrity), and openness (a willingness to be transparent about decision making and motivations) (Rivera-McCutchen, 2014). Knowing about the children’s lives was an important first step for Rachael in creating trust and an environment that was welcoming and supportive, as important as their academic work. She stated that ‘it was just all about the kids and caring about them. Not just about their learning but about them. As people, as individuals’. She argued that she didn’t just pay lip service to the notion of child-centredness, it is her fundamental belief, stating, ‘the child is at the centre. They really are. It’s the truth’. Her own experiences at school as a child growing up in the working-class western suburbs seem to be the origin of her child-centred approach. She had always wanted to teach, ‘and by experiencing great to damaging teachers through the years at school, I knew the kind of teacher I wanted to be and the kind I didn’t want to be’. In her interviews and in my observations of Rachael, a respect for children as individuals is evident and some fundamental elements of her leadership practice began to emerge. She talked often of ‘putting myself in their shoes’ to understand their experience and acknowledged the need to make apologies to them when she felt she had made a mistake. For example, Rachael implied that she aimed to replace the power of her role as a principal, as an adult with ultimate control over the child, with the role as an adult who listens, suggested in the following anecdote: I remember the first day [of my principalship] coming in and walking through the yard, and saying [to some children], ‘Hop off the garden’. And the kids looked at me like, ‘What?’ And I followed them. They turned around and said, ‘Fuck off and stop stalking us’. I thought, ‘You know what? They’re right’. I was stalking them. So the next day, I apologised. I called them over and I said, ‘I’m really sorry. I was stalking you. But I really cared about the plants, and I thought you might be damaging them and I want the place to look good for you because I think you deserve that’.

Her apology to these children, even after they had sworn at her (which in other contexts would result in detention or suspension), illustrated how Rachael listened to the children, reflected on the incident, and agreed with them, so apologised. This is not just a nod to the school conventions of listening to children’s voices, for example, through a Students Representative Council, which typically records children’s ideas for their schooling, and then the ideas disappear into a bureaucracy that is unfathomable to them. Fundamentally, she believed that children should know that adults make mistakes; that we aren’t perfect and that we can all learn from them. Trust is

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a crucial component of this belief. This is linked strongly with the development of a culture of care which advocates for a concern for the whole child, building relationships based on trust and respect, and repairing damage (Cavanagh et al., 2012; Noddings, 1984). Following on from this, Rachael also believed that her relationships with the school community, including teachers, parents and the wider community, should focus on care and respect. In her relationships with the parent community of CHPS, she recognised that the parents and carers may not have a history of positive relationships with school and teachers based on their own experiences of education. And similarly, she reflected that they may not ‘parent like I would, but they’re not bad people and they love their kids, so I kind of went from that. That was my starting point’. She related that she built relationships with the community through coming to appreciate the needs of the families in the school and ‘seeking to understand first’. Critically, Rachael reported that she sought to connect in the ways that the community wanted to connect, not in ways that other principals might expect the community to connect with them. Rachael stated that it is ‘about treating people with dignity and respect’. For example, in discussing the common trend of schools communicating with families through assemblies and regular newsletters, she remarked: When a community can’t read, why do you give them newsletters? When they don’t want to come out of their houses because they’re either embarrassed or they have got anxiety, or they [have] mental health issues. Why would you expect them to turn up at an assembly? They’re not going to. So why would you do that?

As in her doxic beliefs about moral purpose discussed above, Rachael often commented that this ‘is just how you treat people’. For Rachael, this was self-evident. The Century Heights community is an extension of her commitment to the children in the school, and it is incumbent on the school therefore to provide what support they can, she stated, ‘…it’s a village’. In Rachael’s understandings, this support extends to taking responsibility for parents, siblings, and people in the community who are not connected to the school. Rachael or her staff will, for example, attend court with parents, pick up children if they are absent, and provide food packages. An important theme in the recent literature on educational leadership is the struggle for educational leaders in reconciling their beliefs about their work with external pressures (Heffernan, et al., 2022). This is related to the recognition that a principal’s work (in fact, all leader’s work) is fundamentally emotional work (Heffernan et al., 2022). Reay (2000, 2004a) extends Bourdieu’s notions of cultural capital to theorise emotional capital as predominantly the domain of mothers within family units. This idea can be extended to suggest that Rachael, based on her primary and secondary habitus, has developed emotional capital with the capacity to connect with and understand her school community. The maternal care evident in Rachael’s leadership surely acts as a double-edged sword in terms of a personal toll. While she valued and practiced within a culture of care, the rapid neoliberal restructuring of the education market increasingly values school improvement through external accountabilities (Heffernan, 2016, 2017). Blackmore (1996) points out that emotional labour is a common consequence of an

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educational leader’s work in managing the dissonance ‘between felt and displayed emotion’ (p. 346). While there are certainly some general qualities, strategies and skills common to all exemplary educational leaders, those that work in marginalised communities face a greater range of challenges (Day, 2014; DeMatthews, 2015), suggesting that the emotional labour they perform may be greater. Educational leaders working in these conditions must be resilient and able to reconcile these pressures to manage the stress in their working lives. When she started at CHPS, there was a leadership coach already working at the school who had been chosen by the previous principal. Rachael reported that this caused her much anguish because the coach was very rigid in her ideas about leadership. She related that while she didn’t know how to be a principal, she did know how to teach, and she recounted that she needed to be really courageous as a novice principal in standing up for her own beliefs about leading. Courage became a leitmotif in Rachael’s discussion about becoming a principal, but she held true to her own vision for her principalship, encompassing care and relationships: If you can’t look after your own colleagues, what does that say about you? The [education authority] couldn’t give a shit about any of us really … so, you know, if you’re going to be that kind of leader, and yes you can do it, you’ve got all the backing that you want, you can make it uncomfortable for anybody over anything, but if you don’t sit back and reflect and balance it up … it comes back to empathy. (RI2)

5.4 Conclusion In this portrait of Rachael. I have explored her social justice leadership practices through the metaphors of mission, macrocosms and mothering. Her leadership practices conform to normative ideas of a social justice leader (Chap. 2). She was inclusive, democratic, has dispersed leadership across her staff, and put into place procedures and structures that free teachers to teach. Rachael’s strong vision for her school in moral purpose and countering deficit narratives within the community; her dedication to building up the whole community; and her care and empathy within her community suggest strong social justice ideologies. There are, however, disjunctions evident between her beliefs and practices. For example, her adherence to the discourse of meritocracy suggests responsibilisation and the internalising of neoliberal subjectivities within her secondary habitus. These disjunctures are expanded on and examined in Chap. 8. Likewise her self-responsibilisation for the whole community, not just the children, and staff, in her school, suggests a missionary zeal that adheres to the heroic individualised educational leader. This is further explored in Chap. 8.

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Reay, D. (2000). A useful extension of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework?: Emotional capital as a way of understanding mothers’ involvement in their children’s education? The Sociological Review, 48(4), 568–585. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.00233 Reay, D. (2004a). Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class. The Sociological Review, 52(2_suppl), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2005. 00524.x Reay, D. (2004b). ‘It’s all becoming a habitus’: Beyond the habitual use of habitus in educational research. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 25(4), 431–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 0142569042000236934 Reay, D. (2012). What would a socially just education system look like? Saving the minnows from the pike. Journal of Educational Policy, 27(5), 587–599. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939. 2012.710015 Reay, D. (2017). Miseducation: Inequality, education and the working classes. Policy Press. Reay, D., Crozier, G., & Clayton, J. (2009). ‘Strangers in paradise’?: Working-class students in elite universities. Sociology, 43(6), 1103–1121. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038509345700 Reay, D., Crozier, G., & Clayton, J. (2010). ‘Fitting in’ or ‘standing out’: Working-class students in UK higher education. British Educational Research Journal, 36(1), 107–124. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01411920902878925 Richards, G. (2017). Working class girls, education and post-industrial Britain: Aspirations and reality in an ex-coalmining community. Palgrave Macmillan. Rivera-McCutchen, R. L. (2014). The moral imperative of social justice leadership: A critical component of effective practice. The Urban Review, 46(4), 747–763. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11256-014-0297-2 Ruddick, S. (2009). On “maternal thinking.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 37(3/4), 305–308. Ryan, S., & Runswick-Cole, K. (2008). Repositioning mothers: Mothers, disabled children and disability studies. Disability & Society, 23(3), 199–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/096875908019 53937 Sandel, M. J. (2020). The tyranny of merit: What’s become of the common good? Allen Lane London. Scambler, S., & Newton, P. (2011). Capital transactions, disruptions and the emergence of personal capital in a lifeworld under attack. Social Theory & Health, 9(2), 130–146. https://doi.org/10. 1057/sth.2011.1 Sergiovanni, T. J. (2001). Leadership: What’s in it for schools? Routledge Farmer. Sinclair, A. (2005). Body and management pedagogy. Gender, Work and Organization, 12(1), 89–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0432.2005.00264.x Sinclair, A., & Wilson, V. (2002). New faces of leadership. Melbourne University Press. Smyth, J. (2012). The socially just school and critical pedagogies in communities put at a disadvantage. Critical Studies in Education, 53(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2012. 635671 Somerville, M. (2013). The ‘placetimemattering’ of aspiration in the Blacktown Learning Community. Critical Studies in Education, 54(3), 231–244. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2013. 831365 Steedman, C. (1985). ‘The mother made conscious’: The historical development of a primary school pedagogy. History Workshop Journal, 20(1), 149–163. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/20.1.149 Still, L. (2009). Women in management: A personal retrospective. Journal of Management and Organization, 15(5), 555–561. https://doi.org/10.5172/jmo.15.5.555 Stone, L. (2018). Nel Noddings: Courageous philosopher and reformer. The High School Journal, 101(2), 100–107. https://doi.org/10.1353/hsj.2018.0003 Sweetman, P. (2003). Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus. The Sociological Review, 51(4), 528–549. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2003.00434.x Thomson, P. (2002). Schooling the rustbelt kids: Making the difference in changing times. Trentham Books.

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Thomson, P. (2008). Headteacher critique and resistance: A challenge for policy, and for leadership/management scholars. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 40(2), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620802210848 Wilkinson, J., & Eacott, S. (2013). ‘Outsiders within’? Deconstructing the educational administration scholar. International Journal of Leadership in Education, 16(2), 191–204. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13603124.2012.750762 Yates, L. (2008). Revisiting feminism and Australian education: Who speaks? What questions? What contexts? What impact? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 29(4), 471–481. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596300802410193 Yoon, I. H. (2016). Trading stories: Middle-class white women teachers and the creation of collective narratives about students and families in a diverse elementary school. Teachers College Record, 118(2), 1–54.

Chapter 6

Mission, Monarchy and Might—Peter’s Story

I’m not limited by what other people believe, or don’t believe is possible. (Peter) And I think it’s about saying this is what can happen when good people come together to bring about some change. (Peter)

Abstract This chapter provides a portrait of Peter and explores his primary and secondary habitus through his history as a missionary prior to becoming a teacher then principal. His leadership practices are explored through the metaphors of mission, monarchy and might. Peter’s ‘mission’ as a principal, linked to his missionary past is explored in detail. ‘Monarchy’ uncovers Peter’s positioning as principal in his school and the ways in which his leadership positions others in his school. The metaphor of ‘might’ exposes the ways in which power is deployed in Peter’s school to craft his vision of just schooling for the children in his school community. Keywords Habitus · Field · Capital · Bridge leadership · Religious habitus · Gender

This chapter is the second of three chapters examining the social justice habitus and practices of three principals working in primary schools in some of the most marginalised locations in Australia. In this chapter I introduce Peter, the principal of Bonham Hollow Primary School (BHPS). I investigate how his early family life and life experiences influence his primary habitus and secondary habitus, and his social justice understandings. I explore how Peter has interpreted the key issues in his leadership at BHPS and how he leverages his own social and cultural capital to navigate the intersecting fields of public education and social justice for marginalised communities. The chapter explores his social justice understandings, his leadership and his habitus through the lens of three key metaphors: his social justice desires for students, mission; how he views his leadership, monarchy; and his understandings of his strengths and weaknesses, might.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7_6

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6.1 Context—Bonham Hollow Primary School As outlined in Chap. 4, the households in the catchment area for the school were characterised by a high level of socio-economic disadvantage: a high degree of rented social housing, rental stress, high unemployment, low income, low educational attainment and lack of transport. My first visit to BHPS in 2016 is to introduce myself to Peter and discuss my research project so that he can decide if he wants to participate. The school is well maintained although the garden is overgrown but a wonderful mosaic lines the steps up to the foyer. In my observation notes I record that I felt that the foyer was unwelcoming because, unlike any primary school I have ever been in, there was neither children’s artwork on display nor any sense of the school’s focus. I noted that it could have been a waiting room for any kind of business. This is unchanged over four visits to the school over several months. I am directed to Peter’s office and once past the foyer the corridor walls have children’s art displays and I can hear the sound of busy and active classrooms. Peter’s office has a meeting table and his desk overlooks the front of the school so he sees all the comings and goings to the school through the foyer. His office is organised and bare with only a framed and signed football poster of his team on the wall. Peter welcomed me with warmth and humour, and we developed an easy camaraderie, very similar to what I have experienced, particularly in the patois, in the male dominated remote agricultural area in which I grew up. He related that there is a lot of interest in his school because of their apparent NAPLAN success for such a marginalised school and that ‘we get a lot of people through’. He commented that he likes to participate in research and I sense that he is proud of what he has achieved at BHPS.

6.2 Peter—Primary and Secondary Habitus Peter had been principal of Bonham Hollow PS for over a decade and was contemplating retirement in the next few years. While he was reluctant to spend too much time discussing his childhood and early life, he related that his life has taken him in interesting directions. He observed, ‘I’ve had some varied experiences, so I don’t get fazed by too many things’. Peter reported that his childhood life in the urban fringes of the city was normal: ‘you know, normal family, younger sibling, war service home. It was good growing up’. Peter’s use of the term normal in relation to his early family life is worth exploring as part of the context for his social justice leadership at BHPS. Bourdieu’s rendition of habitus suggests that what an agent finds normal in childhood and in family life is shaped by their experiences of being parented (Macdonald, 2011), and thus shapes a doxic understanding of what is a natural family life (Moilanen et al., 2015). The doxic category of a normal family for an agent creates an other not normal category for family life. This has significant implications for how educational leaders in highly disadvantaged communities may

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position themselves within that community, and how they might understand the challenges for children and families in the community. Peter’s description of his normal family in comparison to those in his school community is explored in the following discussions. Peter appeared to be ambivalent about his own schooling commenting that it was ‘sort of okay’ and that he ‘enjoyed’ it although he noted that he was not necessarily committed to studying particularly hard. Peter related that he was heavily involved with the scouting movement into adulthood. After finishing school, he completed a three-year teaching diploma that took him five years noting, ‘I was a terrible student I think. Initially it was a three year diploma course…and I got out after year five!’. Peter related that teaching ‘just didn’t grab me at the time and I had other things that I was doing that were far more interesting’. He found his time at teachers college ‘boring’ and in the end, ‘it was a struggle to get through to the end’. At the time that Peter attended teachers college, the main form of teacher recruitment was through bonded service (Burke, 1976). This meant that the Department of Education paid scholarships including tuition and an allowance for selected students to study teaching, and they were then bonded to teach for three years (Burke, 1976; Mayer, 2014). Peter recounted that he taught for three years after college before he was drawn to a progressive Christian organisation. His ambivalence about teaching suggests that he never really developed a desire to teach at that time, but because he was bonded to the state he completed three years of teaching following his diploma, commenting that he ‘had to do three years teaching’. Peter returned to teaching following completing a Bachelor of Education and Masters in sociology later in life. His hiatus from teaching was consumed with his Christian missionary youth work. He then taught for five years, but found that it was not fulfilling, observing ‘I was beginning to go: you know what? This is not me’. When a colleague asked why he had not applied for leadership roles, although he felt he was not ‘ready or interested at one level’, he decided that he would ‘have a go’. He became an acting assistant principal for one year, before applying for and becoming principal at BHPS, a school that he felt his prior experiences with his religious organisation in youth work could benefit from: …the way the school was, and the community I thought there’s probably things that I can value add into this place. I didn’t see it as a short-term option. That’s because I think these communities often are seen as stepping-stones for people – they come in, they do two or three years and then they apply for a bigger school and go. Whereas when I came here, I decided that I’d be here for a long time…a commitment to be here, well if it was ten or fifteen years, so be it. That’ll see me out in my working life.

Peter also noted that he felt that this school was a good ‘fit’ for him with his youth work background. Peter’s tenure at BHPS has seen his leadership recognised as exemplary by the DETV. He has been the beneficiary of research travel grants from the department, and his school is often used as a location for picture opportunities with local, state and federal politicians. Outside of his role at school, Peter retains an interest in the Arts and serves as a board member for an arts and social change organisation.

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In the following sections I turn to exploring Peter’s leadership and his primary and secondary habitus, through his navigation of the fields in which he operates. These are explored through the themes of his sense of purpose as a principal in a marginalised school (mission), his positioning of himself as a leader in the school (monarchy), and the power of his leadership (might).

6.3 Encounters Between Habitus and Field—Mission, Monarchy and Might Mission Peter’s beliefs about the purpose of education have a moral and ethical focus, suggesting a sense of mission in his role at BHPS: Education should be a provider of pathways and gateways for kids to have a range of experiences and opportunities presented to them. But not just from a literacy and numeracy perspective, from a wellbeing perspective and from an arts and creative perspective and to have all manner of experiences that actually prepares them for whatever their future may be. So that’s sort of what drives me, you know, pretty much continuously.

Peter’s long involvement with a religious organisation between his first and second stages of working in the education system, however, brings a different understanding to his sense of mission as an educational leader at BHPS. Whilst he was at teachers college he had ‘one of those dramatic conversions’, but he does not attribute this to any particular moment. Rather, he relates that: I just don’t think I’d found myself. What is the meaning and purpose of life? And so, instead of drinking alcohol and shooting up drugs or whatever, I thought, yeah I could do that, but really? I’m not sure there’s much point to it. So I felt that there was more purpose around [the religious organisation].

The group that Peter became a part of was one of many alternative religious groups that developed in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s (Smith, 2003). These movements, often dedicated to marginalised young people and popular culture through music and theatre, had a focus on ‘socioreligious activism, political resistance, social transformation and communitas1 ’ (Smith, 2003, p. 316). The numerous groups across Australia developed around young male charismatic leaders who rejected the orthodoxy of the traditional churches. Peter became part of a parachurch, an organisation working independently from, and without oversight, of a formal church. Membership of his organisation was considered a form of radical discipleship drawing from the liberation theological traditions from the Americas (Freire, 1970; Smith, 2003). Peter remained with his parachurch group through the 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s and was part of the administrative team that grew it from a ‘loosely connected group of people’ to a large provider of social services. During this growth period Peter worked nationally preparing submissions for government inquiries into youth 1

Smith (2003) uses the cultural anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of communitas as a necessary egalitarian and intense existential bond between people.

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affairs, and served on the boards of social service and youth councils. Peter left the organisation when his marriage ended because his ex-wife wanted to remain with the group. He continues to maintain a strong connection with it, ‘because I still think that what the organisation is trying to do is quite legitimate’. He has drawn on their resources for his school and maintains contact with the leader and others from his time in the parachurch who now work in the Arts field. In discussing his growing involvement with the parachurch as a young man, Peter notes that while he was studying and teaching he worked part-time with the organisation on weekends connecting with and proselytising to young people at music festivals and theatre groups. After he had completed his three years of bonded teaching, Peter relates: It became sort of obvious that my wife and I felt called to go to the mission. It was a faith venture. So there was no income. A lot of where my thinking around how to be strategic with community development, around organisational health, organisational understandings, all comes back from those days really.

In this crucial quote Peter connects the religious mission he was called to as a young man with the mission of his leadership at BHPS. He notes that his organisational understandings and his focus on strategic community development were developed in his years as a missionary (his description of his role), and this is linked to the way in which he positions himself through our discussions as an educational leader and a long time advocate for social justice. While Peter does not talk about his continuing faith directly, his sense of his mission as an educational leader in his school and the language of faith are peppered throughout our discussions, suggesting his faith is a key structuring and structured part of his habitus. For example, he describes his work as a principal as ‘making the community the best that it can be. Good defeating evil’. He believes in a kind of divine intervention as demonstrated when he discusses the cost of an extra-curricular program for selected students in his school. He remarks: Well it’s never stopped me before in my life. Even though when I was working with (missionary group), when it was a faith mission, I was never paid. So you just relied upon whatever, and however, it came. So I’ve always lived that philosophy. You just never know how things will happen, but you had to believe that it would happen.

His unshakeable belief that things will work out as he envisages them is captured in the emphasised quotes above. Similarly, in the epigraphic quote, Peter argues that he is not limited by what other people believe, or don’t believe is possible suggesting that he has a strong belief and confidence in his leadership as a divine destiny. This divine destiny, his mission at BHPS, is also expressed in the way in which he discusses how he found ‘fit’ with the school, noting that he felt that ‘the way the school was, and the community, I thought there’s probably things that I can value add into this place. I didn’t see it as a short-term option’. Peter’s confidence in his mission at BHPS, outlined above, also reveals an underlying white, masculinist and hetero-normative image of leadership (Connell, 2005; Wilkinson and Bristol, 2018). In his research into masculinities and evangelical leadership, Wignall (2016) suggests that the leadership of charismatic preachers, such

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as the young male leader around whom Peter’s parachurch coalesced, ‘becomes a way to transform masculinity into a consumable doctrine, modelled indirectly and directly by leaders young and old’ (p. 399). Charismatic male Christian leaders, by necessity, in cohering and forming their strong followings, create ‘idealised forms of manhood for young men to emulate’ (Wignall, 2016, p. 396). Peter’s long involvement with the religious organisation, his continuing relationship with the founder, his move into leadership within the parachurch and educational leadership in his school suggest his leadership habitus is suffused with white male Christian notions of leading. Though limited, Bourdieu’s work2 on religion and belief with the Islamic Kabyle with whom he worked in Algeria (Bourdieu, 1977) and his examination of Catholicism and the institution of the Catholic Church in France (Bourdieu, 1991a, 1998, 2010) offers significant avenues for the broader sociology of religion and religiosity (Collins, 2002; Dillon, 2001; Ignatow, 2009; Mellor & Shilling, 2010; Urban, 2003). In particular, Bourdieu’s contributions extend his arguments around social positioning and power. These are relevant in investigating Peter’s experiences in a non-orthodox Christian organisation and his positioning of himself as leader in his school. Rey (2014) contends that two convictions dominate Bourdieu’s ideas of the religious field3 : that religion, and the power of religion, is in decline although the institutional churches try to cling to power, and that the social function of religion, through the mechanisms of symbolic violence, misrecognition, doxa and illusio, help believers ‘make sense of their respective positions in the social order’ (p. 57). This is a key point in relation to Peter’s positioning of himself as a leader and a champion of social justice. Essentially Bourdieu argues that, like all fields, the religious field is structured by the struggle for position in the field and can be understood through the economics of the supply and demand of symbolic goods and religious capitals (Bourdieu, 1991a, 1998). The religious field, then, is structured by ‘confrontational juxtapositions between agents and institutions’ (Rey, 2014, p. 337), where a struggle for religious capital occurs between the consumers (the laity) and the institutional hierarchy as ‘the holder of a monopoly in the manipulation of the goods of salvation’ (Bourdieu, 1991b, p. 115). Bourdieu defines the religious habitus as the ‘principal generator of all conformist thoughts, perceptions or actions to the norms of religious representations of the natural and supernatural worlds’ (Bourdieu, 1971, p. 319). Peter’s sense of mission, his calling to both his religious mission and to leadership is embodied in his habitus, and is seen in action through his leadership at BHPS and hinted to in the language of faith which he uses to describe his work. Criticisms of Bourdieu’s work on religion suggest valid questions, such as the applicability of his schemata based on an institution coupled with the state like the 2

Rey (2014) reports that there are only ten papers that deal directly with religion, some of which have yet to be translated into English. Some, for example, such as ‘La dissolution du religioux’ and ‘Sociologues de la croyance et croyances de sociologues’ included in Chose Dites, were not included in the English translation, In Other Words. 3 Bourdieu first defined his idea of the field in his work on religion.

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Catholic Church in France in the last century, to places like Australia where religion has long been decoupled from the secular state. His elucidation of the religious field does, however, suggest that young people with a religious belief such as Peter who felt they did not fit with established churches, might recognise the ‘process of collective misrecognition’ inherent in the functioning of such institutions (Dillon, 2001, p. 413). The social justice and political concerns of the small alternative religious groups that proliferated were focused on the liberation of the marginalised who were not welcome in established Australian churches in Peter’s time with his organisation. This social justice focus offered religious adherents a powerful sense of political agency and moral righteousness (Smith, 1988). Indeed, Peter argues that ‘social justice has always been an important dimension and part of my being’ harking back to his time in his religious organisation but also to his involvement with the scouting movement (discussed below). Sutcliffe (2006) makes a convincing argument, however, that counter-culture/ alternative/New Age expressions of religiosity should be de-exoticised and considered instead as popular religion (p. 298). Popular religion, he argues, should be understood as ‘doing religion…both within and without corporate institutions, organizations and official cults: it is practiced in a dialectical tension with the hegemonic formations and normative models inscribed in the ‘high’ culture of religious elites’ (Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 298). It can be ‘amateur, untutored and informal, and is therefore capable of expressing both conservative and radical positions’ (Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 298). Sutcliffe argues that such religious movements are ‘culturally Anglophone, geographically Anglo-American (by origin and dissemination), (aspiring) middleclass, and ethnically ‘White’ version[s] of popular religion’ (Sutcliffe, 2006, p. 299). This argument is compatible with the logic of practice in schooling and leading in the educational field in Australia, which is underpinned, despite the decoupling of the church and state, by Christian faith which is evident in the celebration of Christian holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, within the curriculum. What is compelling in Sutcliffe’s argument is that he contends that the religious habitus incorporates the features of alternative religious ideologies as function rather than substance (Sutcliffe, 2006). Many of the Australian leaders of alternative religious movements from the 1960s and 1970s are now key members of orthodox congregations (Smith, 2003), suggesting that despite their subversive reactions to the hegemonic religious field in their youth, their religious habitus has found fit in orthodoxy as they aged, becoming producers of religious capital rather than consumers. This is suggested in Peter’s experience both through his previous work as a leader who contributed to the mainstreaming of his organisation into a provider of social services, and to his current, apparently more conservative, life as a principal. A dual influence on Peter’s sense of mission and his leadership practices, along with his religious experiences, is his long involvement with the scouting movement, an organisation with which he remained connected into young adulthood becoming a Queen’s Scout. Peter relates that leadership and service were always a part of his involvement with the scouts and this has continued into his adulthood. He remarks, ‘so, for whatever reason I’ve been down that pathway a little bit more’. The scouting movement is entrenched in its founder’s (Lord Baden-Powell) Christianity

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and initially provided a model for British manhood; a ‘mode of active masculinity filtered through British Imperialism’ (Greening, 2009, p. 3). Indeed, Michael Messner (2007) argues that the scouting movement arose as a result of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ that industrial capitalism highlighted leading to a fear of the ‘social feminization’ of boys through exposure to female teachers, urbanisation, and the new separation of public and domestic spheres (male/female) (pp. 34–35). Connell (2005) suggests that the ideologies of organisations such as the scouts foster particular forms of masculinities, and significantly, reproduce masculinities that are rooted in a colonial-Christian identity. Scouts offered young boys a militarised, structured space in which a sense of duty was instilled and ‘true’ manliness could be learned (Bruce, 2015; Greening, 2009; Hantover, 1978; Meinhart, 2009). When Peter was involved in the scouting movement, it was an exclusively male experience (in Australia girls were allowed to join in the 1970s), and research into the movement suggests that it was ‘a White, Anglo Saxon, middle class enclave’ (Bruce, 2015, p. 4). It is clear that for Peter his time with the scouts has been an important influence in how he sees himself and who he is. As he articulates in the quote above, for example, his ideas in relation to service were developed in his scouting years. In his comments on the community that his school serves, a strong sense of paternalism emerges. For example, Peter notes that: The parents want the best for their kids but really they have not the capacity to understand what that means, and then to do anything about it because, they’re damaged as well. We’ve got some pretty tough kids, … We’ve got generational poverty. Who really can’t see anything except where am I going to get the next drink or smoke or drug from and you know, and so they’re much more complex communities. Our client base is highly disadvantaged and not highly motivated. Education is not seen to be a way out. Education is something that gets done to you. It has to happen because the government says it gets done to you.

In Peter’s candid remarks about the children and the community there is a strong notion of deficit, and in our discussions, he hints at his view of his leadership role as a saviour. His view, for example, that his previous experience as a missionary meant that he would be able to value add to the community and his belief in his ability to be a creative force for the school (not limited by what others believe) illustrate this view. Peter’s view of his normal early family life are important to foreground here also because in the quote above, his ‘othering’ of the families in his school community (they want the best but they don’t have the capacity to understand what that means) further suggests both deficit views and his role as a saviour. The assertions about the community and children in his school capture all too common deficit thinking about communities tackling the realities of late capitalism and neoliberalism. Indeed, a perceived lack of aspirations amongst students and the school’s families is clear in Peter’s characterisation of the community as lacking motivation. His comments indicate a common form of misrecognition amongst educators and society more broadly (Bourdieu, 1990). This misrecognition occurs when rising inequality in the western world is understood as a function of reduced social mobility resulting from a lack of individual aspiration (MacDonald, 2019). And is increasingly common to governments in the UK, the US and Australia (Reay, 2013; Simmons and Smyth, 2018;

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Spohrer et al., 2018). Increasing attention to the rhetoric of aspiration has coincided with the reduction in welfare spending and the responsibilisation of individuals to become self-reliant (Spohrer et al., 2018). This neoliberal rationality ‘extends from the management of the state itself to the soul of the subject’ (Brown, 2011, p. 118). In schooling, this plays out as viewing underachievement as the result of the lack of aspiration of children and their parents: they are ‘flawed consumers in the educational marketplace’ (Best, 2017, p. 47). Peter’s comments indicate internalised neoliberal subjectivities expressed through the rhetoric of aspiration and social mobility. In exploring Peter’s habitus through the lens of mission, I have argued that he relies on his Christian worldview and his place in it as a missionary to do what he considers to be the ‘right thing’ as a leader for the children in his school. The contradictions evident between the ways in which Peter expresses his moral purpose and commitment to social justice, but simultaneously holds deficit views about his community suggests a cognitive dissonance, or a restricted view on what social justice might mean for the children in his school. There are symmetries in Peter’s thinking with unreflexive leaders who may see themselves as social justice leaders ministering to a sometimes-ungrateful congregation. In the following section I explore Peter’s habitus as a leader through a related but distinct metaphor of monarchy.

6.3.1 Monarchy In this section I use the metaphor of monarchy to explore how Peter saw himself as the leader at BHPS. This is explored through the way in which Peter describes his autocratic leadership style, and also through the distribution of the pedagogic work in the school. Additionally I introduce how he plays to his strengths, specifically his bridgework in building social capital for the school beyond the schooling field, whilst simultaneously eschewing the role of instructional leader. When I first interview Peter, the BHPS results of the most recent NAPLAN are strewn across the meeting table in his office and he remarked that he would not normally be trying to make sense of them. Peter related that assistant principal Steven who was then acting principal at a different school normally undertook this kind of work. The Assistant Principal role had not been filled in Steven’s absence and Peter bemoaned the fact that he had to deal with the NAPLAN results himself. He was, however, immensely proud of the results and took great care to point out how ‘good’ their results were compared to other schools in marginalised locations, and wondered aloud why there had not been calls from the press to publicise them. This discussion lead us to discuss the pedagogical work in the school and his leadership. Peter related that he had a very autocratic way of leading and expected all his staff to do what he dictated in both pedagogy and content. He went on to say that he didn’t think of himself as an ‘overly charismatic leader’ and stated, ‘I have a strength of character and I understand my purpose for what I’m doing that people can either harmonise with or not’. The consequences of not being in harmony with Peter as a

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leader in the school are discussed in the following section, however in these words he again asserts his confidence in his mission at the school. Peter made no apologies for his autocratic style. In his view the responsibility for the school sat with him and he related, for example, in discussing his priorities as a principal, ‘I don’t … have to be nice, not so much that I don’t have to be nice, but the goal is about these kids’ education’. To this end, Peter and his leadership team had created a pedagogy and curriculum that was not negotiable. The distribution of the educational work of the school was a recurring theme in our discussions. Peter stated that he was ‘not that … committed [as an] educationalist’ and that he was ‘deskilled purposefully’ from the pedagogical work in the school: Don’t ever ask me to go into a classroom. I’m deskilled purposefully because that’s not what I’m doing. I think I need to have people in key places to be able to manage and run programmes that teachers can understand, so I’ve got a literacy person, her job is to actually make sure that they are following the literacy programme that we proscribed at (school) and we know that it works.

In this quote, Peter illustrates his location as outside of the pedagogical work in the school but overseeing it. I have characterised this role as like a monarch ruling over his subjects (or his flock as a missionary). Peter’s deliberate building of a strong leadership team that undertakes the curriculum and pedagogical work in the school and his own deskilling from the educational work runs counter to what might be expected from an educational leader focused on social justice, particularly in an educational era where there is major emphasis on the role of the principal as an instructional leader (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014; Hattie, 2015; Robinson et al., 2008; Timperley, 2011). Peter maintained, however, that roles such as leadership for welfare, numeracy, literacy should be undertaken by people who ‘think, eat, breathe’ these specialities, and the improvement in NAPLAN results at BHPS suggests that Peter’s strategy is successful in relation to the narrow measure of high stakes testing. Peter did have a very reflective sense of his own strengths and weaknesses and is focussed on compensating for these in his staffing, ‘I need to have really good teachers. I need to have good people who can manage teachers and do curriculum sort of stuff, because that’s not my strength card’. This frees Peter’s time for the things that he enjoys the most, and to play to what he saw as his strengths. He recounts that his prior experience in growing a small organisation into a much larger national organisation means that he saw the scope of his principalship as much larger than the individuals in his school. For Peter, the distribution of educational labour is key in leaving him to think creatively about the ‘big picture’: I’ve always been big picture. So let me loose on that and let’s put it together... I’m a bit of a change merchant, so guess what? We’re not going to be doing same old-same old.

An example of Peter’s creative work and commitment to the local community is in his ongoing work with the nearby secondary school, as well as local, state and federal politicians, to create an educational precinct focused on children in his community from 0–18 years of age. Similarly, his work in sourcing funding for a

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lawyer in school one day a week to assist families reflects his thinking ‘outside the box’. Peter’s leadership was not isolated to the school domain but included building crucial forms of social capital for BHPS through his involvement in other networks such as with local, state and federal politicians, local businesses and charities. Peter actively sought media coverage for his school because, he argued, this allowed him to reach people who could become part of his network, observing, ‘you just don’t know when people are listening’. Peter recognised this form of capital building as crucial for his school stating, ‘I think networking is a really critical thing to do’. Bridge leadership in the social justice literature links bridge-building with educational leadership and can be defined as ‘a kind of epistemology in which the leader understands that the core of his or her work is rooted in traversing spaces between people’ across parameters such as time and geography (Tooms & Boske, 2010, p. xviii). In creating bridges between his school and his broader networks, Peter is building social capital that he then uses to promote his school and to benefit the children and community surrounding his school. This strengthens the social and cultural capital for the children in his school community through the connections he makes. Yet there is a disjuncture in Peter’s assiduous bridge-building work for the benefit of his school and community, and the apparent deficit views that he expresses in describing his community as noted above. Peter related that he sees relationships in schools such as his as vital (although he does not seem to include his own relationships with teachers as part of this observation): I think the key is the relationships. It’s not necessarily with me, it’s more about the relationships that are created through the whole school, the relationships that the staff create with the kids; that the staff create with the parents, and how they all interrelate.

What is interesting in his quote is that he specifies that the relationships are not necessarily with him, and when I ask him to discuss his relationships with the children and community he suggests that the intense, day-to-day emotional interactions are undertaken by others on his staff: I think it’s one of the misnomers because I have all of these other people that do a lot of that really intense work, I’m surprised at how little interaction that I actually have. So I don’t get ingrained with some of the day-to-day stuff.

This does suggest that, along with the pedagogic work of the school, Peter outsources the emotional labour of his work to other staff. This does not mean, however that Peter is not aware of the personal circumstances of the children and families in the school. At a welfare meeting I attended with Peter, he demonstrated his intimate knowledge of all the children and families discussed, which amounted to about a quarter of the children in the school. The key point is that, like a monarch, he oversees the pedagogical and emotional work of the school, while surveilling and holding staff to account (discussed below). The outsourcing of relational work by Peter suggests the gendered dimensions of his leadership. The emotional labour of leading has been a long time interest in leadership research, particularly in feminist research (Blackmore, 1996, 2010, 2011), along

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with emotional resilience (Day, 2005; Day & Hong, 2016; Pratt-Adams & Maguire, 2009), emotionality (Rajah et al., 2011) and the neuroscience of emotion and leading (Lakomski et al., 2017). Jill Blackmore argues that emotionality and rationality are entangled and that ‘emotions are the catalyst of and for analysis of unequal power relations’ (Blackmore, 2010, p. 645). Peter’s apparent repudiation of the emotional labour in his school harks back to earlier accounts of educational administration as a masculine enterprise, and teaching as a feminine domain (Blackmore, 2017). Indeed, Peter’s leadership practices seem to align with the old-fashioned colonial hegemonic ideals of masculine leadership being rational, unemotional, and authoritative (Blackmore, 2017). This can be linked to Peter’s long experience in the Boy Scouts and in his religious organisation, suggesting that Peter’s leadership habitus is steeped in white Christian and masculine ways of leading. I have argued in this section that Peter’s leadership can be thought of in terms of a monarch ruling over his subjects. This is consistent with, and an extension of, his experiences as a young missionary and then as a key member of the leadership team that grew his religious organisation into a national body. Peter’s interpretation of his role as principal creates juxtaposition with his stated social justice commitments. There appears to be limitations in Peter’s understandings of justice; for example, he does not consider his own relationship with his staff as a necessary inclusion. In the following section I further discuss his leadership through the idea of might, which examines how power functions in his relationships.

6.3.2 Might I have used the term might to extend on the monarch metaphor characterising his leadership as a ‘ruler’, and to reflect Peter’s keen sense of purpose, further expand on his intimate knowledge of his strengths and weaknesses and the way in which power is a factor in his leadership practices. Peter’s experience in growing his religious organisation into a national body, and his experience in schools has provided him with a reflective understanding of where his strengths lie and what, and particularly who, is required to complement his leadership. As described above, he sees his strengths in the big ideas, and in his networking. For the pedagogic and welfare work at BHPS Peter has drawn together a team of experts to act, for example, as the literacy, or numeracy, or welfare specialists. When he began his tenure at BHPS, Peter related that he ‘had a fairly clear understanding about what my purpose was. The job was fairly clear. The brief was: this school’s in crisis’. He viewed this as a mandate to make the changes that he, along with a school reviewer, saw as necessary to turn the school around. Peter reported that he saw the BHPS teachers as ‘weary and resistant to change’ and as ‘nice people, but really been here way too long’. He noted that the school reviewer had a view that they ‘were still teaching like in the seventies’. With an educational consultant, literacy coach and a speech pathologist, a framework for pedagogy and curriculum

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was developed and teaching within this framework is an absolute requirement for the teachers in his school. Peter has provided an environment in which teachers need only worry about the educational goals of the children, shifting welfare concerns to staff employed specifically in those roles, and providing support staff in each classroom. He noted he believed that ‘the main core of the teaching job is to teach’. He was acutely aware of how difficult it can be to teach in schools in highly disadvantaged communities, noting that, ‘it becomes a really hard gig for people’. However, he made it clear that those who won’t conform to his expectations do not have a role at BHPS: This isn’t a discussion. It’s about how you’re going to implement this. You’re either fully in, or you’re fully out. I think if you’re an impediment to their education, then you don’t need to be here. Whose responsibility is it to tell that person that they should move? Well, I think that’s mine…so we’ve changed over staff probably three times since I’ve been here. Staff only last probably three or four years.

It can be very difficult to keep staff in schools in marginalised areas, and consequently high staff turnover is common (Day & Hong, 2016; Grissom, 2011). Peter does not appear to be concerned at the high staff turnover at his school. His comments suggest that he may not consider his teachers wellbeing in his work as a principal for the children and community. Peter laughed when he recounted that the staff ‘fear me’ when he asked to have a conversation with them, indicating the power he exercises as principal. However, in opposition to these authoritative, autocratic ways of leading, Peter also indicated that he championed the careers of particular staff members. He discussed one of his educational support staff that he has elevated into an expert welfare role. This anecdote relates back to the work that Peter did with disenfranchised youth in his missionary days: I’m somebody who also likes to believe in the fact that just because you’ve got a title doesn’t mean you’re any good at your job. Because there are people who, for whatever reason, have not gone into education. So I’m always on the lookout for people that I think have got really high ceilings, but opportunities have been denied them. And there’s plenty of ES [educational support] staff that you think: You are GOLD!

Peter uses his power, his might, in the elevation of some staff, recognising their skills. This can also be seen in the way he has championed the career of his assistant principal Steven. Steven was a relatively inexperienced classroom teacher of five years at their previous school when Peter encouraged him to apply for the assistant principalship at BHPS. However, it is clear in the above discussion that Peter also uses the power of his position to surveil staff, disciplining them when they transgress (they fear me). Taken together, the vignettes discussed in this chapter suggest Peter’s leadership habitus has found fit within the accountability measures that are the technologies of neoliberalism. Peter’s white male Christian leadership practices outlined in this chapter align with the logics of practice within the educational leadership field (discussed in Chap. 3). These neoliberal logics of the field are synonymous with Niesche’s (2014) contention that educational leadership is a technique of governmentality, arguing that ‘leadership as a discourse (and a particular type of leadership

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primarily) is being deployed as a strategy of governments, and as an answer to educational problems’ (p. 144). In a remarkable synchronicity with Peter’s experiences in a religious organisation and the scouting movement, Foucault (2007) argues ‘governmentality was born (first), from the archaic model of the Christian pastorate and, second, by drawing support from a diplomatic-military model, or rather, technique’ (p. 145). Peter’s appointment as principal with his long experience as a missionary with marginalised youth, and his mandate (mission) to turn around a ‘failing’ school with ‘failing’ teachers can be seen as a strategy to answer the educational problems at BHPS. This serves to highlight the foundation of Peter’s doxic leadership practices. As an instrument of governmentality, characterised by Nigel Wright as ‘bastard leadership’ (Wright, 2001, 2011), and in alignment with the neoliberal logics of the field, Peter has mandated pedagogy and curriculum, for example, creating a highly performative and precarious environment for his teachers. By his description, the teachers work in a low trust, high surveillance environment, and fear him should he request a meeting. As another example, the welfare of students, traditionally the remit of classroom teachers, is the responsibility of a welfare expert, undervaluing relational care element of the classroom teachers, reducing their roles to teaching only. In a performative environment this ‘requires individual practitioners to organize themselves as a response to targets, indicators and evaluations. To set aside personal beliefs and commitments and live an existence of calculation’ (Ball, 2003, p. 215). Peter has a team of experts he trusts to ‘manage’, or surveil, the teachers ensuring their compliance. The teachers and experts are individualised, regulated and responsibilised. In Peter’s estimation, the NAPLAN result strewn across the table when I first meet him are vindication of his leadership decisions at BHPS, and is noticeable in his pride in their results. Peter has a long history, through his time as a missionary working with disenfranchised youth, with the work and language of social justice. This is mediated through his religious habitus, initially through the liberation theologies of his counter-culture group, and then through more orthodox traditions in his role as part of the leadership team mainstreaming the group. Peter is firm in his focus on what he understands to be social justice for the children in his school, but he does not appear to include others, such as the teachers, in his remit. Wilkinson (2008) argues that in working for social justice ‘good intentions are not enough,’ contending that this averts the gaze from the role of leaders in constructing, maintaining and reproducing structural inequalities (p. 103). Similarly, Niesche (2017) claims that ‘schools are vulnerable to the problematics of White-driven advocacy on behalf of marginalized groups’ (p. 246) which can actually serve as an instrument of domination, oppression and violence. The disjunctures in Peter’s understandings and practices are explored in Chap. 8.

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6.4 Conclusion There is no denying that Peter has a strong and well developed commitment to what he understands as social justice principles for the children in his school community and he conforms to many of the normative ideas around social justice leadership (Chap. 2). However, his leadership practice looks very different from other reportedly socially just principals, and there are some clear disjunctures in his articulated ideas around social justice and some of his understandings about his community. Peter seems to have an ambivalent relationship with teaching, and did say in the context of whether or not he could, or should, seek the principalship of a larger school, that he was not a committed educationalist but that he is committed to his school because he feels that it fits him. His leadership appears to align with white Christian and masculinist ways of leading. For example, Peter contracted out work more traditionally associated with women’s labour such as caregiving, to his (younger male) deputy principal, Steven, and curriculum and instructional leadership to the female middle leaders in the school. Peter’s faith is a key structuring and structured part of his habitus, and that his leadership in his marginalised school is his (Christian) mission. The missionary habitus was revealed in the missionary-like zeal of Peter’s principalship. This aspect of his leadership habitus did appear to conform to the literature, for example, his industrious work as a bridge builder, forging social capital through networking beyond his school. However, there also appeared to be contradictions to his social justice leadership and these disjunctions are explored in more detail in Chap. 8. In the following chapter, I introduce Christine, the principal in a small rural and highly disadvantaged school.

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Chapter 7

Monitor, Ministry and Mentor—Christine’s Story

If someone asked me what I do each day I couldn’t explain. Or they wouldn’t believe me. (Christine) And a lot of people say, well how do you afford to do that? And I go, how do you afford not to? (Christine)

Abstract In this chapter, I present an intimate portrait of Christine, an experienced principal near the end of her career. Her leadership is explored through the metaphors of monitor, ministry and mentor. First, her life history informs the development of her primary and secondary habitus. The metaphor of monitor is used to explore the ways in which Christine surveils the staff and students in her rural school through an ethics of care. Ministry is deployed as a way of examining Christine’s workload in caring for the wider community. The metaphor of mentor outlines Christine’s commitment to share her knowledge and experience with teachers and aspiring principals in the service of public education. Keywords Habitus · Field · Capitals · Work intensification · Community · Dialogic leadership · Mentor

In this final chapter examining the social justice habitus and practices of three principals working in some of the most marginalised primary schools in Victoria, I introduce Christine, the principal of a school in a highly distadvantaged rural community, Aurora Creek Primary School (ACPS). I investigate how her early family life and life experiences influence her primary habitus and her secondary habitus. I explore how Christine has interpreted the key issues in her leadership at ACPS and how she leverages her own social and cultural capital to navigate the intersecting fields of public education and social justice for marginalised communities. It outlines her approach to leadership and how her primary and secondary habitus has shaped/influenced this approach through the lens of three key themes: her commitment to instructional leadership which I have termed monitor, her social justice desires for students and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7_7

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families termed ministry, and her commitment to growing the leadership potential in teachers which I have labelled mentor.

7.1 Context—Aurora Creek Primary School As outlined in Chap. 4, ACPS is located in a rural area, one of the most impoverished in Victoria. The school had 11 teaching staff and 10 non-teaching staff, and enrolments of 180 students with around 10% of the students on the Program for Students with Disability. Only 2% of the students are from a language background other than English and 2% have identified as Indigenous. The school population is highly mobile, constantly moving both into and out of the school. Christine reported that they often have single parent families coming from the city, to live with their retired parents. She reports that single parents are frequently struggling with longterm unemployment or escaping domestic violence. As Christine notes, ‘the issue has been that once the parents come up and get themselves on their feet a little bit, there’s no work. But worse, there’s no childcare’.

7.2 Christine—Primary and Secondary Habitus Christine revealed that she spent her early years with her parents and three siblings in a wealthy leafy eastern suburb in Melbourne and attended an expensive elite private girls’ school. She said she had ‘a great family life’. Her father, a returned soldier, had always dreamed of being a farmer so they moved to a dairy farm in rural Victoria when she was eight and she attended a one-room school. Her father died when she had just turned 13, and she related that this traumatic life-changing event had a major effect on who she is today, saying, ‘It moulded me’. Her mother struggled financially and practically with the farm and all four children pitched in and helped with the necessary farm work such as milking. Eventually her mother sold the dairy farm and Christine reported that they eked out a meagre existence on a small rural holding. During these difficult years, Christine relayed that a community charity was crucial in supporting her mother both emotionally and financially. In particular, the charity and its volunteers took a keen interest in Christine and her journey through high school. Christine recounted that ‘they were checking on my academic progress’. She related that she was encouraged by the charity to think about attending university, an option that she had not considered because none of her older siblings had post-secondary qualifications. When she settled on teaching as a career, the charity provided a stipend to cover her living costs in the city so that she could attend Teachers College. This was a crucial intervention for Christine because her mother had said to her, ‘I can’t afford to send you off anywhere or give you rent’. Christine was the first in her family to attend university, and it would not have been possible without the involvement of the charity. Christine’s emotions are clear when she shared this story:

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Here’s people that don’t know me from a bar of soap, but are prepared to look after my future, and build a future for me. And it just wasn’t for me. It was for my family. And it will go on and on. Because the opportunities that I had allowed me to educate my kids, and put my kids through uni[versity]. They were all able to choose and do what they wanted to do because I had been given that opportunity. I am thankful. I never take it for granted.

Critically for Christine, she related that these experiences were key to her beliefs about the children in her school: ‘I don’t take for granted … the opportunities that kids don’t have. And that’s what I’m so passionate about. I really don’t care what your social or economic background is. Everybody should have the same opportunity. But everyone comes with a different package and when they start school way behind everybody else then that’s not fair. That’s the impact I’m trying to change - where their futures will go and what opportunities these kids can have’.

Christine’s statements about the future of the children in her school highlighted her view of her leadership work as an ethical and moral project (Greenfield, 2004). She indicated that her passion is expanding the opportunities for the children in her school, and highlighted that the inequality some children experience is not fair. Her words echo those of other social justice leaders who act ‘on a sense of ‘moral outrage’ at the perpetuation of inequitable educational experiences and outcomes of learners who are often denied access and opportunity’ (Rivera-McCutchen, 2014, p. 749). Three significant and related themes are important to highlight in the development of Christine’s primary habitus and her subsequent approach to leadership: losing a parent as a child, a marked change in her family’s social status (both from her wealthy city life to a dairy farm, and to poverty after her father died), and the positive impact that the care of the charity organisation had on her and her family, as demonstrated in her words above. The loss of her father was devastating for Christine. She not only lost the love and support of a parent, but her social and economic circumstances also changed. This is not an uncommon experience for children who lose parents. Significantly, orphaned (maternal or paternal) children have poorer educational outcomes than children who do not lose a parent (Berg et al., 2014). While her social circumstances were changed by the loss of her father, the intervention of the charity moderated these effects in both building social capital through a network of people taking an interest in her, and through the provision of economic capital in the form of financial support to the family. Christine remarked that she worked very hard at school because she felt obliged to, but also credits this to a pro-education habitus shaped from memories of her father: So I suppose I worked my butt off because I felt I owed [the charity] something. And Dad had always been one to say, you know, ‘Education is the key. You do the best that you can with what you’ve got. We never expect more than your best. And you put in the effort the rewards will always be there.’

Critically, the memory of her father’s words may have had an effect on her work ethic as part of the development of her primary habitus. While research in the field of dying, death and bereavement has been slow to incorporate sociological concepts, ideas such as Émile Durkheim’s anomie, a normlessness, uncertainty and alienation,

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offer powerful ways to think about bereavement (Small, 2017; Thompson et al., 2016). This can be compared to Bourdieu’s (1977) hysteresis of habitus, ‘one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions to grab them which is the cause of missed opportunities’ (p. 83), and is the antithesis of Christine’s leadership practice. She grasps every opportunity offered to her, successfully applying for many grants, taking up opportunities to participate in many programs through universities, the governing education authority and private enterprise. Her childhood bereavement, the deeply absorbed lessons from her father that underpin her work ethic and her felt obligation to succeed because of the care of the charity appear to have simultaneously structured her leadership habitus and her practices in the educational leadership field. Christine’s complex relationship with class mobility, from a comfortable urban middle-class early childhood, to rural farming, to hardship after her father’s death, and returning to middle class as a principal appears also to have contributed to the development of her secondary habitus and subsequent social justice leadership practices. Bourdieu (Bourdieu et al., 1999) posits that social mobility results in a habitus that is divided, or habitus clivé. With upward social mobility, many people report a feeling of being ‘out of place.’ Bourdieu himself describes his cleft habitus in his journey of upward social mobility (Bourdieu, 2007). More recent research on class and social mobility suggest that the habitus of those who experience movement between social classes may be blended, i.e. origin and destination habitus are combined (Daenekindt and Roose, 2013), or culturally omnivorous and more strategic (Emmison, 2003). Aarseth and colleagues (2016), in their work on the intergenerational effects of class mobility in Norway, suggest that rapid class mobility requires emotional work which either forces change, or not, in the habitus. The direction of mobility has an impact on habitus plasticity. Paulson (2018) argues that with downward mobility, the habitus is more resistant to change and maintains class origin, whereas with upward mobility there is ‘more incentive to change’ in order to fit in (p. 1070). Christine’s trajectory through rapid transformations suggests that in the difficult years after her losing her father, through her family’s accumulation of cultural capital and her commitment to her education, that her primary habitus was relatively inflexible and maintained its class origin. At the same time, Christine does relate that when she came to ACPS she felt she was ‘a good fit’ for the school, suggesting that the years of hardship her family experienced have also effected change in her habitus. Her habitus reflects a blending of her class positioning. While Christine’s journey has been complicated, her statement, emphasised above, I really don’t care what your social or economic background is. Everybody should have the same opportunity. But everyone comes with a different package suggests her intimate knowledge of how varied social positioning can impact one’s life opportunities. It also means she is uniquely positioned to empathise with the families in her school. After graduating from Teachers College, Christine taught in different areas around Victoria, moving a number of times for her husband’s job. Subsequently, the family resettled in the area in which she grew up. During this time, she became a leading teacher at a large school in a adjacent highly disadvantaged region to ACPS where she ‘was pushed’ into leadership positions. Christine believed however, that she

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wouldn’t be able to ‘change kids lives’ unless she was with them in the classroom. She observed that at one point: I was getting pushed from leadership in the school. You know, ‘You should step up the ranks.’ Oh I don’t want to do that, that’s not what I want. I want to be teaching and changing kids lives and helping them.

Christine’s observation about being pushed into leadership positions reflects a commonly recognised reaction by women when it comes to educational leadership. This highly gendered repudiation of leadership roles suggests the workings of symbolic violence, but also suggests an ethics of care in her educational aspirations (Noddings, 1984). Christine’s comments are reminiscent of Jill Blackmore’s observations of the historical construction of leadership in the education field as a masculinist enterprise whilst teaching is constructed as a feminine and feminised occupation (Blackmore, 2017). This construction of the field is part of the working through of symbolic violence. Lois McNay argues that ‘masculine domination assumes a natural, self-evident status through its inscription in the objective structures of the social world which are then incorporated and reproduced in the habitus of individuals’ (McNay, 2013, p. 37). This is evident, as Jill Blackmore reports, in the way in which women have tended to see positional leadership ‘as being more about ‘being good’ in alignment with system priorities or market demand rather than ‘doing good’ in alignment with educational principles and what is best for the students and colleagues’ (Blackmore, 2009, p. 78). This description fits Christine’s initial reluctance to assume a positional leadership role. However, Christine’s doxic beliefs about her key role as a classroom teacher were challenged when she had an opportunity to spend some of her long service leave shadowing a principal at another school. This changed her view on leadership. She remarked, ‘The penny dropped that as a principal or assistant principal your influence can be much broader. So that changed my thinking’. This experience mirrors Jill Blackmore’s work with women leaders which suggests that women thought of their work in terms of ‘good teaching, and not leadership’ until they ‘had access to the institutionalized discourses and system-wide information’ as Christine would have had in her shadowing of a principal (Blackmore, 1999, p. 77). Christine’s anecdote also sheds light on the way in which the gendered nature of the education field shapes understanding of what constitutes the principalship. The anecdote shows the way in which she saw leadership as labour without children at its heart suggesting an understanding of leadership as highly masculinised. Her experiences in shadowing the principal reveal a disjuncture, which occurs when habitus encounters a different field, or different part of a field, with which it is not familiar (Reay, 2004), causing the agent to resist or bring about a new awareness (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Christine notes that this experience led to her seeing leadership as a position that would allow her to have a broader influence, and could incorporate her ethics of caring. This new awareness of what the principalship could be suggests a dawning of her reflexivity about her role. Christine prevaricated on applying for the assistant principalship at ACPS, believing herself to be ‘not ready’. This reluctance to apply until she felt herself ready reflects gendered norms. Research into the reluctance for women to apply

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for promotion, initially thought of as a lack of aspiration or a ‘confidence gap’ began after Hewlett-Packard apparently found that women only applied for promotion when they were felt they were 100% qualified, and men applied when they felt they were 60% qualified.1 While the origin of these figures is opaque, it is clear that there is a disparity between the numbers of men and women in the principalship in Australia—a disparity that is reflected in OECD nations more widely (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2014). More recent research highlights the danger of considering this gap as a gap in confidence, which rests the ‘blame’ on the victim, i.e., women, for the disparities, rather than on continuing structural barriers related to gendered notions of masculinist leadership, and feminised teaching (Carlin et al., 2018). It does, however, remain the case that men are more likely to consider themselves worthy of promotion earlier than do women (Baker, 2010). Christine was the successful applicant and was assistant principal for two years before taking on the principalship at ACPS. The principalship at the school had been a revolving door for principals who used the school as a ‘stepping stone’ to more attractive school contexts. When we met, Christine had been the Principal of ACPS for nine years and was close to retirement. She had been recognised as a high performing exemplary principal by education authority through provision of a number of state-wide awards and expressed no desire to move to any other school. While this trajectory to the principalship mirrors the experience of many female educational leaders, such as being ‘pushed’ into leadership, Christine tells of another traumatic event in her life that had an enormous influence on her secondary habitus and the way in which she saw her responsibilities as a school leader to the staff in her school. When she was a senior teacher at her previous primary school she experienced a harrowing physical assault by a parent while at work which spilled into her private realm threatening her family. She felt that she was utterly unsupported by her principal, and the education authority, who she felt did not try to understand what she had gone through. She reported that she was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of this experience. Working in environments that serve the community, such as in hospitals and schools, has an increased risk factor for occupational violence (Henderson and VanHasselt, 2017). Post-traumatic stress is one of the outcomes of experiencing workplace violence (Wilson et al., 2011). Despite growing concern around a perceived increase in violence in schools (Australian Education Union, 2017), there are surprisingly few empirical studies into the experience of the victims of violence against teachers, and the majority focus on student violence against teachers (McMahon et al., 2017). This research suggests that PTSD is a common outcome along with ‘diminished efficiency and reduced productivity, increased turnover, absenteeism, counseling costs, decreased staff morale, and reduced quality of life’ (Gerberich 1

These figures are referred to often in magazines such as Forbes (Zenger, 2018), the Harvard Business Review (Mohr, 2014) and The Atlantic (Kay and Shipman, 2014). Despite an extensive search, I could not find the origin of these figures, purported to be from an internal report at Hewlett-Packard.

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et al., 2011, p. 301). Adequate support from their leadership team for teachers who have experienced violence is a critical key indicator for job satisfaction and intent to stay in the profession. In several empirical studies, teachers who had been victims of violence reported that lack of support from administrators was as upsetting as the violence itself: they felt blamed, unsafe and disempowered (Fox and Stallworth, 2010; McMahon et al., 2017). An alarmingly high proportion of principals experience physical assault. Philip Riley’s research into the health and wellbeing of Australian principals suggest that perhaps as many as 37% experience actual physical violence, and 43% experience threats of violence (Riley et al., 2021). There is little direct research exploring the experiences of principals who have experienced trauma as a result of physical assault. However it is very clear in Christine’s case that her experiences have influenced her leadership practices as a result of this assault: What do teachers want most of all from a leader? It is to be supported, to have their back. And I didn’t feel that. It has had an absolutely major impact on me. Yeah, and I will do everything I can to back my teachers and make sure that they’re right. Without any doubt. Because that’s what you want from your leader.

In my visits to ACPS, I observed Christine respond to two critical incidents offering support to two teachers illustrating her commitment to this practice. Firstly, the staff had just done a professional development session on domestic violence and mandatory reporting and Christine was making sure one of her teachers, who she knew had experienced domestic violence herself, was feeling supported. There are several ways to read this incident. Firstly, Christine is demonstrating an ethic of care (Noddings, 1992) in her concern for her teacher. On the other hand, this can also be read as overt maternal monitoring of her teachers, something they may not necessarily desire or need. This incident may surface problematics in the power asymmetries between Christine and her staff. The second incident was Christine’s support of a young graduate teacher who was acting as a casual relief teacher for the first time in this school and was distraught because of a false allegation of tripping a child. Christine related, after supporting the young teacher, that she was very aware of how vulnerable the teacher was in this circumstance and that she wanted her to know that she had Christine’s support and that it would not negatively influence her future work prospects in the school. Experiencing workplace violence has not been a single event for Christine. On one of my visits to ACPS, as we were discussing the importance of partnerships between the school and families, it emerged that Christine was working on building a relationship, through phone conversations, with a parent who had recently assaulted her and had a Restraining Order banning them from being at the school. We could be forgiven for wondering how Christine managed to return to the classroom after experiencing PTSD as a result of workplace violence as a teacher, and further violence as a principal. However, as has been outlined, Christine’s primary habitus is steeped in the values of service and commitment to repay the charity for what she sees as the gift of her life, a life she would not have had without their intervention. This surfaces in her leadership practices and her gratitude never seems to be far from her thoughts.

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In the following sections I explore her social justice and leadership practices in the field through the metaphors of monitor, minister and mentor. I use the term monitor to explore the way in which Christine listens to her staff and the children in her school; minister to describe her commitment to her staff, the children and the community; and mentor to explore how she draws on her experiences and acts to champion future leaders. Christine’s leadership and social justice practices indicate both her simultaneous resistance to the logics of the field of education and the way in which the neoliberal logics of the field have subjectively shaped her leadership habitus.

7.3 Encounters Between Habitus and the Field 7.3.1 Monitor There are two ways in which to explore Christine’s leadership through the metaphor of monitor. Firstly, I use the term monitor to suggest surveillance, but rather than taking a negative view of surveillance, I draw on the meaning of monitoring as careful observation, listening and keeping track (Cambridge Dictionary, 2018). Additionally I take the meaning of monitor, in regard to schooling, as one who keeps order (Collins Dictionary Online, 2018). Christine stated that her over-riding approach to her leadership at ACPS was to listen to her staff. She reported that because she had been assistant principal in the school for several years the staff knew and trusted her, and she knew and trusted the staff. Christine suggests that the previous leadership in the school had been ‘dictatorial’, but not necessarily pedagogically engaged. A school review that occurred whilst she was assistant principal had highlighted for her how the staff felt detached from decision making in the school. She observed that she and the previous principal had never sat down together to look at school performance data and she drew on these experiences when she became principal: In setting that scene on Day One [of my Principalship], I said to the staff, ‘These are our results [school performance data]. Are we happy about it?’ And I said, ‘Knowing you and watching you in your rooms, and what you’re doing and your dedication, you can’t work any harder, so therefore we have to work smarter and that’s an absolute key priority. Are we making the most of every minute we’ve got at school? If we keep doing the same things we’re going to keep getting the same results so we have to change. So let’s unpack what the real underlying problems are. I’m a very sort of proactive sort of a person, but instead of being reactive to what the situations are let’s get in there and resolve the problems.

Christine recounted that she was fresh from the classroom when she started as assistant principal at ACPS and she remarked that she understood the realities of the classroom, where their previous ‘dictatorial’ principal didn’t seem to: I think understanding what the chalkface is like. I think that was because I hadn’t been out of the classroom for years and years that I really understood, and the teachers could see that I understood, the problems and what they were facing in the classrooms.

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When Christine became principal she asserted that she listened to what the problems were and systematically set about creating, with the staff, programs and pedagogies to change things. She remarked, ‘It’s about listening to your staff, hearing what they say and acting’. They identified a range of issues that needed to be addressed and then set about tackling these issues systematically: behaviour, attendance and consistency across the school, curriculum and pedagogies. In her epigraphic quote, she related that for her, it wasn’t a matter of how she could finance the changes she made, such as having support staff in every classroom and creating pre-school programs, it was a moral and ethical decision, ‘how could I afford not to’. In this quote Christine’s reliance on her moral and ethical beliefs about her work as an educational leader become clear. She highlighted the primacy of these interventions in addressing the social and educational needs of the children in her school, while eschewing standard management of budgetary concerns. In Chap. 3, I outlined the logics of practice in the educational field, where increasingly accountability through individualisation, regulation and responsibilisation have led to a culture of performativity and compliance for educational leaders. Christine’s quote here was in the context of a discussion about what she says other principals have observed in her work at ACPS, questioning how she financed her decisions. This suggests that Christine challenged some of the compliance demands placed on principals in terms of how she used the funding she received in ways that other principals seem surprised by. In navigating the field, Christine’s primary and secondary habitus allow her, for example, to challenge the budget constraints and find ways to provide resources where she believed they were necessary, like the innovative pre-school program they operate. This comes at a cost for Christine because, as she reported, she spends a considerable amount of time applying for grants from government and philanthropic organisations, but her statement that she cannot afford not to indicated her moral and ethical commitment to the children in her school. Likewise, Christine’s stated that her focus on listening to her staff and trusting their professional judgement, rather than using her role as a positional leader to surveil and discipline them indicated her rejection of the prevailing logics of surveillance and discipline in the field of education. In listening to the staff, however, Christine does report that she challenged them where necessary. In countering deficit thinking by the teachers about the children and community, she recognised that the school had good teachers who were unsupported. Christine related that she believed, ‘There’s no such thing as a bad teacher. There’s teachers that aren’t supported and aren’t prepared properly, but they’re not bad teachers’. She shared several stories that indicate the challenges she posed to her staff. The first is in relation to the children’s behaviour: They talked about the fighting that was evident outside. I said, ‘Well, where’s all this coming from?’ And they said, ‘It’s because the kids get on the buses when they come to school from these different communities and then they fight on the bus, and then they fight here’. And I go, ‘Well, how long has this school been going?’ And they go, ‘Oh well 25 years or something’. ‘And you’re still using the same excuse? Like, we need to get over that!’

In this quote, Christine challenged the teachers and held them to account. She questioned both their complacency about the reasons for the problems in the schoolyard, and their excuses, which put the ‘blame’ on the children, making the children,

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not the staff, responsible. In her monitoring of the staff, she confronted these as deficit views about children’s behaviour and asked them to justify their position. Note that in her quote above, she felt there are no bad teachers, but those that are unsupported, and she extended her ethics of care (Noddings, 2012), or perhaps maternal thinking (Ruddick, 1995, 2009), to scaffold their growth. The second story that Christine related highlights again the deficit notions that the teachers held of the children and community: The teachers here were fairly critical of parents. Some of them were quite like, well this child, they’re never going to be bright. And I asked, ‘Why not?’ So I posed those questions, and I suppose it was difficult for a start. But I’d just sort of say, ‘Well, why not? Why can’t this child achieve? What do we have to do to make the difference there?’ Not, ‘Don’t keep blaming genetics, or their social background for what they’re going to achieve academically’. But, ‘What can we do to impact on that?’ And the same with, talking about parents, the teachers would say, ‘So-and-so never reads at home’. And I would say, ‘Parents don’t know what they don’t know, so let’s teach parents about doing that. So let’s teach them and let’s fill the gaps’.

These two stories indicate Christine not just listened to, but heard what the teachers had to say, and challenged their thinking. As a result of these challenges to her staff, Christine reported that together they designed and implemented school-wide programs that dealt with their priorities, such as positive behaviour programs and consistency in pedagogy across the school. Similarly, they designed an innovative early childhood program where they teach parents how to read and play with their children. Christine related that as a staff they together identify priorities and seek professional development to support those priorities. In implementing professional development, the whole staff is trained together (including support staff). In my observations at a leadership meeting, in the context of a discussion of literacy priorities for disengaged students, two teachers had sought out and trialled a literacy approach and were recommending it as a whole staff professional development. This initiative and the resulting discussion was led by the two teachers who had trialled the approach and was supported by Christine and the rest of the leadership team. The leadership practices indicated in these snapshots suggest a form of dialogic leadership for social justice that challenges the status quo through dialogue working to overcome the silence of the marginalised, challenge class stereotypes and promote inclusion (Shields, 2004, 2010). Freireian in scope, dialogic leaders ‘work together with families, teachers and students especially by supporting and promoting actions that contribute to transform the school and the community, which include the neighbourhood and the interactions at homes’ (Padrós and Flecha, 2014, p. 217). This leadership also encourages leadership dispersal across the school, something that Christine related that she is passionate about. She talked often of ‘building leadership in others’. Christine was adamant that, ‘It’s not just me, it’s a team approach. We have been able to create such a fantastic team approach. I gave [the staff] the opportunities’. In one reading of these kinds of statements, Christine reveals a gendered habitus of the principalship invested in an understanding of leadership as a ‘collective and relational practice’ (Blackmore, 2009, p. 77). This kind of understanding of leadership practice stands in contrast of contemporary notions of leadership in the

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field such as the principal normalised into accountability regimes, like individualisation and regulation seen through the surveilling and disciplining of staff (Niesche, 2010), sketched in Chap. 3. However, in another reading, it is worth exploring Christine’s use of the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘I’ in her quote above. Sennett (1998) argues that ‘we’ can be a dangerous pronoun, claiming that notions of teamwork, like Christine espouses, are weak forms of community because differences in ‘privilege and power’ are not acknowledged (p. 143). Christine’s use of the pronoun ‘I’ in her comment I gave the staff opportunities, exposes her security in her positional power in giving opportunities, which suggests rather a more traditional understanding of her role as principal in a traditional school hierarchy. This challenges her own reading of her leadership as collective, however her statement about there being no bad teachers suggests divergence from the common neoliberal discourse of bad teachers needing to be removed from the profession. Courtney and Gunter (2015) argue that these prevailing logics mean that the principal is subjected to relentless pressure to ‘inspire and command individuals to feel that they belong to and can sign up to the leader’s view of where the organization is going and what this means for their professional practice’ (p. 6). In the relentless requirement for principals to be visionary, a misrecognition of authoritarianism leads to teachers becoming disposable when they are not the ‘right’ people for the job (Courtney and Gunter, 2015). Christine’s repudiation of these logics are seen in her beliefs about teachers who are not supported, and in the low staff turnover she reports in her school. As discussed above, together Christine and her staff devised programs to address the identified issues. In challenging student behaviour, for example, they implemented a positive behaviour framework; in regard to home reading they developed and implemented an innovative pre-school program that provides resources and teaches parents how to read and play with their children. These programs relate to Christine’s avowed commitment to making no assumptions about the children and families who make up the ACPS community identified in the previous section (I don’t take for granted): So, you know, when we say to children, ‘You’re in an out-of-bounds area’, the thing is those children need to be taken outside and shown that this is the area where you can play. You can’t assume that because you say it the children will understand.

In this quotation, Christine references the taken for granted assumptions, the doxa (Bourdieu, 1990), that teachers may have about the children and their understanding of what is expected of them at school. Just as in the previous quote she mentions that parent’s don’t know what they don’t know, Christine is very aware that the parents’ own experiences at school, and that their social and cultural capitals may not align with teachers’ expectations of their parenting. In her research on how teachers’ gender, social class, and racial identities influence their work, Irene Yoon, for example, found that their narratives reflected ‘middle class White social distance from students and families … asserting teachers’ moral superiority in parenting’ (Yoon, 2016, p. 1). Hall and Jones (2013) argue that for middle-class novice teachers working in marginalised schools, unless class is made explicit to them, their class

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positioning remains invisible. Christine’s keen observations, monitoring of the children and families and listening to her staff, has led to the devising of programs that aim to enhance the educational capital of the children and parents and to reduce the levels of symbolic violence that are at play in schooling when teachers make assumptions about parenting based on middle-class assumptions of cultural capital. In her monitoring of the happenings in her school, Christine also appeared to value childrens’ voice and so when children were ‘disruptive’ and sent to her office, she spent time listening to them. For example, I observed Christine gently encourage a child who had been sent to her office for disruptive behaviour in the classroom. The gentle care in her relationship with the child illustrated her concern firstly with the wellbeing of the child and her calm probing of the causes for his disruption illustrated her knowledge of the child’s circumstances. She knew he was reluctant reader and she encouraged him to read with her. Through their conversation she ascertained that he was not reading at home because he didn’t know which readers he should be choosing. This emerged because she knew the child, knew the issues he was facing at home and in the classroom and knew the questions she needed to ask. She followed up with his teacher at recess, touching base on welfare and academic concerns, but also about what she had discovered about his home reading. When we discuss this incident after he returns to the classroom, she remarked, ‘You have to know the community or you could do more damage to the children’. Francis and Mills (2012) argue that the schooling system as a whole can be injurious to both students and teachers. Christine commented on several occasions that she has always looked at what is behind the behaviour she sees in children, remarking, ‘Let’s not look at the behaviour, but what’s behind that? Then [as a teacher] I never used to have too many worries at all’. In her quotes in the preceding discussions, Christine’s commitment to challenging the teachers on their assumptions about the children, their behaviours, and their lives outside of school supports her understanding about the damage that can happen for children in school, and her desire to change it. This suggests her understanding of the symbolic violence perpetrated against the children and families of her school community and the role of schooling in reproducing social stratification which legitimises class inequalities (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977). This section has explored Christine’s leadership through the metaphor of monitoring, taken to reflect her leadership focus on observation of the happenings in her school, listening to her staff, the families and the children in her community. In Christine’s approach, a commitment to an ethics of care is evident (Noddings, 1992). Key to an ethics of care is receptive attentiveness through listening and response (Noddings, 2012). Nel Noddings also argues that every human encounter is ‘a potential caring occasion’ (Noddings, 1992, p. 24). In observing Christine’s encounters with staff and children throughout her day, she appeared to embody this ideal, providing modelling of care and affirmation for the cared-for, dialogue, in an open-ended Freireian sense (Freire, 1970), and a practice embedded in the structure of her school (Noddings, 1992). However, while care is a factor in her leadership, Christine’s seemingly traditional positioning of herself as the positional and instructional leader of her school does bring a sense of surveillance, albeit rooted in care, to the metaphor of monitoring in her leadership, in line with neoliberal logics of the field.

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In the following section I expand on Christine’s relationship with the school community in order to examine her social justice leadership through the metaphor of ministry. Christine views her leadership role as a commitment to caring for the broader community, not just the children and staff in her school. Therefore exploring her connection to community is an important aspect of her social justice leadership.

7.3.2 Ministry In this section, I use the idea of ministry, in the first instance not in a religious sense but to highlight Christine’s work as committed and vocational, tied to the obligation she feels because of the support she received from the charitable organisation that changed her life. This is seen in Christine’s comment that she felt she owed the charity that supported her to work hard and not take things for granted. Her continued commitment to education, despite the trauma that she experienced through violence, highlights her dedication to her educational leadership at ACPS. This has influenced her commitment to give of herself and her time to others. I have been deliberate in the choice of exploring Christine’s leadership and social justice work as a ministry, a term that is not without contestation and is normally associated with religious endeavours. I do so to foreground her ethical and moral commitment to the ACPS community and to trouble notions of educational leadership as a ministry, doing the work of a (white woman) saviour. Previously in this chapter I have discussed Christine’s commitment to the teachers in her school, in checking on their health and wellbeing, that she attributes to her experiences where her own leaders did not support her when she was assaulted. I have suggested that this concern may not be desired, and is a form of surveillance, highlighting potential asymmetries in power. I have also highlighted her approach to the children in her school, not taking for granted their experiences, and her consciousness of how what happens at school can have a damaging effect on vulnerable children. In this section I expand on her relationship with families at ACPS and show how Christine attends to the needs of her community (ministering to them), drawing on her own experiences, understandings and empathy. Thomas Sergiovanni characterises this as the heart of leadership values, hopes, beliefs and commitment (2015). Christine reports that she is, like a missionary, dedicated to the families in the ACPS community. Her devotion and dedication are evident in the hours that she puts in to her work and can be explored through notion of a white woman ‘doing good’ for a marginalised community, like a missionary ministering to her flock. Cole (2012) coined the term The White Saviour Industrial Complex to describe the interference of American people in the African continent, tweeting, ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege’ (Cole, 2012). Cole was chiefly responding to the viral Kony 2012 video and commenting on the role of development agencies in undeveloped countries. Increasingly critiques of volunteer tourism in the developing Global South draw on the racialised and gendered dimensions of such tourism, linking

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the increasing participation of middle-class white women to a shift from a colonial masculinised endeavour to a ‘new civilizing mission’ (Bandyopadhyay and Patil, 2017, p. 650). Bandyopadhyay and Patil (2017) question whether the purpose of such tourism is for the volunteers to ‘do good, or feel good’ (p. 651), linking this work to the saviour complex. The idea of a saviour is a familiar refrain in education. For example, in Ruby Payne’s (Payne, 2005) pathologising of poor communities in A Framework for Understanding Poverty, teachers of the marginalised are framed as saviours (Gorski, 2005, 2008). Hancock and Warren (2016) argue that white women have had an enormous impact on the political, ideological and cultural underpinnings of schooling in America, contending that ‘racialised pedagogical orientations, school policies, and classroom practices are underwritten by White, cisgender, feminine, and middle to upper class social and cultural norms’ (p. viii). This is true also of Australia, where the teaching staff in primary schools are predominantly Anglo-Saxon English speaking women (80.9%), and where 65.5% of primary principals are also women (Wilkinson, 2018). Wilkinson (2018) argues that there is little ethnic or linguistic diversity in the principalship, despite Australia’s richly diverse multicultural society, and is therefore coded white. Moreton-Robinson (2000, 2004) argues that the normative and dominant nature of Whiteness is invisible and continues to serve as a colonising force in Australian society.2 The saviour in Australian teaching is still a serious part of the discourse and can be seen in programs such as Teach for Australia where high performing students are provided with alternative pathways to teaching than Initial Teacher Education (Skourdoumbis, 2012). In Christine’s dedication to the children, staff and community there is an element of this notion of the saviour; of her understanding of her role as principal as being a ministry. What is important here, however, is although Christine demonstrated an understanding of the symbolic violence perpetuated against the children and families through her recognition of the damage that schools and schooling can do to children, she appeared not to be particularly reflexive about the dangers of assuming this kind of saviour positioning. Her commitment to the community is made particularly difficult because of the relative isolation of the school, and the number of children who come by bus, but this relationship is something that she tried to build early on. In particular, she connects with pre-school parents at the on-site kinder. Christine explained: So I make sure I’m down there every week, chatting to parents beforehand and afterwards just getting to know them, becoming familiar with them and building those relationships as well because that’s really important. That communication that we do is really clear and right to the point.

Additionally, Christine related that she and the ACPS staff are cognisant of how the children are coming to school: You notice that somebody’s looking a bit, you know, shabby. The children say, ‘Ooh well we’re living in the car at the moment, because we got thrown out of our house and can’t pay 2

Likewise Benjamin Doxtdator (2019) relates his experiences as a First Nations student in Canada’s coded white schooling, and Ann Milne (2016) discusses the ‘whitestreaming’ of New Zealand schools where the normative student is white.

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the rent’. I’ve put families in my car and driven them in to [town] to go grocery shopping because they’ve had no food for that night’s dinner. And we can connect them with all the local charities. And I say, ‘It’s alright, you know, nobody’s going to know’. And other principals go, ‘But that’s not a principal’s role!’ And I say, ‘Why isn’t it?’ Because ultimately, that child coming to school who’s got no food and is going home to no food can’t learn. Why wouldn’t you do that? Isn’t that putting out the welcome hand and saying, ‘We care about you?’ That family needs support, so you do it. It’s time well spent.

In this quote Christine recounted that her principal colleagues question her involvement in helping the families in her community, ‘but that’s not a principal’s role!’ In Chap. 3, the contemporary field of public education was explored through the moves of individualisation, regulation and responsibilisation related to accountability regimes imposed from the fields dominating and rupturing education, such as geopolitical and economic fields. These neoliberal technologies make principals individually responsible for the (measurable) learning outcomes of the children in the school, even though, through the media, schools are increasingly being made responsible for social problems in society. As Bob Lingard and colleagues (Lingard et al., 2014) argue, data-driven accountabilities have ‘changed what is counted as social justice in education’ (p. 710), re-articulating justice as equity measured in abstract numerical and comparative ways. These ignore the human relationships that are key to the success of the educational enterprise. Raising student achievement on measurable learning outcomes is the raison d’etre of principal practice according to the logics of the public education field, having undergone a reconfiguring from the largely gendered work of classroom teachers to the responsibility of principals (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014; Blackmore and Sachs, 2007). Christine, however, does see the fact that some of the families in her community might be homeless as part of her responsibility as an educational leader in ensuring the safety of the children in her community. This is not a responsibility that is necessarily shared amongst her principal peers, as is clear in her quote above. She has thus responsibilised herself for the welfare of her community where in the past the traditional social services, reeling from over one billion dollars of cuts since 2013 (Australian Council of Social Service, 2018), would have stepped in. The origin of her commitment to these families is likely based on her own experiences as a child and young adult where the charity stepped in to help her mother and supported her going to university. What is key here is that Christine is stepping in and filling the gaps left by the increased privatisation of social services that have occurred over successive neoliberal governments, something that apparently other principals in her network do not do. The neoliberal technologies influencing public education exploit Christine’s discourses of maternal care, loving and missionary zeal, producing and profiting from her gendered (white and classed) habitus. These ideas are further explored in Chap. 8. Julie McLeod, however, offers a counter-argument to the negative connotations that self-responsibilisation can carry and argues that through the feminist ethics of care, a shift in the critical gaze from self-responsibility to a ‘recognition of relational responsibility for others’ is required (McLeod, 2017, p. 46). Likewise, anthropologists Trnka and Trundle (2014) make the same call through a concern that the term

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‘responsibility’, a key part of a caring society, has been hijacked through neoliberal technologies. Christine’s ministry to her community is realised in McLeod’s (2017) exploration of responsibility as relational and therefore both a practice and a disposition, and as ‘relations of love, care, solidarity and responsibility’ necessary within frameworks of equality and debates about educational purpose (p. 53). Christine’s rejection of her principal peers assertion that her care for the community is not part of her job indicate her reliance, not on the received wisdom of her colleagues and the educational field in general, but on her own understandings (gendered, raced and classed) of her role as an educational leader where she is herself the subject of responsibilisation for this community. Significantly, Christine is very aware, perhaps because of her own experiences, of the feelings of shame and guilt that people who are experiencing economic hardship feel, and this is clear when she states, ‘nobody’s going to know’. It is established that shame, as well as stigma, powerlessness and disrespect, are social dimensions related to poverty across the global north and south, and across developed and developing countries (Jo, 2013). Walker and colleagues (2013) argue that ‘poverty-related shame increases social exclusion, reduces self-esteem and social capital and cumulatively inhibits effective agency’ (p. 231). Christine’s recognition of the need to protect parents from the stigma of needing help highlight her relationship with the ethics of care (Noddings, 2012), but paradoxically she is very forthright with her own experiences of the support she herself received. While she rejected the othering of parents experiencing hardship, common in neoliberal times, Christine simultaneously holds views about the lack of aspirations of the children and their families, relating, ‘so what we’ve tried to do is raise aspirations of the children, but we’re raising aspirations of the parents as well’. This positioning reflects Christine’s acceptance of the arguments of merit and aspirations that are technologies of a neoliberalised education field (Pimlott-Wilson, 2017; Zipin et al., 2015). This suggests a possible blindness in her critical reflexivity to the ways in which individuals have been responsibilised and the ways in which poor communities are shaped by these discourses, thus perpetuating symbolic violence. One of the key features of a social justice leader is critical reflexivity (Chap. 2). The implications of this potential blindness in critical reflexivity for our understandings about social justice leadership are explored in Chap. 8. Christine assiduously worked to increase social capital for the children and their families through connecting with charitable organisations, local cultural organisations such as the Men’s Shed and the Country Women’s Association, and funding bodies: So really connecting in with the local organisations, I view it as part of my work. I’ve never been one to sort of sit in my office all day and, and look at figures. It’s about what’s actually going on that’s affecting the kids. And the welfare side of things is huge here, so every time I’m out somewhere I’m looking for ways to help support it.

Some of these organisations have a long-term commitment in the school mentoring and working with individual children. The Men’s Shed (a community-based nonprofit organisation), for example, provides regular mentoring for individual children

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creating strong relationships for them. In linking families to networks of support, Christine drew on out-of-school resources that attempt to build the social capital of her school, as she details in the above quote. But, significantly, as outlined in the section above, Christine has also worked to build cultural capital through educating parents, for example, in how to read and play with their children, and providing information on adult learning and career pathways to parents. Christine notes, ‘We’ve got parents going, ‘I’m actually going to study”. Christine’s commitment to the families of the ACPS community is clear in the way that she observed, recognised and attended to their needs, which can be thought of as a form of ministry. There are potential problematics in her missionary zeal, however, and these have been suggested in the notion of the white woman saviour. Her ministry can also be seen in the way in which she valued her role as a mentor in growing the leadership potential in, not just her own staff at ACPS, but other teachers and leaders in her education networks. This is discussed in the following section.

7.3.3 Mentor Not only does Christine have a commitment to the staff, children and families at ACPS, she reported that she also has a deep commitment to mentoring future leaders, admitting, ‘It’s a passion of mine’. Oplatka (2010) argues that late career principals may turn to thoughts of legacy as their experience and knowledge is consolidated. Christine remarked that she sees mentoring ‘as part of my role too, of where I am with my leadership. If you can’t impart and develop new leaders coming on, then what’s your role been about?’. Through her instructional and dialogic leadership, explored in the preceding sections, she noted that middle leadership is well developed in her school: The most important thing we’ve got at the school, our best resource is our teachers. It is people. So we invest in them. We’ve developed a real middle leadership within the school as well. Everybody has responsibilities. Even my [educational support] staff have responsibilities. What we say is important for one, is important for all. ES staff train with the teaching staff. We all do [professional development] together and we’re committed to that. We are all on the same path. We’re all headed in the same direction and we all talk the same language. We’re all responsible for every child in the school, not just the ones in your grade.

The leadership team meeting I observed included two graduate teachers and two experienced teachers, all of whom led different discussion on agenda items related to their portfolios, supporting Christine’s assertion of building middle leadership in the school. Dispersal of leadership is a key component of leadership in the social justice literature (Brown et al., 2011; Smyth, 2012). Christine was adamant that the most valuable resource in the school is the people. In the quote above, she noted that she has a democratic approach to professional development and the educational support staff participate, with the teachers, in all professional learning. This was confirmed in my observation of a leadership meeting where the staff discussed an upcoming professional development in which all staff would be participating. Her

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mantra that we are all responsible for every child in the school is key to her approach in developing capacity in her school. However, in this quote there is a strong sense, again, of Sennet’s (1998) dangerous pronoun ‘we’ (discussed above). Additionally, this quote is also reminiscent of the visioning that Courtney and Gunter (2015) liken to totalitarian practice. They contend that visioning is a control practice and provides agency for the principal ‘through direction setting, charismatic command of loyalty and commitment, and through the right to manage others’ attitudes, activity and performance’ (p. 7) (original emphasis). Vision is also the first of the Principal Requirements in the Australian Principal Standards (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014). Christine repeats the phrase we are all…, but what is not clear is the repercussions for staff if these visions are not shared. Christine also participated in several other mentoring opportunities, both formal and informal. She has, for example, formally mentored aspiring principals from a leadership institute of the education authority; she informally mentored a principal from her regional network; she mentored high performing students from within Initial Teacher Education programs; as well as mentoring within her school. She does wryly note, however, that she ‘may have taken too much on’. Her commitment to realising potential in those she mentors seems likely to be related to her habitus structured through her own experiences with the charity that supported her and her family. As discussed above, her sense of gratitude and her desire to pay that kindness forward is often raised in conversation. Mentoring can have positive and negative effects on mentors. Positive outcomes include such things as confidence and personal fulfilment, while negative outcomes can include lack of time for planning and mentoring (Ehrich et al., 2004). Christine is passionate about her mentoring roles, but as she noted above, in taking on too much she may be time poor. Christine relates that she has made a recent commitment to herself not to work past 5.30 pm in the evening, but at the same time she says that during school hours her priority is the children: When it gets to 5.30, it’s tools down and I’m leaving. I’ve been really good with that, until last week. Last week I had some 7 o’clock nights, and then I had taken things home and worked until midnight. That takes its toll. My husband works in Melbourne a couple of nights a week and so I’ve got myself into the only nights that I’ll work at home are the two nights that he’s in Melbourne. I’ve recently had some complex things to work through, so I just put the hours in to do it. When I’m here [at school], if there’s a child that needs support, or teacher, I’m free to actually do that. That’s my work. That’s my priority. That’s what’s important, so the teachers can keep teaching. That’s my job. And everything that I do is about doing the best so that things are better for these kids.

Christine’s stated passion and commitment to mentoring, and the children and staff in her school, requires significant emotional labour, and as she notes above, it takes its toll. This is deeply concerning as the complexity of educational leadership in marginalised communities is likely to be even greater than those of advantaged communities. Principal wellbeing is one of the determinants of school development, teacher satisfaction and student performance (Tikkanen et al., 2017). The yearly Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey for 2020

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reports that principals work up to 65 h a week, with 70% working more than 50 h a week; they experience much higher levels of job demands, emotional demands and emotional labour, up to two times that of the general population; the two main sources of stress are the quantity of work, and the lack of time to focus on teaching and learning (Riley et al., 2021). With principals experiencing a greater risk of poor health and wellbeing than the general population, burnout is a very real prospect (Beausaert et al., 2016). In fact, as reported recently in The Age newspaper, it is increasingly difficult to attract teachers into the principalship because they see their own principals managing gruelling workloads and workplace stress, as well as violence at school and challenging parents (Cook, 2019; Heffernan et al., 2022). This is an issue that researchers such as Pat Thomson and colleagues have been repeatedly suggesting is of deep concern for the future of education (Barty et al., 2005; Thomson, 2009). While Christine recognised that her workload may take its toll, she related that she prioritises her work day around the needs of the children and staff at ACPS, and has had to break her self-imposed rules around the length of her working day. In the field of public education (discussed in Chap. 3), the discourses of educational leadership have increasingly become those of entrepreneurialism (Miller, 2018; Niesche and Thomson, 2017), which foregrounds more masculinist ways of leading (Dean and Ford, 2017). Dean and Ford (2017) argue, for example, that the idea of an entrepreneur is based on a heroic rational man. The entrepreneurial leader by necessity takes on corporate subjectivities and as Cohen (2014) argues, the ‘good’ neoliberal principal is ‘devoting much of their time to public relations management, and … becoming increasingly immersed in the competitive ethos of school ranking systems’ (p. 1). The entrepreneurial expectations of contemporary principals often come at the expense of concerns around the moral purpose of schooling, social justice and welfare concerns for marginalised children and their school communities (Niesche and Thomson, 2017). Christine has taken on board these neoliberal subjectivities. She has no time, for example, for principals who complain about the compliance requirements from the Victorian Education Department, remarking that they should ‘get over it and just do it…it’s part of our job…don’t whinge about it’. Her work for the education department on documents such as her own Performance and Development Plan and her school’s Annual Improvement Plan are so finely detailed that she reports her line managers tell her they don’t need so much detail. She spent a great deal of time applying for grant money that she comes across: Umm, you know I’ve spent last week, you know three nights working until midnight doing a digital literacy grant for $50,000. You know, I [recently] got a $100,000 grant…science specialisation grant.

Neische (2010) suggests such things as funding applications, now necessary entrepreneurial educational leadership tasks, are forms of disciplining through documentation, which require increasing amounts of time. While Christine embraces the accountability demands on her time as ‘her job’, her self-responsibilisation in regard to her ministry for the welfare of the families and children in her school community, her commitment to mentoring educators both within her school and outside of it, her monitoring of the staff and children in her school also suggests that she is

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not prepared to give up her moral beliefs about her role as principal. Her ministry and mentoring roles are in addition to her corporate role as a principal, requiring exhaustive working hours and increased emotional labour. Christine’s admission of her regular breaking of her self-imposed rules around the length of her working day thus brings poignancy to her epigraphic quote in which she remarks, ‘If someone asked me what I do each day I couldn’t explain. Or they wouldn’t believe me’.

7.4 Conclusion In this chapter, I have explored Christine’s primary and secondary habitus and how she encounters the education field through the metaphors of monitor, ministry and mentor. I have argued that her experiences in losing her father and a charity stepping in and supporting her have had profound effects on the ways in which she navigates the public education field and to the way in which she approaches the social justice issues in her school. For example, Christine is utterly committed to her school and community and resists field logics when these are in opposition to the beliefs she holds about her role in her community. As argued above, her experiences uniquely position her to empathise with and support the families in her school, and her awareness of the symbolic violence that is thrust upon them seems to be a factor in her care. There are moral and ethical beliefs that she refuses to give up in order to be a ‘good’ principal within the narrow, corporate and entrepreneurial standards that are common in discourses around public education. Whilst she has also taken on board neoliberal subjectivities that influence her leadership practices, seen in her adherence to meritocracy discourses and her devotion to the accountability requirements of the governing education body, she has taken a highly gendered path that must exact an emotional toll. This is a very feminised response that leads to the kinds of burnout we see so often in principals, particularly those who place care for the children, their communities, and their staff at the apex of their principalship. In the following chapter, I draw together the threads that have been teased out in introducing Rachael, Peter and Christine in the preceding chapters. I discuss how the principal is shaped by the neoliberal technologies acting on public schooling; I explore how gender, in particular maternal thinking and the ethics of care, is exploited by these technologies; and I conclude with an exploration of what the data generated in my research means for our understandings about social justice leadership.

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Rivera-McCutchen, R. L. (2014). The moral imperative of social justice leadership: A critical component of effective practice. The Urban Review, 46(4), 747–763. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11256-014-0297-2 Ruddick, S. (1995). Maternal thinking: Toward a politics of peace. Beacon Press. Ruddick, S. (2009). On “Maternal Thinking.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 37(3/4), 305–308. Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the New Capitalism. W. W. Norton & Company. Sergiovanni, T. J. (2015). Strengthening the heartbeat: Leading and learning together in schools. Wiley. Shields, C. M. (2004). Dialogic leadership for social justice: Overcoming pathologies of silence. Educational Administration Quarterly, 40(1), 109–132. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X0325 8963 Shields, C. M. (2010). Transformative leadership: Working for equity in diverse contexts. Educational Administration Quarterly, 46(4), 558–589. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161x1037 5609 Skourdoumbis, A. (2012). Teach for Australia (TFA): Can it overcome educational disadvantage? Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 32(3), 305–315. https://doi.org/10.1080/02188791. 2012.711298 Small, N. (2017). Pierre Bourdieu. In N. Thompson, & G. R. Cox (Eds.), Handbook of the sociology of death, grief, and bereavement: A guide to theory and practice. Routledge. Smyth, J. (2012). The socially just school and critical pedagogies in communities put at a disadvantage. Critical Studies in Education, 53(1), 9–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2012. 635671 Thompson, N., Allan, J., Carverhill, P. A., Cox, G. R., Davies, B., Doka, K., Wittkowski, J. et al. (2016). The case for a sociology of dying, death, and bereavement. Death Studies, 40(3), 172– 181. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2015.1109377 Thomson, P. (2009). School leadership: Heads on the block? Taylor & Francis. Tikkanen, L., Pyhältö, K., Pietarinen, J., & Soini, T. (2017). Interrelations between principals’ risk of burnout profiles and proactive self-regulation strategies. Social Psychology of Education: An International Journal, 20(2), 259–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-017-9379-9 Trnka, S., & Trundle, C. (2014). Competing responsibilities: Moving beyond neoliberal responsibilisation. Anthropological Forum, 24(2), 136–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2013. 879051 Walker, R., Kyomuhendo, G. B., Chase, E., Choudhry, S., Gubrium, E. K., Nicola, J. Y., Lødemel, I., Mathew, L., Mwiine, A., Ming, Y. A., & Pellissery, S. (2013). Poverty in global perspective: Is shame a common denominator? Journal of Social Policy, 42(2), 215–233. https://doi.org/10. 1017/s0047279412000979 Wilkinson, J. (2018). “We’re going to call our kids ‘African Aussies’”: Leading for diversity in regional Australia. In J. Wilkinson &, L. Bristol (Eds.), Educational leadership as a culturallyconstructed practice: New directions and possibilities (pp. 54–74). Routledge. Wilson, C. M., Douglas, K. S., & Lyon, D. R. (2011). Violence against teachers: Prevalence and consequences. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 26(12), 2353–2371. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0886260510383027 Yoon, I. H. (2016). Trading stories: Middle-class white women teachers and the creation of collective narratives about students and families in a diverse elementary school. Teachers College Record, 118(2), 1–54. Zenger, J. (2018, April 8). The confidence gap in men and women: Why it matters and how to overcome it. Forbes, April. Zipin, L., Sellar, S., Brennan, M., & Gale, T. (2015). Educating for futures in marginalized regions: A sociological framework for rethinking and researching aspirations. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(3), 227–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.839376

Chapter 8

Socially Just Principals in Unjust Times? A Discussion

Abstract This chapter brings together the rich narratives explored in the previous chapters. It explores key findings in relation to social justice leading practices. Firstly it examines the implications of the spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage and how this influences leadership in schools. It explores leadership, intersectionality (gender, class and race) and social justice understandings through the very different life experiences of Rachael, Peter and Christine. The social justice understandings and practices of the participants are further examined through their resistance and compliance with the expectations of their governing public school system. The social justice disjunctions of the participants are explored through their varied understanding of merit and aspiration within their communities. The implications of these explorations are outlined. Keywords Spatiality · Intersectionality · Resistance · Compliance · Merit · Aspiration · Disjunctions

Niesche (2014) argued that the field of educational leadership scholarship lacks a focus on the struggles that educational leaders face daily in their complex and demanding roles. He argues that research should focus not just on the resistance/ compliance binary, but on studying ‘resistance practices and resistance to practices’ (Niesche, 2014, p. 149). This contention led me to consider how principals of public primary schools, located in some of the most marginalised areas in Victoria, are guided by principles of social justice in increasingly unjust times. The central research question driving this research asked: How do educational leaders address social justice issues in public primary schools located in marginalised areas. The research had a focus on uncovering what educational leaders understand by social justice and how these understandings influenced their leading practices. In Chaps. 5, 6 and 7, I introduced Rachael, Peter and Christine, each recognised by their educational systems as exemplary principals leading primary schools in the most disadvantaged areas in Victoria. In these chapters, through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I explored the participants’ habitus through narratives of their personal lives and work trajectories to explore their understandings of social

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justice. I explored how their habitus encountered the field of public education, as well as the various intersecting fields that rupture the education field, to examine their socially just leading practices. Through these examinations, disjunctions emerged in the articulated understandings of social justice expressed by the participants and their practices. These disjunctions are linked to neoliberal discourses of merit and aspiration. In this chapter I draw together the threads identified in Rachael, Christine and Peter’s narratives. I examine their socially just leading habitus and practices and the ways in which their social justice leadership differed according to their intersectional subjectivities. I examine whether their socially just leading practices are in synchronicity with the performative demands of the neoliberal school (compliance, compromise or contestation). I explore how their practices conform to, or differ, from the social justice leadership scholarship discussed in Chap. 2. In particular, I expand on the disjunctions identified in the participant narratives particularly in the discourses of merit and aspiration that each principal, to varying degrees, exhibits.

8.1 Spatial Justice In Chap. 4 I introduced spatial justice as a lens through which to theorise the consequential geographies of the marginalised communities in which Rachael, Peter and Christine work. Two of these communities, Century Heights and Bonham Hollow, are outer suburban suburbs that were developed and built by the Housing Commission of Victoria to provide public and low-income housing, in part as an attempt to shift criticism of its earlier policies of inner-city high rise developments (Kilmartin, 1988). While some of these outer suburban developments became embroiled in political scandal (Kilmartin, 1988), ultimately suburbs such as Century Heights and Bonham Hollow were built with poor infrastructure to support the increasingly complex needs of the residents that were shifted from inner city locations. For example, poor public transport and a lack of essential retail spaces like grocery and medical practices were common and this remains an issue for residents today, entrenching disadvantage. What is key to this research is that the marginalised contexts of the schools in which Rachael and Peter work are a result of historic urban planning decisions that have created spatial distributions of advantage and disadvantage that continue to resonate some 60 years since the construction of these suburbs. As I argued in Chap. 4, the uneven distribution of advantage and disadvantage creates socio-spatial gaps (Costes, 2014) that has consequences for educational justice for children, particularly in the increasing social segregation of schools (Perry et al., 2022) depending on their location. This is increasingly important as in Australia there is increasingly an expectation that parents and communities will make financial contributions to their public schools (Rowe & Perry, 2021) to fund enrichment programs for students. Victorian parents, in fact, are expected to make the greatest ‘voluntary’ contributions to their children’s schools than any other state in Australia (MacDonald et al., 2023). For schools in communities where collecting such voluntary contributions from parents is difficult,

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the consequences are that they have significantly lower levels discretionary funding, meaning that they may have narrower offerings of curriculum, enhancement, and enrichment programmes for their students (MacDonald et al., 2023). Christine’s rural community, likewise, by its very nature invites an investigation of how justice may be a function of spatiality, particularly how opportunity and access are unequally distributed. The village of Aurora Creek is a small village with a highly transient population servicing agricultural industries, but also offering cheap housing for those that work in the service industries in the adjacent tourist areas where wealthy Melbournians have holiday homes. All three locations in this study are adjacent to neighbouring higher SES areas and following David Harvey (2008, p. 32) this draws attention to these areas as ‘fortified fragments’ of society. Soja (2000, p. 299) suggests this creates ‘archipelagos’ of fortified spaces that exclude ‘others’ through social, economic and political means. It is common in educational research to argue that context matters. I maintain here that the ‘thisness’ of a school, it’s haecceity, is critical for principals to carry out their work in socially just ways. Recognising the community and the location as more than just a geographical place, but the spatio-socio-historical creation of place is key, and Rachael, Peter and Christine do this to varying degrees. Christine, as a long term resident of her rural setting is very aware of the issues of opportunity and access for rural communities. Both Rachael and Christine whose early lives were in similar communities to where they are now principals share similar lived experiences with their communities. Peter, through his experience of working as a Christian missionary with marginalised young people, works as bridge builder in linking supports with his school community. However, when disadvantage becomes concentrated in particular geographic areas, deficit narratives of those communities tend to become a common feature in political rhetoric. A critical lens emphasises how such neighbourhoods are created through ‘the processes of globalisation…and in the way these neighbourhoods come to be constructed as problems with particular sets of social arrangements and ideologies which sustain those arrangements’ (Raffo et al., 2010, pp. 48–49). These neoliberal discourses stereotype neighbourhoods and have an essentialising effect leading to deficit discourses that are hard to resist (Bauder, 2002), and evident to some degree with each of the participants in this study through the discourse of merit and aspirations (discussed below).

8.2 Intersectional Identities and Social Justice Understandings In their pathways to the principalship, Rachael, Peter and Christine were all encouraged by a mentor to apply for their promotions into the principal class. However, Rachael and Christine had both been classroom teachers for 25 years before, as they both suggested, they were ‘pushed’ by a mentor into applying. Peter, on the

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other hand, had five years recent classroom experience, and when he was encouraged to apply for an assistant principal role, he stated that he knew that he was not ‘ready or interested,’ but that he would ‘have a go’. These accounts reflect a well-reported gendered pathway to the principalship. Blackmore and Sachs (2007) reported, for example, that women don’t necessarily see leadership as associated with their ‘everyday practices and personal lives’ (p. 142). This is clear in Christine’s repudiation of formal leadership until she had the opportunity to shadow a principal and make a connection that leadership would allow her the opportunity to broaden her influence. Blackmore and Sachs (2007) argue that whereas women tend to see promotion opportunities as an intensification of labour, men view promotion as ‘leading to more opportunities to delegate and hence more freedom and autonomy’ (p. 142). Peter is the epitome of this approach through deliberately deskilling himself from the pedagogical work of the school, and outsourcing the emotional labour to his assistant principal and leadership team thus leaving him to think about the ‘big picture’. As has been demonstrated in the participant narratives, Peter, Rachael and Christine have particularly gendered ways of leading. Peter’s leadership is steeped in his white Christian and masculinist ways of leading, while both Rachael and Christine (white women) to different degrees, lead from a subject location shaped by their class mobility and an ethics of care and a way of thinking associated with traditional notions of maternal care. This is not to suggest an essentialising of care as women’s nature, but that there has been a ‘feminization of care in most societies around the world’ (Robinson, 2011, p. 9), leading to what Nancy Fraser calls the ‘crisis of care’ stemming from financialised capitalism (2022). Christine and Rachael report that their leadership is ‘collective and relational’ (Blackmore, 2009, p. 77). They both used the phrase, ‘It’s not rocket science’ to describe the work they do, diminishing the complexity of their work. Rachael talked about wanting to be her students’ ‘mother’, and ‘you just have to care’ as the necessary requirements for her leadership. Her caring practices extend to her staff and the community as well as the children, and she demonstrates her trust in her staff in leaving them, for example, to hold leadership meetings when she can’t attend, saying, ‘They know what they’re doing.’ Exploring Rachael’s primary and secondary habitus and her encounters with the field revealed a highly developed reflexivity. This is linked both to her experiences growing up working-class, but also her experiences as the mother of a child with complex and high needs. As discussed in Chap. 5, McKeever and Miller (2004) argue that hegemonic discourses of motherhood (some mothering is valorised more than others), childhood and disability have an impact on mothers’ social positioning and isolation. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) argue that when an agent is confronted with challenging events, a self-questioning is generated, bringing the unconscious habitus to the level of consciousness resulting in ‘habitual reflexivity’ (Sweetman, 2003, p. 544). Those with habitual reflexivity, like Rachael, are better able to navigate multiple and complex fields and use their capitals to ‘play the game’ of principalship for the benefit of their school community. Christine also extends her care to her staff through checking in on their wellbeing, for example, after domestic violence training, and to the community in supporting them through difficulties such as homelessness.

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She does, however, reveal a more traditional understanding of her positional role as principal, when she relates that she ‘gives’ her staff opportunities. The nature of the care that both Rachael and Christine exhibit, however, may also be seen as over-surveillance. Both Rachael and Christine report that caring for their staff is a key part of their leadership role, surfacing problematics in the asymmetries of power. As has been argued, the desire to ‘do good’, with the best of intentions, can have negative or harmful consequences (Archer et al., 2017; Niesche, 2017; Robinson, 2011; Wilkinson, 2008). The classroom staff were not interviewed in this research so it is not possible to draw any conclusion in this respect, however in observations of Rachael and Christine, they both had warm relationships with staff in the interactions I observed. The care that Rachael and Christine exhibit in their leading practices could be seen as a subversive response to the managerialism expected of them in neoliberal times. Certainly, the emotional labour that is entailed in their ethics of care is greater for them than for Peter, who outsources the emotional demands of his work to his staff. However, as discussed in Christine’s narrative, she is not prepared to give up her moral beliefs about her role as principal and because she has taken on board neoliberal subjectivities and values the compliance activities that are required of principals, her beliefs about her moral purpose are additional to her corporate role. Rachael, also, will not give up her moral beliefs about her role as a principal although she is more likely to resist external accountabilities than either Peter or Christine. This means that both Christine and Rachael work punishing hours because neither of them is willing to do compliance and administrative work during school hours because they put the children and community first. This reflects the insidious way in which neoliberalism has co-opted the caring ways in which Rachael and Christine lead their schools. Feminist scholars argue that the governmentality of neoliberalism works, not just in reshaping markets etc., but also in reshaping subjectivities (Adamson, 2017; Brown, 2009). This ‘deems particular mindsets, attitudes and dispositions (not just skills) of a (citizen)-worker to be more or less valuable and desirable’ creating flexible, individualistic and entrepreneurial feminine subjectivities (Adamson, 2017, p. 317). Through the neoliberal moves of self-management and self-discipline, women are expected ‘to present all their actions as freely chosen’ (Gill & Scharff, 2013, p. 7). This is clear in the ways in which both Christine and Rachael have been responsibilised and made themselves responsible for the larger welfare concerns of the communities around their schools, in gendered ways that Peter has not been. Both Christine and Rachael have taken on the roles that traditional welfare organisations of the past, defunded by government, no longer fulfil. The neoliberal ideologies at work burrow in under the surface, they play on Christine and Rachael’s discourses of maternal care, loving and missionary zeal to produce a particular kind of habitus— the female principal as endlessly caregiving, endlessly on a mission to save. The neoliberal agenda in public education produces, profits from and exploits this kind of gendered (raced and classed) principal habitus. The differences in the way in which the participants in this research lead suggest that it is Rachael and Christine,

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the women principals, who carry the brunt of the caring burden in their highly disadvantaged communities because of the very kinds of habitus that they bring into these schools. The concept of the ‘greedy institution’, originally developed by Lewis Coser (1967), is as relevant now, perhaps more so in these unjust times, than it was fifty years ago. Greedy institutions seek undivided loyalty and commitment (Coser, 1967) and ‘tend to rely on voluntary compliance and to evolve means of activating loyalty and commitment. … Greedy Institutions aim at maximizing assent to their styles of life by appearing highly desirable to the participants’ (Coser, 1974, p. 6). There is symbolic violence evident in the ways in which Christine and Rachael’s (invisible) emotional labour through their gendered habitus have been taken up and used by the education system, in ways that Peter avoids through his outsourcing of emotional labour. Blackmore and Sachs (2007) argue that greedy institutions have ‘particular effects in terms of the quality of life for women’ (p. 53), and this is very clear in the ways in which Rachael and Christine’s avowed commitment to the children, wider community and staff during working hours mean that their administrative and compliance tasks are undertaken outside of their normal working days. The participants’ classed habitus also intersected with their moral commitments to their work in marginalised communities. This is particularly evident for Rachael whose working-class childhood and early teaching experiences in working-class suburbs led her back to a school very similar to her own allowing her to ‘find fit’, like a ‘fish in water’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 127). Peter, too, discussed finding fit with his school through his secondary habitus based on his years of religious advocacy work with marginalised young people. It is his othering of his community (e.g. his own normal childhood) that reveals his classed habitus. Likewise Christine’s complex relationship with class mobility, based on the poverty she experienced after losing her father and the support of a charity that allowed her to attend teachers college, was revealed in her understanding and empathy with the families in her community, particularly in understanding the shame they may feel. Of the three principals, Rachael appears to have greater reflexivity reflecting Sinclair and Wilson’s (2002) argument that for leaders who have experienced disadvantage, the ‘mechanisms of systematic discrimination [become] more real and observable’ (p. 29). As a result, such leaders, particularly educational leaders, are likely to be more reflexive, challenge deficit discourses and to understand the reproduction of advantage. In the following section, I turn to the ways in which Rachael, Peter and Christine’s socially just leading practices are implicated in how their habitus encounters the public education field. In particular, I explore how they comply, conform to or resist compliance and accountability regimes of the neoliberal school.

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8.3 Resistance and/or Compliance—Socially Just Practices In Chap. 3, I outlined the perilous position of principals in the field of Australian public schooling. The effects of neoliberal regimes in the rupturing of the borders of the education field have led to increasing accountability, where principals are individually responsible for the ‘success’ of their schools based on narrow measures of attainment. Principals may face disciplinary measures as a result of not meeting agreed benchmarks, making their work risky. These measures work to narrow the curriculum. As Connell (2015) argues, the policy cascades of the last three decades have worked to increase the hold that the market logic has on all levels of education. Inevitably, as Heffernan (2016) demonstrates, early career ‘principals’ behaviours have changed to align with the emphasis on data, but more than this … their … thoughts and beliefs [have become] aligned with system expectations’ (Heffernan, 2016, p. 386). This is a critical observation when considering how principals in schools located in marginalised communities work to address the educational disadvantage that the children in these areas experience. Rachael, Peter and Christine have all been recognised as exemplary by their education authorities and are late career principals. Each reported that they intend to work until their retirement in the schools where they were principals. In this study, Rachael, Peter and Christine have all taken on board neoliberal subjectivities to different degrees, even though they are late in their careers. While each of them practises a strategic resistance to neoliberal technologies in some ways, in others they have found themselves being ‘surreptitiously normalized into working in particular ways that satisfy disciplinary requirements’ (Niesche & Thomson, 2017, p. 200). Peter most clearly exhibits some ways in which neoliberal subjectivities have shaped his leadership habitus. For example, his deliberate deskilling from the pedagogical work of the school places him in an entrepreneurial and managerial role, allowing him to work on, for example, attracting corporate funding or seeking the media to profile the school in the news. He appears to accept the policy scripts in which teachers have been framed as the ‘problem’ in school improvement (Fitzgerald & Savage, 2013), feeling no apparent concern about the high turnover of staff in his school. He has co-opted disciplinary measures in surveilling and controlling his staff. The mandated pedagogy and curriculum at his school, for example, creates a highly performative and precarious environment for his teachers. By his description, the teachers work in a low-trust, high-surveillance environment, and ‘fear’ him should he request a meeting. He has a team of experts he trusts to manage, or surveil, the teachers ensuring their compliance. The teachers are individualised, regulated and responsibilised. This suggests Peter’s leadership habitus has found fit within the accountability measures that are the technologies of neoliberalism. Peter’s white male Christian leadership practices align with the logics of practice within the educational leadership field. Peter’s strategic resistance takes the form of, as he reports, ‘keeping my head down’. In other words, as Thomson (2008) describes it, he ‘does just enough of what is required to maintain good relations and minimise interference’ (p. 88). In a contradiction, however, he does court exposure for what he sees as his successes,

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such as the NAPLAN results he shares at our first meeting. Peter’s stated beliefs about the purpose of education, as being ‘a pathway…for kids to have a range of experiences and opportunities presented to them’ are at odds, however, with the way he describes the success of his school through the narrow measure of NAPLAN results. Thomson (2009) argues narrow measures such as high stakes testing may only ‘appear to show that a difference is being made’ (p. 130). Christine, likewise, has internalised neoliberal subjectivities as part of her leadership habitus but she also maintains some resistance to the logics of the field of education. For example, she is resistant to the ways in which her principal peers question the welfare role she takes with the families in her community, and particularly in disavowing the policy scripts about framing teachers as the problem (Fitzgerald & Savage, 2013). Notably, she insists, ‘there’s no such thing as a bad teacher. There’s teachers that are unsupported and unprepared’. In taking on these welfare concerns, and responsibilising herself for the welfare of not just children and staff, but for the families in the community, she is stepping in to fill in the gaps left behind by privatisation of the social service sectors. In terms of her positional role as principal, this constitutes invisible labour because this work is not measured to determine the ‘success’ or otherwise of her school. This form of responsibilisation also plays on her gendered habitus as the white woman saviour (Chap. 7). Connell (2015) argues that neoliberal technologies, rather than freeing schools from bureaucracy, are tying them ‘more tightly into a system of remote control, operated by funding mechanisms, testing systems, certification, audit and surveillance mechanisms’ (p. 192). Christine’s neoliberal leadership habitus is visible through her scathing view of principals who find fault with compliance requirements for example, remarking, ‘get over it…it’s your job’. Likewise her assiduous and successful work in seeking and applying for external funding grants suggest her acceptance of the new ‘normal’ entrepreneurial principalship and governmentality (Niesche, 2010). Like Peter, there is surveillance of staff at Christine’s school. However this surveillance is rooted in an ethics of care both for her staff, the children and their families in her community. Peter’s surveillance differs in that it takes a disciplinary and compliance focus. What is key in Christine’s case, is the way in which her surveillance of staff, through her ethics of care, is co-opted and ritualised by the neoliberal state (Fitzgerald & Savage, 2013). Rachael is open about her resistance to external accountabilities. She actively ignores policy directives, such as deleting emails, when she has questions about their value and relevance to her highly disadvantaged context. She relies on her own moral and ethical beliefs about education, children and their families and was tested on this early in her tenure as principal. When she took on the role at CHPS there was already a leadership, as well as both a literacy and numeracy, coach in the school. She did not agree with what she saw as a rigid approach to leadership that the coach espoused, and she relates that it took courage to resist this knowledgeable other. She reports that her confidence in her abilities as a teacher supported her in her resistance to rigid leadership strategies, along with the knowledge acquired as part of a recently-completed Masters in Educational Leadership that informed and supported her leadership decisions.

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Rachael’s skill at ‘playing the game’ to benefit her school and community, is seen in the way that she learned quickly who to contact at her governing educational authority to get the answer that she wanted to any concern she had. Because she is a late career principal, and leads a hard-to-staff disadvantaged school, she suggests that she has a lack of concern about her career so she is able to make dangerous decisions, deligitimising the power of external accountabilities. These dangerous decisions could indeed be risky for her career, and the consequences of being out of step with the prevailing logics of the field have been highlighted in leadership literature (Courtney, 2017; Niesche & Thomson, 2017). In exploring resistance strategies with a principal committed to holistic education, Heffernan (2018) reports that the principal felt that she had a ‘good track record’ with the education department so she ‘was left alone’, but noted her strict adherence to compliance regulations (p. 9). In interview, acting principal Steven (Peter’s assistant principal), suggested that he would never question the authority of his line manager to shape his work. Rachael has excellent relationships with her line managers, which I observed in her school, and she is a recognised exemplary principal, supporting my contention that it is both Rachael’s late career stage, as well as her management of her relationships that support her disregard for external accountabilities. As Rachael suggests, in making decisions that might not meet ‘the rules’, ‘at the end of the day, no one cares about the kids [in this school] the way we do’. Unlike Peter and Christine who report that they measure their success through their NAPLAN results, Rachael states that she measures her success by ‘the feel of the school, the engagement of the children as I walk around, feedback from volunteers and others, increased enrolments’. She also suggests that she does not ‘really care about NAPLAN’. Assistant principal Lucy, however, reports that Rachael does care and like other schools NAPLAN is one of the data sources that they use in planning and as evidence. Rachael spends a considerable amount of her time, like Christine, building external networks and applying for external funding. Peter does this as well, however he outsources the application work to others on his leadership team. In their research about the engagement of principals with equity agendas, Molla and Gale (2019) argued that ‘compliance is a more likely stance of principals in disadvantaged schools whereas contest is a more likely stance of principals in advantaged schools’ (p. 3). My research challenges this contention because each of the principals in this study was resistant in some ways. Rachael’s resistance takes the form of doing what she, in consultation with her staff, believes is right for her school and community, regardless of what the education authority directs. However, Rachael must do the compliance work that is mandated and this means that like Christine this is done as another layer in her role. Like Christine, she prioritises the invisible work in caring about the welfare of the children, staff and community during school hours, meaning that the administrative and compliance work, work that Peter outsources to others on his leadership team, is done after school, in the evenings and on weekends. The invisible labour that I have suggested both Christine and Rachael undertake falls outside of traditional, although contested, understandings of invisible labour as unpaid, and draws on a more recent understanding as:

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activities that occur within the context of paid employment that workers perform in response to requirements (either implicit or explicit) from employers and that are crucial for workers to generate income, to obtain or retain their jobs, and to further their careers, yet are often overlooked, ignored, and/or devalued by employers, consumers, workers, and ultimately the … system itself. (Crain et al., 2016, p. 6)

I suggest further modification to this understanding tying it to the emotional labour of the feminised ethics of care work that both Christine and Rachael perform, and the maternal thinking that characterises Rachael’s thinking. I characterise this work as invisible because, although all schools are expected to fulfil welfare responsibilities, despite the removal of funding for much of this work, this is not measurable within neoliberal accountabilities and is consequently not valued in these regimes. The result is that principals like Christine and Rachael work gruelling hours in order to realise their own moral and ethical understandings of their work, at great cost to their own health and wellbeing, while principals such as Peter outsource this work to others. In the following section, I explore how Rachael, Peter and Christine’s social justice understandings and practices relate to previous social justice leadership scholarship. I explore this in relationship to the normative view of social justice leadership synthesised from the research in Chap. 2. In particular, I expand on the disjunctions identified in Chaps. 5, 6 and 7, of Rachael, Peter and Christine’s articulated understandings of social justice, and their practices. These disjunctions relate to discourses of merit and aspiration.

8.4 Merit and Aspirations—Social Justice Disjunctions Each of the participants expressed their understanding and belief that their role as principal was as an instrument of justice for the children in their communities. As has been argued in the preceding chapters, the early life and career trajectories of each influenced the ways in which their primary and secondary habitus encountered the field in their work as social justice leaders. But each, in their way, held some notion of deficit of their communities. These disjunctions were most often expressed through the discourses of meritocracy and aspiration, and through the othering of their communities. What emerges is the importance of challenging symbolic violence, and the reflexivity required for this. In this section I explore what this means for social justice for their communities. In Chap. 2, based on a survey of a wide range of international literature, I synthesised a series of social justice practices that represent a normative view of what leadership for social justice might look like. According to this literature, a leader for social justice will: . Champion a focus on pedagogy where leadership will focus on improving student learning outcomes, but also on learning with staff. . Be critically reflective, and critically reflexive. . Promote a shared ethos of social justice as a key part of the school’s agenda.

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. Disperse leadership across the school, support collaborative decision-making and champion the development of leadership in others. . Implement structures and strategies that support smooth running of the school. . Seek to develop networks and partnerships with local organisations and businesses that create powerful educational connections. . Champion supportive social relationships with and between staff, students and in the staff, developing of a culture of care which encourages teacher professional risk taking and leads to high trustlow surveillance environments where the teachers have the support of school leadership to do their job. SJLs will promote inclusion, giving voice to teachers, parents and students, particularly to the marginalised. . Be activist and political. They will understand marginalisation—and understand that forms of marginalisation such as racism (sexism, homophobia etc.) are not the ‘behavior of an individual but explore how structures and processes constitute systemic cultures and forms of racism, and seek to openly acknowledge and address where it occurs’ (Niesche, 2017, p. 246). They will challenge power relations and structural inequalities and deficit discourses, promote equal opportunities for marginalised children. . Think critically about leadership discourse and what is being sold. Peter’s long history in working with marginalised youth as a Christian missionary, his advocacy and lobbying with social service groups, his participation in mainstreaming his organisation into a large provider of social services and his articulation of the social justice imperatives in his role as a principal might suggest that he would embody the normative ideals of a social justice leader outlined above. While he embodies many of the ideals, such as a firm focus on pedagogy, leadership dispersal and developing extensive networks to support the work in his school, there were aspects to his leadership that were troubling in relation to the continuing symbolic violence that is wrought on the community. Of particular note is his othering of the school community, and his adherence to the rhetoric of aspiration and social mobility. On narrow measures of high-stakes testing like NAPLAN, the raison d’etre of the neoliberal school, BHPS is very successful and Peter’s assiduous work in putting a leadership team together focussed on creating pedagogies and curriculum suggests that his leading strategies have paid off. Raising the aspirations of the students, and their families, in their highly disadvantaged communities was a pre-occupation of both Peter and Christine. This reflects their acceptance of the policy discourses around aspiration for low socio-economic students resulting from the ‘ideological ascendency of neoliberal modes of rationality, or governmentality’ (Zipin et al., 2015, p. 228). Brown (2013) defines aspiration as ‘a particular form of neoliberal social hope based around promoting individualised social mobility’ (p. 419). This makes the individual responsible for their lack of social mobility, and turns our attention ‘away from social structures and institutions and on to individuals’ (Francis & Mills, 2012, p. 256). This is a deficit discourse that essentialises marginalised communities and frames working-class children as problems when they do not ‘fit into the regulatory ideal of achievement via aspiration’ (Best, 2017, p. 37). Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson (2011) argue that when

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principals characterise working-class families and children as low in aspiration, they are in fact othering them as the opposite of ‘idealised middle class parents who are constructed in wider political and policy discourse as having the appropriate aspirations, values and financial resources to support their children’ (p. 84). Likewise, Spohrer and colleagues (2018) suggest that raising aspirations ‘can be divided along class lines into those who can be trusted to exercise their freedom appropriately and those who need to be more tightly governed in order to develop the desired attitudes and behaviours’ (p. 337). This highlights the subtlety of how power and privilege operate to become an invisible factor in a principal’s habitus leading to misrecognition of the systemic and structural causes that contribute to the residualisation of marginalised communities. Peter is reflective, rather than reflexive, in his understanding of what he sees as his strengths and weaknesses, building a strong leadership team to compensate for his perceived weaknesses. His experience with marginalised youth and communities in his missionary past suggests that he recognises what might be missing for families in his community and in some ways he strives to provide them, such as finding funding to employ a lawyer to provide legal help. He has found funding to provide experiences for some of the children in the school, such as overseas travel. He is not, however, reflexive about the ways in which his deficit discourses of residualised communities may perpetuate symbolic violence. His practices suggest a common form of misrecognition described above. Likewise, Christine’s gendered leadership embodies many of the ideals of a normative social justice leader. Her experiences in her youth and young adulthood where she was supported by a charity that took interest in her, and the violence that she experienced as a teacher have clearly influenced her leadership habitus that is deeply rooted in the ethics of care. Christine extends this care to her staff, unlike Peter, and also to the families of the children in her school. As previously discussed, like Peter, Christine has taken on board neoliberal subjectivities, especially in the way that she champions the compliance activities imposed by the education authorities. Christine’s experiences in losing her father at a young age, her complex relationship with class mobility and the violence that she has experienced have influenced her reflexivity, and the ways in which she empathises and cares for the families and children of her school, as well as the teachers. There are disjunctions, however, in the way in which she articulates her leadership for social justice, and her acceptance of the discourses of merit and aspiration that are technologies of the neoliberalised education field (Best, 2017, p. 47). Rachael’s social justice beliefs and understandings are expressed as her moral purpose as a principal. Her social justice leadership differs to both Christine and Peter in that she appears more reflexive than her colleagues and recognises the larger social and economic conditions for the residualisation of the community in which she is principal. Like Christine, she has responsibilised herself for the welfare of the children and their families in her school, but also for the wider community. As argued in Chap. 5, leaders with a keen sense of social justice have typically encountered events at a personal level that make them reflect on the world and their place in it. They have experienced a shift in consciousness. For example, Sinclair and Wilson argue

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that for leaders who have experienced disadvantage, the ‘mechanisms of systematic discrimination [become] more real and observable’ (Best, 2017; Brown, 2013; Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2011; Pimlott-Wilson, 2017; Zipin et al., 2015). As a result, such leaders, particularly educational leaders, are likely to be more reflexive and more likely to challenge deficit discourses and to understand the reproduction of advantage. Rachael’s keen reflexivity is likely the result of a shift in consciousness in her primary and secondary habitus through her experiences both as a parent of a profoundly disabled child, her early life as an immigrant child of working-class parents and her early teaching career spent in working-class suburbs. There are, however, disjunctures evident between her beliefs and practices. For example, her adherence to the discourse of meritocracy suggests responsibilisation and the internalising of neoliberal subjectivities within her secondary habitus, although these seem less influential in her practices than with Christine and Peter. Meritocracy has been a key feature of Australian mythscapes: ‘the land of the ‘fair go’, the sentiment that everybody should have an equal opportunity to improve their lives and to chase rewards based upon their talent and hard work’ (Crawford, 2010, p. 4).1 The suggestion that education operates as a great social equaliser, however, is largely untrue with low student achievement correlating with highly disadvantaged communities since the introduction of compulsory schooling (Crawford, 2010; Mills & Gale, 2010). Bourdieu (2010) and Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) argued that the idea of meritocratic opportunities arising through schooling misrecognises hereditary privileges that most commonly breed success in school. Marginalisation is rendered invisible through these deceptive ideologies (Doxtdator, 2019). Meritocracy, in fact, benefits the ruling elite (Dorling, 2015; Littler, 2017; Piketty, 2014; Streeck, 2017) and is a form of cultural reproduction (Littler, 2017), perpetuating misrecognition and symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 2006). There are of course exceptions to this and Rachael’s success at school leading to her own class mobility is one example. Her apparent acceptance of the discourses of meritocracy is the result of the deeply rooted lessons she absorbed as the child of a poor immigrant family and the success that post-war Australia afforded them. Rachael’s primary habitus is steeped in the ideology of merit and she expresses this through her stated belief in the value of hard work and learning to get ahead. The key issue that arises in Peter, Christine and Rachael’s social justice understandings and practices is the way that the neoliberal technologies of merit and aspirations have been internalised to different degrees. Each of them professes to be working for social and educational justice in their communities, yet their misrecognition is likely to be perpetuating symbolic violence and reproducing disadvantage. Each of them is working to do the best, as they see it, for the children in their schools, and for their communities. To address their possible reflexive blindness, understanding symbolic violence and developing their reflexivity might enhance their social justice work for their communities. Moorosi (2014), however, argues 1

This has been continuously reproduced by Australian politicians, the latest specious version is previous Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison’s political advertising slogan ‘have a go to get a go’.

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that socially just leadership development through formal leadership programs may be unpredictable and is dependent on the background and context of educational leaders. The research reported on here illustrates very clearly how the primary and secondary habitus of Rachael, Peter and Christine have mediated the ways in which they practise their social justice leadership. Socially just leading practices, as seen in this study, are reliant on the ways in which the individual leaders interpret and enact their own understandings of social justice. Ironically, given the long critical history of educational leadership scholarship arguing against the heroic, charismatic individual leader, this is exactly what emerges in this research. Peter, Christine and Rachael’s social justice leadership is as individual as they are. As this research has elaborated, their leadership may conform to normative understandings of social justice leadership in some ways, but diverges in others. The question, then, is whether we can argue that this represents social justice for the disadvantaged communities in which they work? If not, is it better than nothing? The disjunctions that have emerged in Rachael, Peter and Christine’s articulated understandings of social justice, and their social justice leading practices raise questions about the ideal normative notions of social justice leaders in social justice leadership scholarship (what should be), and how these principles of social justice leadership are lived in the complex disadvantaged contexts in which they are located (what is). Peter’s othering of his community, Christine’s adherence to the discourses of aspiration, Rachael’s belief in the meritocratic myths of education all fall outside of social justice norms. Does this mean, then that we cannot characterise their practices as socially just? Or rather do we need to rethink our conceptions of socially just leaders and their practices? However, it remains critical that appointments to the principalship in disadvantaged communities should not be left to chance (Wilkinson, 2008, 2018).

8.5 Conclusion In this chapter I have drawn together the threads woven through Rachael, Peter and Christine’s narratives that explored their primary and secondary habitus, and their encounters of the principalship in the neoliberal field of public education in Victoria. I began by exploring the implications of the spatial distribution of advantage and disadvantage and the haecceity of the communities in which Peter, Rachael and Christine work. I discussed the particularly racialised, gendered and classed ways in which each principal understood social justice. I discussed the ways in which Rachael, Peter and Christine’s social justice leadership practice was synchronous, or not, with the neoliberal orthodoxies of performativity. Each of the principals was simultaneously compliant and/or resistant to these technologies in different ways. I expanded on the disjunctions that were evident in the ways in which, while understanding themselves to be working for social justice, they held notions of deficit of their communities, expressed through the discourses of meritocracy or aspiration

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In the following final chapter, I outline the implications for policy and practice, the contributions to the educational leadership and social justice scholarship and make some suggestions for future research.

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Chapter 9

Implications for Leading for Social Justice

Abstract This final chapter outlines the implications of this research for social justice leadership scholarship, for leadership scholars, for policy makers, and for principal practice. I outline the empirical and theoretical contributions of my research, highlight the implications to policy and practice, reiterate the limitations of the study, and suggest some areas for future research. Keywords Social justice leadership · Policy · Practice

The research on which this book is based sought to add to the body of knowledge on leadership for social justice in schools located in marginalised communities. My key research focus was on understanding how principals working in primary schools located in these communities understood social justice, and how this influenced their leading practices. The research makes a contribution to theory, educational leadership and social justice scholarship and leadership practice. I extended Bourdieusian practice theory to explore the intersectional identities of the educational leaders and drew on Soja’s theories of spatial justice to contextually position the research within their unique locations. The research has contributed to educational leadership and social justice scholarship through the rich narratives that highlight the complexities of the everyday practices of principals who work in schools located within these communities. Of particular significance is the importance of intersectionality in exploring how the principals have become responsibilised in gendered, classed and raced ways. It reveals the path educational leaders have taken to work in schools located in marginalised areas, and how they lead, i.e., what strategies they mobilise in order to manage the complexities of their work in terms of their leadership practices. This research contributes to an understanding of what shapes the social justice dispositions of primary principals working in these challenging contexts, examining the links between the ideal (what ‘should be’) and how these principles of social justice leadership are lived in the complex contexts in which these school leaders are located (‘what is’).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7_9

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9.1 What Has This Book Offers the Scholarship of Leading for Social Justice In Chap. 2, from a wide range of social justice leadership research, I synthesised a series of social justice practices that represent a normative view of what leadership for social justice might look like. According to this literature, a leader for social justice will: . focus on pedagogy where leadership will focus on improving student learning outcomes, but also on learning with staff. . think critically about leadership discourse and what is being sold. . promote a shared ethos of social justice as a key part of the school’s agenda. . disperse leadership across the school, support collaborative decision-making and champion the development of leadership in others. . implement structures and strategies that support smooth running of the school. . seek to develop networks and partnerships with local organisations and businesses . champion supportive social relationships with and between staff, students and in the staff, developing of a culture of care which encourages teacher professional risk taking and leads to high trust—low surveillance environments where the teachers have the support of school leadership to do their job. SJ. . be activist and political. . be critically reflective, and critically reflexive. My research has challenged these normative assumptions. I have illustrated that leaders who imagine themselves to be leading in socially just ways may have disjunctions between their understandings and practice leading to misrecognition and perpetuating symbolic violence. This raises questions about whether such principals are acting in socially just ways, or whether we need to rethink conceptions of socially justice leadership and practices. In Chap. 2, I outlined Gewirtz’s (2006) contention that educational social justice is a function of three particular contexts of enactment: the multi-dimensional nature of understandings of justice which can be held in tension with each other, the external norms and constraints that mediate social justice ideals, and the field and subject location of the agent. In this study the multiple abstract meanings that can be held in tension with each other are visible in the ways in which disjunctions in the participant understandings and practices were expressed. The external norms and constraints that mediate justice ideals are visible in the ways in which neoliberal orthodoxies have normalised, particular entrepreneurial and corporate subjectivities in school leadership. Each of the participants resisted these constraints, thus in some ways harking back to Niesche’s (2014) call to examine principals ‘resistance practices and resistance to practices’ (p. 149). The field and subject location of an agent is Gewirtz’s (2006) final contextual dimension. This is relevant in considering the implications, to policy and practice, of my research. While this research is a small sample, it suggests that principals are carrying the burden of years of neoliberal policies that have eviscerated welfare support in the

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schools and in residualised communities, while also rendering schools, principals and teachers as responsible for the effects of these cuts. Principals are left with an impossible task and are set up to fail. This has highly gendered implications because, as my research suggests, it may be women who carry more of this burden.

9.2 Implications for Leadership Scholars In Chap. 1, I pointed to the lack of attention in educational leadership scholarship to the complexities of everyday practices that principals face, particularly in leading in socially just ways in schools located in marginalised communities. My research makes a contribution in the examination and portrayal of the practices of these leaders through thick description providing rich narratives. In particular, in this study I have explored the participants’ primary habitus formation and how this has shaped their secondary dispositions as principals. These explorations have elaborated on why these principals sought out these schools and how they experience them as ‘good fits’. Of particular significance is the way in which the rich narratives contribute to understanding principal leadership habitus, through the exploration of the social formation of their primary habitus, and how this then shapes their encounters in the neoliberal setting of the public education field. In this research, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice has provided a framework for exploring how principal’s understandings of social justice lead to their social justice leadership practices in their marginalised communities. Bourdieu’s work has sometimes been used in inauthentic or limited ways, for example, use of his thinking tools as stand-alone rather than relational. As a result I have been conscious of Yang’s (2014) suggestions that there has been an ‘impoverishing simplification’ (p. 1538) of his work. For this reason, I have been careful to integrate Bourdieu’s relational theory of practice across all phases of the research. My research makes a contribution to theory in the way in which I have focused on the intersectional framing of each principal’s habitus. In particular, my research shows how Rachael, Christine and Peter’s habitus are gendered, raced and classed. This is clear in their primary habitus formation, their leadership habitus formation and the ways in which their habitus encounters the neoliberal education field. A meaningful contribution my research makes, following on from how the participants’ habitus has encountered the neoliberal education field, is in demonstrating how the responsibilisation of principals has played out in such gendered, raced and classed ways. My research has shown that the social relations of gender are reproduced in the principalship through neoliberal technologies that have put the responsibility of caring on principals. Rachael and Christine, for whom the ethics of care is essential to their leadership, are seen to be carrying the burden of cuts to welfare and increasing economic inequalities through invisible labour. Whereas masculinised practices of leading (drawn from white Christian values and institutions), like those carried out by Peter, replicate the gendered divide between, for example, the saviour angel of the female principal like Christine and the monarch principal, like Peter, dispersing and

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outsourcing care. My study shows the significance of the intersectionality of gender (race and class) in the formation of these principals’ leadership habitus.

9.3 Implications for Policy and Practice Based on this small study, the responsibilisation of principals in this study is highly gendered as well as raced and classed. This study has highlighted how the social relations of gender are challenged/reproduced through the principalship. Neoliberal technologies have made the responsibility of caring the work of principals like Christine and Rachael who carry the burden of cuts to welfare and increasing economic inequalities (Chaps. 5 and 7). Masculinised practices of leading (drawn from white Christian values and institutions) as embodied by Peter replicate the gendered divide between the saviour angel of the female principal and the monarch dispersing and outsourcing care (Chap. 6). In Victoria, at the time this research took place, women are more likely to be principals in schools located in marginalised communities (55% were women), and in the highly disadvantaged region in which this study took place two thirds of principals were women. This has policy implications in terms of the invisible labour of women principals and how responsibilisation, as in this study, might play out differently for male and female principals. Additionally, my research indicates that what is necessary is a reconsideration of the role of principals, schools and teachers and the removal of the pressures of performativity and responsibilisation. Without such reconsideration, the consequences follow that teachers and assistant principals, who see the gruelling workloads and increasing responsibilities of their own principals, may make the (wise?) decision not to apply for promotion into the principal class. This has become an increasing concern in Australia, with dire shortages of principals forecast in Victoria (Cook, 2019). Yet the decrease in numbers of teachers applying for the principalship, not only in Australia but other Anglophone nations because of the increasing toxicity of the role has been forecast over a long period of time by social justice researchers into the principalship, such as Pat Thomson, Jill Blackmore and Judyth Sachs (Barty et al., 2005; Blackmore et al., 2006; Thomson, 2009; Thomson et al., 2003). Leadership preparation programs and salary increases are often touted as the policy solutions to imminent shortages of principals. My research, in the rich narratives generated with Rachael, Peter and Christine, demonstrates unequivocally why the principalship is not an attractive promotion, and this should be a concern for both politicians and policy makers looking to the future of public education.

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9.4 Concluding Thoughts My research was guided by questions about how educational leaders address social justice issues in public primary schools in areas of concentrated disadvantage, what they understood about social justice, and how these understandings influenced their social justice leading practices. I found that principals’ understandings of social justice were linked to their life histories and were realised in their primary and secondary habitus, a habitus that is intersectional (gendered, classed and raced). I examined how educational leaders’ understandings of social justice influenced their leadership practices in profound ways. In particular this was reflected in their reflexivity as principals. For example, Rachael who had experienced growing up in working-class suburbs found fit in the disadvantaged community of her school. Likewise her experiences as a parent of a young man with complex disabilities acted to make the unconscious conscious, triggering a deeper reflexivity (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). Each of the participants in some way had some possible blindness in their reflexivity, taking on board discourses such as meritocracy and aspiration which potentially led to the othering of marginalised communities and acted as a form of symbolic violence, despite the principals believing themselves to be working for social justice. The participants’ habitus encountering the public education field led to practices that were influenced by neoliberal subjectivities and these were taken on by leaders in gendered ways. The research identified disjunctions between Rachael, Peter and Christine’s articulated understandings of social justice and the social justice leading practices they implemented, expressed through discourses of meritocracy and aspiration, misrecognising the systemic and structural conditions leading to disadvantage in their communities. This misrecognition turns the gaze away from social structures to focus on individuals as responsible for their conditions, thus perpetuating symbolic violence. My research opens up future research opportunities in the social justice leadership field in the exploration of the questions that were raised in discussions above: can we characterise as socially just a principal who conforms to some normative social justice ideals, but in other ways seems the antithesis of a socially just leader? My research has challenged these normative assumptions so there is scope for work in rethinking these ideals around social justice leadership. Additionally, in my research there was a hint that career stage and the willingness to resist external accountabilities might be a fruitful area for research. This arose because each of the late-career principals were resistant in some ways, however, as reported in Chap. 8, one secondary participant, an assistant principal, suggested he would be very reluctant to resist accountability measures. The intersectional way that the principals in my research encountered the educational field and the neoliberal orthodoxies impact their professional and personal lives, particularly in the invisible labour that is highly gendered deserves further study. This is particularly important in terms of a transformational agenda in improving the working conditions for all principals. I end this book locating this research within the utterly predictable and endlessly unfolding tragedy that increasing inequality through symbolic violence visits upon

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marginalised communities and their children. I began this research, as many educators do, wanting to understand and make a difference. My research makes contributions to social justice and leadership scholarship; however, I wish to make some sobering observations around the seeming intractability of the issues that my work uncovered for me. Since Jill Blackmore’s foundational work on women and the principalship, almost nothing has changed. There are numerically more women in the principalship but the profiting from and exploitation of their habitus in the carrying the burden of care continues; Nancy Fraser’s crisis of care (2016, 2022). Blackmore’s (1999) book Troubling Women is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Likewise, Raewyn Connell and colleagues published Making the difference: Schools, families, and social division (Connell et al., 1982), based on investigations of educational inequality in Australia carried out 40 years ago. Yet, the educational inequality they highlighted is still a problem, and as neoliberal orthodoxies have influenced almost every aspect of our lives, may in fact be worse. I have found it hard at times, to maintain a positive outlook, as the world seems to be riven with a rise in conservative and divisive politics and what feels like an increase in fascist and racist ideologies. So, I end with an appeal to those of us who have a voice to be activists, to open our eyes, stand up and speak up.

References Barty, K., Thomson, P., Blackmore, J., & Sachs, J. (2005). Unpacking the issues: Researching the shortage of school principals in two states in Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher, 32(3), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf03216824 Blackmore, J. (1999). Troubling women: Feminism, leadership and educational change. Buckingham: Open University Press. Blackmore, J., Thomson, P., & Barty, K. (2006). Principal selection. Educational Management Administration and Leadership, 34(3), 297–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/1741143206065267 Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Polity Press. Connell, R. W., Ashendon, D. J., Kessler, S., & Dowsett, G. W. (1982). Making the difference: Schools, families, and social division. Australian Curriculum Studies Association. Cook, H. (2019, 17 January). Victorian schools lose their principals as parents drive teachers from top job. The Age. Retrieved from https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victorian-schoolslose-their-principals-as-parents-drive-teachers-from-top-job-20190117-p50s12.html Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100(99), 117. Fraser, N. (2022). Cannibal Capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet—And what we can do about it. Verso Books. Gewirtz, S. (2006). Towards a contextualized analysis of social justice in education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 38(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2006.00175.x Niesche, R. (2014). Deploying educational leadership as a form of governmentality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(1), 143–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306. 2013.805018 Thomson, P. (2009). School leadership: Heads on the block? Taylor & Francis. Thomson, P., Blackmore, J., Sachs, J., & Tregenza, K. (2003). High stakes principalship-sleepless nights, heart attacks and sudden death accountabilities: Reading media representations of the United States principal shortage. Australian Journal of Education, 47(2), 118–132. Yang, Y. (2014). Bourdieu, practice and change: Beyond the criticism of determinism. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 46(14), 1522–1540. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354309345647

Index

A Accountability, 2, 5, 18, 23, 26, 27, 51–55, 64, 85–87, 94, 113, 127, 129, 133, 137, 138, 147–152, 165 Activist, 20, 25, 55, 92, 153, 162, 166 Agency, 39, 40, 44, 68, 71, 73, 82, 107, 131, 134, 136 Aspiration, 10, 41, 46, 48, 54, 82, 108, 109, 123, 124, 134, 143–145, 152–156, 165 Assessment Naplan, 65 Aurora Creek Primary, 69, 71, 119, 120 Autonomy school improvement, 53

B Blackmore, 5, 16, 17, 22–25, 27, 42, 44, 50, 64, 81, 82, 86, 89, 92, 94, 111, 112, 123, 128, 133, 137, 146, 148, 164, 166 Bodily hexis, 83 Bonham Hollow Primary, 69–71, 101, 102 Bourdieu, 1, 6–9, 17, 28, 37–50, 55, 56, 65, 73, 77, 80–87, 89, 92, 94, 102, 106, 108, 122, 123, 129, 130, 143, 146, 148, 155, 163, 165 Bourdieusian, 27, 38, 39

C Capital, 9, 27, 37, 38, 40, 43–47, 51, 55, 77, 83–85, 87, 94, 106, 107, 111, 130, 146

Care, 25, 78, 86–89, 92–95, 109, 114, 121, 122, 125, 130, 133, 134, 138, 146, 147, 151, 153, 154, 162, 164, 166 Caring, 9, 84, 92, 93, 119, 123, 130, 131, 134, 147, 148, 151, 163, 164 Caring practices, 146 Caring professions, 82 Catholic, 3, 42, 66, 80, 106, 107 Century Heights Primary, 67–70, 78 Charismatic, 104–106, 109, 136, 156 Christian, 42, 71, 103, 106–109, 112–115, 145, 146, 149, 153, 163, 164 Class, 4, 9, 19, 28, 41, 47–49, 65, 68, 72, 78, 80–83, 89–91, 93, 107, 108, 122, 128–130, 132, 143, 145, 146, 148, 153–155, 164, 165 Classed, 7, 133, 134, 147, 148, 156, 161, 163–165 Class mobility, 46, 47, 81, 122, 146, 148, 154, 155 Climate change, 2 Clivé, 83, 122 Collective, 26, 47, 49, 91, 107, 128, 129, 146 Commitment, 2, 9, 18, 70, 78, 85, 86, 94, 103, 109, 110, 112, 114, 115, 119, 120, 122, 125–127, 129–137, 148 Community, 1–7, 9, 10, 17–27, 40, 41, 43–45, 48, 50, 51, 53–56, 63–65, 67–73, 77–82, 85–95, 101–103, 105, 108–111, 113, 115, 119, 120, 124, 126–138, 143–156, 161, 163–166 Compliance, 10, 53, 86, 114, 127, 137, 143, 144, 147–151, 154 Conflict, 5, 80 Connell, 53, 65, 92, 105, 108, 149, 150, 166

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. MacDonald, Socially Just Educational Leadership in Unjust Times, Educational Leadership Theory, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47616-7

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168 Consequential geography, 66, 67, 73, 144 Contestation, 17, 131, 144 Context, 4–8, 16, 19–22, 24, 28, 37, 38, 42, 44–46, 48, 50, 54–56, 63, 67, 73, 78, 87, 90, 92, 93, 102, 115, 120, 124, 127, 128, 144, 145, 150, 152, 156, 161, 162 Courtney, 16, 22, 37, 39, 46, 54, 129, 136, 151 Critical feminist, 19 Critical reflexivity, 134 Cultural capital, 24, 44, 45, 51, 65, 78, 81, 83, 94, 101, 111, 119, 122, 129, 130, 135 D Data-driven, 133 Datafication, 53 Democracy, 55 Democratic, 2, 23, 95, 135 Deskill, 110, 149 Dialogue, 128, 130 Discourse, 6, 9, 16, 25, 26, 41, 42, 46, 48, 77–79, 81, 83, 84, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 113, 123, 129, 132–134, 137, 138, 144–148, 152–156, 162, 165 Disposition, 8, 39–41, 46, 47, 80, 83, 85, 122, 134, 147, 161, 163 Diversity, 21, 22, 66, 132 Doxa, 9, 37, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52, 77, 85, 86, 106, 129 E Eacott, 8, 16, 18, 19, 24, 37, 38, 49, 64, 82, 86, 89, 112 Economic capital, 43, 45, 121 Educational disadvantage, 4, 15, 27, 46, 63, 64, 149 Educational leaders, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 16, 19–22, 25, 27, 40, 43, 45–48, 50–56, 73, 77, 84, 89, 93–95, 102, 104, 105, 110, 124, 127, 133, 134, 143, 148, 155, 156, 161, 165 Educational leadership, 1, 6–8, 15, 17, 19, 20, 24, 26, 37, 38, 40, 42–45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 92, 94, 106, 111, 113, 122, 123, 131, 136, 137, 143, 149, 150, 156, 161, 163 Educational leadership for social justice leadership for social justice, 27 LSJ, 15, 19 Embodied, 40, 44, 49, 80, 106, 164

Index Embodiment, 83, 85 Emotional labour, 25, 94, 95, 111, 112, 136–138, 146–148, 152 Emotions, 25, 95, 112, 120 Enablers and/or constraining, 21, 23 Epistemic injustice, 23 Equality, 18, 65, 67, 134 Equity, 8, 18, 63, 64, 69, 133, 151 Ethical, 3, 41, 49, 104, 121, 127, 131, 138, 150, 152 Ethics, 17, 27, 92, 121–123, 125 Ethics of care, 9, 77, 86, 92, 119, 123, 128, 130, 133, 134, 138, 146, 147, 150, 152, 154, 163 Ethnicity, 42, 49

F Feel for the game, 86 Feminism, 92 Feminist, 9, 17, 22, 41, 42, 77, 92, 111, 133, 147 Field, 1, 6–9, 15–19, 27, 28, 37, 38, 40–56, 73, 77, 78, 82–87, 101, 104–107, 109, 113, 114, 119, 121–123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138, 143, 144, 146, 148–152, 154, 156, 162, 163, 165 Foucault, 39, 66, 114 discourse, 113 governmentality, 27 surveillance, 27 Fraser, 5, 146, 166

G Gender, 4, 9, 24, 41, 42, 49, 129, 138, 143, 163, 164 Gendered, 7, 16, 111, 123, 124, 128, 131, 133, 134, 138, 146–148, 150, 154, 156, 161, 163–165 Gewirtz, 5, 6, 162 Governance, 2, 26, 51, 54, 73 Governing, 10, 19, 22, 23, 39, 44, 86, 122, 138, 143, 151 Governmentality, 16, 27, 49, 54, 113, 114, 147, 150, 153 Government education, 52 Gunter, 8, 16, 17, 21–23, 27, 37, 38, 52–54, 129, 136

Index H Habitus, 1, 7–9, 27, 37, 38, 40–42, 44, 46, 47, 49–51, 56, 73, 77, 78, 80–87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 101, 102, 104–107, 109, 112–115, 119–128, 133, 136, 138, 143, 144, 146–150, 152, 154–156, 163–166 Heffernan, 25, 53–55, 81, 89, 94, 137, 149, 151 Hetero-normative, 105 Heteronormativity High stakes testing, 18, 54, 55, 65, 110, 150 Housing Commission of Victoria, 68, 144 Hysteresis, 44, 46, 51

I Illusio, 9, 40, 47, 51, 77, 85, 106 Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), 69, 71, 72 Indigenous, 4, 21, 27, 69, 71, 72, 120 Individualisation, 52–54, 127, 129, 133 Individualised, 95, 114, 149, 153 Instructional leadership, 115, 119 Intensification, 53, 146 Interest, 19, 23, 25, 44, 47, 53, 66, 69, 87, 102, 103, 111, 120, 121, 154 Intersectionality, 7, 9, 24, 42, 143, 161, 164 Invisible labour, 150, 151, 163–165

J Justice, 1, 3–6, 18, 19, 22, 28, 50, 64, 66, 67, 112, 131, 133, 144, 145, 152, 155, 162

K Keddie, 2, 5, 18, 21, 23, 24, 27, 44, 51, 52, 54, 64, 65, 86, 89, 91

L Leaders, 3, 6, 8, 15–17, 21–28, 37, 38, 42, 50, 54, 55, 79, 81, 84, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95, 104–107, 109–111, 114, 115, 121, 123, 125–131, 134, 135, 137, 148, 152–156, 162, 163, 165 Leadership, 1, 3–10, 15–28, 37, 39, 41, 42, 45–48, 50–54, 56, 69–71, 73, 77–81, 86, 89–95, 101–115, 119–126, 128–131, 133–136, 138, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149–154, 156, 161–166 Leadership dispersal, 20, 23, 128, 153

169 Leading for social justice (LSJ), 1, 4, 6, 15, 18–20, 27, 46, 162 Leading practice, 1, 5–7, 9, 15, 24, 77, 143, 144, 147, 148, 156, 161, 165 Lefebvre, 66 Logic of practice, 46, 52, 107 M Macrocosm, 9, 77, 78, 84, 85, 88, 95 Markets, 16, 18, 51–53, 70, 82, 88, 90, 94, 123, 147, 149 Masculinist, 50, 105, 115, 123, 124, 137, 146 Masculinities, 16, 22, 105, 106, 108 Mentor, 9, 119, 120, 126, 135, 136, 138, 145 Merit, 10, 46, 81, 134, 143–145, 152, 154, 155 Meritocracy, 9, 48, 77, 81, 95, 138, 152, 155, 156, 165 Might, 9, 28, 48, 49, 79, 93, 94, 101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 113, 133, 151–155, 162, 164, 165 Mills, 2, 5, 21, 23, 25, 42, 48, 52–54, 79, 81, 85, 91, 130, 153, 155 Ministry, 9, 70, 119, 120, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138 Misrecognise, 155 Misrecognised, 44, 46, 48 Misrecognition, 5, 40, 46, 48, 81, 106–108, 129, 154, 155, 162, 165 Mission, 5, 9, 53, 77, 78, 84–86, 88, 95, 101, 104–107, 109, 110, 114, 115, 132, 147 Monarchy, 9, 101, 104, 109 Monitor, 9, 119, 126, 138 Moral, 3, 9, 23, 41, 52, 53, 55, 77, 85–87, 92, 94, 95, 104, 107, 109, 121, 127, 129, 131, 137, 138, 147, 148, 150, 152, 154 Mothering, 9, 77, 78, 83–85, 92, 95, 146 Mparntwe Education Declaration, 63 Multicultural, 21, 132 My School, 65 N National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), 18, 53, 55, 65, 69, 71, 73, 90, 102, 109, 110, 114, 150, 151, 153 Neoliberal, 2, 16, 18, 26, 39, 48, 49, 51–53, 55, 81, 86, 94, 95, 109, 113, 114,

170 126, 129, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138, 144, 145, 147–150, 152–156, 162–166 Neoliberalism, 20, 38, 51, 108, 113, 147, 149 Networks, 20, 24, 25, 45, 46, 70, 72, 88, 89, 111, 121, 133, 135, 136, 151, 153, 162 New public management, 49 Niesche, 5, 16, 21, 22, 26, 27, 49, 52–54, 113, 114, 129, 137, 143, 147, 149–151, 153, 162 Normative, 7, 8, 19, 20, 22, 28, 67, 95, 107, 115, 132, 152–154, 156, 162, 165

O OECD, 18, 51, 52, 64, 65, 124 Orphan, 121 Orthodoxy, 26, 104, 107, 156, 162, 165, 166

P Pandemic, 2, 24 Parachurch, 104–106 Pedagogical, 20, 21, 109–111, 132, 146, 149 Pedagogies, 20, 21, 51, 52, 81, 109, 110, 112, 114, 127, 128, 149, 152, 153, 162 Performativity, 49, 53, 127, 156, 164 Political, 4, 5, 7, 20, 22, 25–27, 44, 51, 65, 80, 87, 92, 104, 107, 132, 144, 145, 153–155, 162 Politics, 5, 17, 52, 54, 66, 166 Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 124, 125 Power, 5, 6, 8, 9, 16–18, 21, 23, 25–27, 37, 38, 40, 43, 44, 46, 48, 51, 55, 56, 63, 66, 87, 93, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113, 125, 129, 131, 147, 151, 153, 154 Practice, 1, 2, 6–10, 18–23, 25–28, 37–42, 44, 46–52, 54, 56, 73, 77, 78, 81, 83, 86, 89, 92, 93, 95, 101, 107, 112–115, 119, 122, 125–130, 132–134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 146, 149, 152, 154–157, 161–165 Practice theory, 6, 161 Principal, 1–3, 5–10, 15–25, 27, 28, 37–39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53–56, 63, 64, 68–73, 77–79, 83, 85–95, 101–107, 109, 110, 112–115, 119, 122–127,

Index 129, 132–138, 143–154, 156, 161–165 Principalship, 21, 26, 27, 78, 79, 86, 95, 110, 113, 115, 123, 124, 128, 132, 137, 138, 145, 146, 150, 156, 163, 164, 166 Professional development, 4, 23, 52, 125, 128, 135 Professionalism, 23 Professional learning, 18, 23, 135 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 18, 51, 65 Public education, 2, 9, 28, 40, 43, 44, 51, 52, 54–56, 73, 78, 101, 119, 133, 137, 138, 144, 147, 148, 156, 163–165 R Race, 3, 4, 9, 19, 22, 24, 28, 42, 143, 164 Racialised, 48, 131, 132 Racism, 26, 153 Radical discipleship, 104 Rationality, 54, 86, 109, 112, 153 Reflexive blindness, 155 Reflexivity, 21, 38, 41, 47–51, 84, 123, 146, 148, 152, 154, 155, 165 Regulation, 44, 52–54, 86, 127, 129, 133, 151 Relational, 39, 42, 49, 86, 111, 114, 128, 133, 134, 146, 163 Religion, 106, 107 Religious, 42, 85, 103–107, 112, 114, 131, 148 Resistance, 10, 27, 46, 55, 84, 86, 87, 104, 126, 143, 149–151, 162 Responsibilisation, 51, 52, 54, 86, 89, 95, 109, 127, 133, 134, 137, 150, 155, 163, 164 Rey, 106 Rural, 2, 3, 8, 9, 50, 63–67, 69, 71, 72, 115, 119, 120, 122, 145 S Saviour, 108, 131, 132, 135, 150, 163, 164 School effectiveness and improvement (SEI), 16, 37 School improvement, 53, 94, 149 School leaders, 8, 19, 22, 24, 26, 64, 124, 161 Scouts, 107, 108, 112 Shame, 134, 148 Shared ethos of social justice, 20, 152, 162

Index Silence, 19, 128 Smyth, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 52, 54, 90, 108, 135 Social capital, 45, 89, 109, 111, 115, 121, 134, 135 Social class, 9, 21, 40–42, 44, 46, 51, 66, 77, 81, 82, 122, 129 Social justice, 1, 3–10, 15, 17–23, 25–28, 37–39, 41–43, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54–56, 73, 77, 78, 80, 84, 85, 92, 95, 101, 102, 105–107, 109–112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 128, 131, 133–135, 137, 138, 143–145, 152–157, 161–166 Socially just educational leadership, 1 Social relations, 4, 19, 41, 163, 164 Soja, 1, 6, 8, 63, 64, 66, 67, 73, 145, 161 Solidarity, 134 Spatial justice, 1, 6, 66–68, 73, 144, 161 Standardisation, 52 Suffering, 47, 48, 84 Surveillance, 2, 23, 25, 27, 54, 114, 126, 127, 130, 131, 147, 149, 150, 153, 162 Symbolic capital, 44, 45, 47, 88, 89 Symbolic violence, 37, 40, 47, 48, 51, 52, 81, 106, 123, 130, 132, 134, 138, 148, 152–155, 162, 165 T Teach for Australia, 132 Testing, 26, 51–53, 65, 150, 153 Tests, 48, 53 Thomson, 4, 8, 19–21, 27, 37–39, 43, 44, 51–55, 67, 79, 81, 87, 137, 149–151, 164 Trust, 23, 25, 93, 94, 114, 146, 149, 153, 162 U Urban, 3, 4, 21, 48, 65, 67, 70, 72, 102, 106, 122, 135, 144

171 V Victoria, 1, 3, 8, 40, 56, 63, 71–73, 119, 120, 122, 143, 156, 164 Violence, 47, 48, 52, 55, 72, 80, 114, 120, 124, 125, 131, 137, 146, 154 Vocational, 131

W Welfare, 3, 5, 46, 51, 54, 55, 70, 109–114, 130, 133, 134, 137, 147, 150–152, 154, 162–164 Wellbeing, 24, 104, 113, 125, 130, 131, 136, 137, 146, 152 White, 5, 16, 21, 22, 27, 50, 80, 89, 91, 105–108, 112–115, 129, 131–133, 146, 163, 164 Whiteness, 22, 132 White saviour, 131 White women, 131, 132, 135, 146, 150 Wilkinson, 8, 16, 18, 21–23, 27, 37, 38, 42, 64, 82, 86, 89, 105, 114, 132, 147, 156 Women, 22, 24, 27, 42, 50, 81, 91–93, 115, 123, 124, 132, 134, 146–148, 163, 164, 166 Work, 1, 2, 5, 7–9, 15–18, 20–22, 24–27, 37–42, 47, 49–56, 65–67, 70–73, 77, 78, 80–82, 85–89, 92–95, 103, 105–107, 109–115, 120–129, 131–134, 136, 137, 143–153, 155, 156, 161, 163–166

Y Young people, 2–4, 24, 27, 63–65, 104, 105, 107, 145, 148 Youth, 26, 71, 103–105, 107, 113, 114, 153, 154