Chapter 8: A Balancing Act: Equitable Leadership Demands and Institutional Obligations

This chapter offers insights into equitable leadership knowledge and practice through considerations of knowledge institutionalization processes, sense-making within institutions, and educational structures and norms. The chapter draws from a larger international comparative study that used a critical constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the influence of institutional factors on school administrators’ constructions of equitable leadership knowledge and practice in Kenya and Canada. Eleven school administrators from Kisumu County, Kenya and Ontario, Canada participated in the study. In this chapter, the author outlines the pathways that school administrators took to connect equitable leadership knowledge and practice to institutional obligations in K–12 settings. These pathways coalesced around actions such as (a) gathering knowledge, (b) establishing the relative importance of knowledge, and (c) confirming institutional knowledge legitimacy. The author connects these pathways to a three-stage process theory that emerged from the data. The three stages are identified as mimetic, normalizing, and transference stages. The mimetic stage is built around actions that mirror sanctioned knowledge, the normalizing stage is associated with norms and values arising from common interpretations, and the transference stage focuses on mental operations that rely on legitimated knowledge. These ideas are then linked to possibilities for decentering institutional undertones of equitable leadership knowledge and practice to ensure they do not place perceptual limits on school principal choices and subsequent knowledge construction as well as to ensure that school principal actions do not reinforce unequal social relations.