Chapter 4: Preparing Bold, Visionary Leaders for School Turnaround

Curriculum, from its Latin roots, encompasses a wide range of meanings. This includes, for example, “what is taught” (Squires, 1990) and “the body of courses that present knowledge, principles, values, and skills that are the intended consequences of formal education” (Levine, 1981). Curriculum can also connote formal structural arrangements of the courses that are offered or that students can select (Stark & Lowther, 1986). Thus, curriculum can be defined from the perspective of content, or/and the sequence of the content being taught. During the last seven decades, leadership preparation has undergone four major themes of curriculum focus. From the 1950s to the 1980s, with a strong managerial orientation, curriculum for principal preparation was focused on school management, school law, planning, politics, negotiation, finance, budgeting, and some gesture at research methodology (Jackson & Kelley, 2002). Starting in late 80s, wider bodies of knowledge were reflected from such core courses including politics, change, school management and leadership, philosophy, ethics, learning theory, and organizational design, and more recently, instructional leadership for improving student learning (Jackson & Kelley, 2002). This shift emphasizes the preparation of aspiring school leaders’ instructional expertise as well as their skills in the areas of visioning, making ethical decisions, being good at human interactions, and building trustful positive relationships with stakeholders especially pushed by accountably policy contexts (Copland & Knapp, 2006; Hallinger & Heck, 2010; McCarthy, 2010; Murphy, Moorman, & McCarthy, (2008). Since the beginning of this century, many universities have offered courses from the social justice perspective. This paradigm of social justice leadership emphasizes a common purpose to address societal inequities in schools, with courses designed around critical pedagogy from critical theories (Cobb, Weiner, & Gonzales, 2017; Jean-Marie, Normore, & Brooks, 2009; Theoharis, 2007). In the last 10 years or so, a group of scholars (e.g., Ylimaki & Henderson, 2017) argue for the reconceptualization of curriculum theorizing in leadership preparation to address the gaps or weaknesses in the curriculum conceptualized in the previous paradigm (e.g., the lack of the consideration of a school leader as an individual or agent). According to Schwab (1971, 2004), for example, neither management functionalists nor critical theorists properly understood the pragmatics of good curriculum; curriculum must be approached as a discipline eclectically culminating in “arts of the practical.” With the reference to the ethical challenges of linking democracy and education, Ylimaki and Henderson (2017) argue for a more productive way to interpret curriculum and pedagogy as the practice of “the critical hermeneutics of democratic general education folding into the transactional pragmatics of pedagogical artistry, folding into the narrative aesthetics of allegorical autobiography, folding into openhearted centering” (p. 150). Conceptualized this way, educational leadership is an intellectually sophisticated form of human artistry that is grounded in the recursive, morally based interplay of reflective inquires and deliberative conversations. Educational leaders must demonstrate selfless service, bring affective as well as academic benefit to their human being, exercise shared leadership, build shared culture in schools, foster interdependence, achieve harmony, and gain leadership as a lead learner (Ylimaki & Henderson, 2017).