Roberto Serpieri
Description
The lecture broadly focuses on the role of educational leadership as a symbolic and material driver of integration and convergence across education systems in Europe. During the last few decades, policy focused attempts to modernize and restructure the provision of education in Europe have been strongly associated with ideas travelling rapidly across national boundaries (Ozga & Jones, 2006). This process has been led by agencies like the European Union (EU), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation (OECD), and the World Bank (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2011). Simultaneously in the field of education, school leadership has been singled out as one of the main levers of educational change (Gunter, 2011). The lecture examines leadership in education within this broader European and transnational policy context, but it does so by reference to the recontextualisation and retranslation of policy in differing European national contexts revealing and reflecting upon the diversity of leadership models in this continent.
In order to examine similarities and differences across national contexts the lecture focuses upon four national cases located within four main respective states: the Federal State (Austria), the Liberal State (England), the Mediterranean-Napoleonic State (Italy) and the Nordic Social Democratic State (Norway). The use of these four state types captures the diversity of the governmental and policy contexts within Europe as a basis for examining the diversity of European leadership models in education.
Key texts of the syllabus will be:
Evetts, J. (2011) A new professionalism? Challenges and opportunities, Current Sociology, (59) 406-422.
Grimaldi, E. & Serpieri, R. (2013). Jigsawing Education Evaluation. Pieces from the Italian New Public Management Puzzle, in Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(4), pp. 306-335.
Gunter, H. (2011). Leadership and the Reform of Education, Bristol: Policy Press.
Hall, D., Grimaldi, E., Gunter, H., Møller, J., Serpieri, R. & Skedsmo, G., (2015) Educational Reform and Modernisation in Europe: The Role of National Contexts in Mediating the New Public Management, European Educatinal Research Journal (in press)
Hall, D. (2013). Drawing a Veil over Managerialism: Leadership and the Discursive Disguise of the New Public Management, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45 (3), 267-282.
Hall, D., Møller, J., Schratz, M. & Serpieri, R. (2016) (forthcoming) From welfarism to neo-liberalism: Conceptualising the diversity of leadership models in Europe.
Møller, J. & Schratz, M. (2008). Leadership Development in Europe. In J. Lumby, G. Crow & P. Pashiardis (Eds.) International Handbook on the Preparation and Development of School Leaders. (pp. 341-367), London: Routledge.
Serpieri, R. & Grimaldi, E. (2015). Leader as Policy Device: the Hybridization of Head Teachers in Italy. Journal of Educational, Cultural and Psychological Studies, 11, pp. 69-86.
Impact
The lecture will provide participants with a deeper understanding of the distinctiveness of the European leadership models in education, and the role of educational leadership as a symbolic and material driver of integration and convergence across education systems in Europe. In this respect the materials that will be provided to participants of all the three edition can be used to understand the potentials and the threads of existing leadership models in the field of education as well as to explore the potentials of a democratic model of educational leadership to foster and support the European integration project within and through education.