Decentring Leadership: Rethinking Leading in Education Contexts

This book is about the practices of leading and their arrangements in a range of contemporary educational contexts. It seeks to shift the traditional, individual, and role-based educational leadership narrative, to more transformational, shared, and ongoing practices between people, thereby decentring leadership.

In this volume, contributors consider leading from a practice perspective across a range of educational contexts. Focusing on leading, rather than leadership, they examine how educational leaders lead through decentring from a range of positions and across a range of educational sectors from schools to higher education. Chapters attend to the practices of leading to ‘decentre’ normative, traditional notions of leadership that focus on the individual leader as the unit of study. They draw on the theory of practice architectures to understand leading as a shared and ongoing process rather than as an individual act. This growing body of work that uses the theory of practice architectures (TPA) is disrupting people’s thinking towards leading as a practice. Focusing on practices and their arrangements shifts the traditional, role-based educational leadership narrative to the more transformational elements of practice architectures in thinking about leading in contemporary contexts.

Decentring Leadership will be a key resource for practitioners and researchers of education leadership and policy, educational administration, educational research, educational studies and sociology. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Educational Administration and History.

Dr Christine Grice is an Australian educator with over 25 years of teaching and leadership experience in schools and universities. She enjoys supporting educators to connect theory and practice for purposeful leading in her work, and her passion is leading learning. Christine coordinates the Master of Education programs at The University of Sydney, Australia.

Dr Susanne Francisco is a researcher and educator with Charles Sturt University, Australia, and an active member of the Pedagogy Education Praxis international research network. Susanne has a focus on professional learning, workplace learning, the learning of teachers (including adult and vocational education teachers), praxis development, and leading learning more broadly.

Dr Amanda Lizier is a workplace and professional learning researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She is interested in understanding practices of working, learning, and leading in organisations across industry and education. Driving Amanda’s work is a desire to act as a conduit between theory and practice to inform effective learning at and for work.