Comparing School Leadership: A Discursive Approach to School Leadership and Curriculum Policy

TL;DRAbstract

In this paper, we take our point of departure from a discursive understanding of both curriculum and educational leadership. Among researchers as well as policy makers, a distributive perspective on leadership in schools has aroused intense interest. In the most basic terms, a distributive view of leadership recognizes that school leadership can involve multiple individuals in addition to the school principal, ‘the leader-plus aspect,’ and that leading a school is fundamentally about interactions, rather than about the actions of individual leaders (Spillane & Healey, 2010). Although we find the institutional approach in empirical studies on distributed leadership contributing to a renewed understanding of leadership in schools, we argue that the approach risks being both too general, i.e., that there is no distinction between the management of the school and other social practices (see Young, 2008), and too restricted, i.e., that each school / district is considered as its own indepen

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