Early childhood teachers engaging with leadership narratives in policy

Coherence, contextualisation, and complexity

Abstract

Educational leadership resists a unifying definition, assumption, or theory. This complexity encourages us to learn about leadership to understand its core components, underlying assumptions, and relevance for context. In Aotearoa New Zealand, policy rhetoric promotes leadership as being enacted by teachers and positional leaders. This consideration for teachers is positive but problematic, as it requires them to consider leadership in ways beyond what they feel equipped or supported to achieve. Augmenting this concern is the limited professional learning support for leadership development, especially in early childhood, and the increasing responsibility for teachers to achieve policy aspirations. To understand the rhetoric used to emphasise this responsibility, we utilise qualitative document analysis to examine the leadership narratives promoted in the Teaching Council’s Leadership Strategy and Capability Framework, from the perspectives of provisionally certificated teachers, teacher leaders, and positional leaders. Our argument suggests the leadership narratives promulgated by these texts are ambitious and raise issues of: coherence, contextualisation, and complexity. We discuss these issues in relation to support for teachers to critically engage with policy texts as important leadership learning.