Introduction
The focus on knowledge production on leadership through using the political and historical thinking of Hannah Arendt (1958) is a contribution I would like to make to educational leadership theory in general as well as to leadership in a College School Network environment specifically, as the main focus of this study. My argument is that Arendt’s approach can provoke ideas, meanings and understandings for educational leadership by examining the interrelationship between plural persons generating ideas and taking action, and can illuminate the dangers of substituting action with activity.
The relationship between leadership in education and democratic development has been a growing theme in debates focused on educational leadership (Grace, 1995) but as argued by Gunter (2014:1) there has been little work that has directly related educational leadership to wider issues of freedom, politics and practices. Engaging with leadership in a College Network in Malta through the work of Hannah Arendt enables the issues of power to be directly confronted. Arendt produces texts that challenged the notions of freedom and politics, and notably examined the lives of people, ideas and …show more content…
For Arendt action is political and public. Politics is space and needs space, it is where the person describes the self, where discussion happens and where the possibilities of ‘natality’ (Arendt 1958) can be realised. People are helped in this process by institutions as a legitimising, durable and stabilising framework through which the initiative and accommodation of the plural person can happen. What is needed to hold the common together are places where people can be separate but at the same time connected, like sitting at a table? When those spaces are removed, and people are essentialised into a type, then totalitarianism can be
The focus on knowledge production on leadership through using the political and historical thinking of Hannah Arendt (1958) is a contribution I would like to make to educational leadership theory in general as well as to leadership in a College School Network environment specifically, as the main focus of this study. My argument is that Arendt’s approach can provoke ideas, meanings and understandings for educational leadership by examining the interrelationship between plural persons generating ideas and taking action, and can illuminate the dangers of substituting action with activity.
The relationship between leadership in education and democratic development has been a growing theme in debates focused on educational leadership (Grace, 1995) but as argued by Gunter (2014:1) there has been little work that has directly related educational leadership to wider issues of freedom, politics and practices. Engaging with leadership in a College Network in Malta through the work of Hannah Arendt enables the issues of power to be directly confronted. Arendt produces texts that challenged the notions of freedom and politics, and notably examined the lives of people, ideas and …show more content…
For Arendt action is political and public. Politics is space and needs space, it is where the person describes the self, where discussion happens and where the possibilities of ‘natality’ (Arendt 1958) can be realised. People are helped in this process by institutions as a legitimising, durable and stabilising framework through which the initiative and accommodation of the plural person can happen. What is needed to hold the common together are places where people can be separate but at the same time connected, like sitting at a table? When those spaces are removed, and people are essentialised into a type, then totalitarianism can be