Building Creative Capacities in Tomorrow’s Administrators: Innovative Interdisciplinary Leadership Development

• In Event: Educational Leadership: Research as Praxis for the Public Good

Abstract

Our paper proposes that strengthening the creative capacity for leadership in contemporary school contexts seems more important than ever. In response to some of the ineffectual, oblivious or invariant leaders of the last century, this second decade of the 21st century sees instead an inspired turn in leadership development that, at its best, demands and supports new goals such as skill-building, mindfulness, creativity and dialogue. The performing arts disciplines provide us with ensemble-building methods, both intuitive and analytical, that can be applied to the development of intrapersonal intelligence in tomorrow’s educational leaders. This project seeks, in a modest manner, to investigate and illuminate how such interdisciplinarity might enhance the kind of dialogue and practices that would benefit educational leaders by serving the goals of leadership development.
It is common practice to employ “case studies” in the teaching of the humanities and social sciences, and in educational leadership and administration programmes this practice is no different (Ashblaugh & Kasten, 1991). It is generally assumed that in the professional world the educational leader may cognitively draw on these or other case studies to inform the decision-making process in the workplace (Haller, Strike & Soltis, 1998). But it is unlikely that in a simple reading that the actual complexities of workplace dynamics that leaders will face are really addressed.
Leaders constantly attempt to problem-solve not only having never experienced the dramatic tension of many of these stories, but also in a somewhat isolated context (Strike et al., 1998). We propose that approaching case studies as theatre might have a more lasting effect in terms of conceptual knowledge, one developed through “felt understanding,” (Clark, Dobson, Goode & Neelands, 1997) and give educational leaders some sophisticated team-building skills that they could later use to engage their own staffs in when strategizing, planning, implementing programs and solving problems (Meyer, 2004).

Authors

• Jerome A. Cranston, University of Manitoba

• Kristin Kusanovich, Santa Clara University