Innovative Work in School Development: Exploring Leadership Enactment

• In Event: 63.084 - Roundtable Session 22
  In Roundtable Session: 63.084-8 - Innovation, Imagination, Transformation in Education

Abstract

Leadership is recognized as a key enabler of innovation in schools. While researchers have focused on how formally leaders within schools narrate their experiences of leading innovations and the effects they observe, less attention has been paid to leadership as an emergent function of actions and interactions that comprise local innovative work. This article focuses on the work of project teams running school development projects. By employing the cultural-historical activity theory, leadership is examined as an enactment that is consequential to the directions of the work. The findings demonstrate that, the locus of initiative and agentive actions changes from moment to moment within sequences of interactions. Thus, leadership is not under the control of any of the involved actors.

Author

• Kirsten Foshaug Vennebo, University of Oslo