Principals' Negotiations in Everyday Curricular Leadership Within a Marketized Early Childhood Landscape

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum Leadership in Singapore's Early Childhood Education Landscape: Learning to Lead and Leading to Learn

Abstract

This paper focuses on the conflictual nature of leaders’ everyday work as they strived to be curriculum and pedagogical leaders supporting teacher learning and improving children’s learning experiences within a marketized ECE sector which requires centres to compete for child enrolment. Neo-liberal market conditions in ECE provisions have been discussed in the UK and Singapore (Lim & Lloyd, 2019). Framed by cultural historical activity theory and the idea of critical conflicts (Engestrӧm & Sannino, 2011; Vasilyuk, 1988), this paper presents an analysis of interview data from 44 early childhood leaders who were selected for a unique leadership development programme for early childhood leaders.
Given that early childhood leadership studies is still a new strand of research in Singapore, this set of interviews provides baseline data on the daily struggles and negotiations faced by leaders in licensed childcare and kindergartens serving children from birth through age six as they juggle administrative, managerial, operational as well as curricular and pedagogical roles. In the international literature, there has been a shift away from seeing leadership as a being associated with or reducible to a list of individual knowledge, skills, or personal qualities (Rodd, 2013), or a role that is dependent on the heroic sacrifices of an individual (Hujala, 2013); instead, leadership is co-constructed and distributed within teams of educators whose focus is on continuous learning and striving towards common goals (Goffin & Janke, 2012; Waniganayake, 2014). As such, early childhood leadership practices are multi-dimensional, complex and linked to contextual influences; and they go beyond administrative prowess to emphasise curriculum and pedagogical leadership if centres are concerned about providing children with quality learning experiences.
This study contributes towards the contextual study of leaders and leadership practices within their particular settings with existing communities, division of labour, and rules. A conversation of at least 70 minutes aimed at understanding the leader’s life world (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009) was conducted with each leader and the qualitative interview data was transcribed and analysed through a sequence of open coding followed by focused coding to pay attention to aspects of curriculum leadership. In this set of data, the leaders were all women, had a range of teaching and leadership experiences of 0 to 20 years, and they worked in a range of commercial and non-profit settings that were all market-driven and competitive given the history and nature of early childhood education as private provision. The paper’s focus is on key strands of curricular work that the leaders carried out -- curriculum planning with teachers, classroom observations, professional conversations -- and in particular, the kinds of conflicting ideas that surfaced during the leaders’ descriptions of their own motives, roles, beliefs vis a vis resources and community or organisational expectations.

Authors

• Sirene Lim, Singapore University of Social Sciences

• Lasse Lipponen, University of Helsinki