A Spiritual Leader's Search for Authenticity: Taming and Transcending the Zen Bull and the Authentic Educational Leader

• In Event: Centering Spirituality: During Crisis, in Secular Education, and in Educational Leadership

Abstract

Contemporary metaphors of school administration fail to address or adequately capture the complexities of the relations and tensions between spirituality and moral authenticity in educational leadership practice. These existing metaphors do little to help school leadership understand the spiritual and human work of re-defining thinking and doing ethical decisioning in when facing dilemmas in today’s educational systems. Motifs and discourses of management and administration in schooling as well as disciplinary practices tend to reify status quo policies and procedures, rendering inept efforts to foster authentic experiences for the self and stakeholders. Our inquiry looks at an ancient metaphor, the “Zen bull,” in new ways, examining spiritual leadership with a heuristic of arts-based inquiry to better understand authentic leadership in education.

Authors

• Charles L. Lowery, Ohio University

• Chetanath Gautam, Delaware State University