Principal Leadership and Research as a Situated Ecology of Practices: Education Possibilities in a Diversifying Rural School

• In Event: Leading Rurally: Lessons on Leadership in Australian and American Rural Education

Abstract

Purpose
This paper focuses on leadership within the dynamic social, economic, and spatial particularities of rural schools. An emerging demographic change for many rural schools is the growing cultural and linguistic diversity of student cohorts, brought on by labour migration and government humanitarian programs. In the US, Coady (2019) notes migration trends to rural communities and the growing presence of English language learners in rural schools. In Europe, increased refugee movements have led to deployment of refugees to so-called ‘depopulated’ rural sites (Jelen, 2020), while in Australia, managed labour migration has long been used to supplement workforces in regional and rural areas (Author, 2021b).

Theoretical Framework
This paper presents the practices of one school principal seeking to reconcile the rural particularities of his school with the growing cultural and linguistic diversity of the community. We argue that the dynamic interrelationship between the elements of the context – growing enrolments of students using English as an additional language or dialect (EAL/D), little connection between the school and migrant families, teacher pedagogical concerns, and standardised assessment frameworks, can be best understood through the concept of ecology of practices as proposed by Stengers (2005). Crucially, Stengers argues that an ecology of practices “aims at the construction of new ‘practical identities’ for practices, that is, new possibilities for them to be present, or in other words to connect” (p. 186). Therefore, an ecological approach to school leadership provides a way to understand possibilities and new ‘becomings’ as the response-ability (Heimans, Singh, & Glasswell, 2017) that is needed to adapt well to the changing social, cultural, and academic conditions of rural education.

Methods and Data Sources
Our claims derive from a participatory research project which brought together key stakeholders who had previously had little communication and connection, namely the school principal, mainstream content teachers, multilingual families, and their EAL/D children. At the centre of the project was the school principal’s recognition of diversity and his commitment to reimagining the school, albeit without a clear idea of how this could be achieved. The project, then, presented a ‘space of encounter’ (Franz, 2015) through which social connections between the participants were initiated as a crucial first step towards change.

Results
The outcomes of the research project demonstrated significant shifts in school practices and participant relationships: migrant parents visited the school for the first time, a migrant parent advisory group was formed to advise the school principal, workplace arrangements were altered to allow migrant parents to attend school meetings without being financially penalised, and many went on to participate in a subsequent project with the researcher.

Scholarly Significance
We argue that the significance of the research – its theoretical focus on leadership as an ecology of practices and its participatory approach – enabled a divergence from non-inclusive practices to new practices that engaged the previously disconnected groups with each other. The research itself constituted a practice which was one part of the ecology committed to the search for new possibilities and ‘practices as they may become’ in a diversifying rural school.

Author

• Margaret Kettle, Queensland University of Technology