Principals, politics and the pandemic: leading schools in an existential crisis

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The ongoing struggle for educational change after apartheid: Shadows of history, elusive futures

Abstract

With the focus on exemplarity (Emmanuel & Valley 2022; Korsgaard 2020), this research is concerned with how a reputational sample of Black principals in South Africa led their schools during the pandemic (see Reimers 2022). Informed by theoretical postulates drawn from work on leadership presence (Bailey et al. 2022), the research questions included the following: how did their leadership emerge and express itself in the crisis? And what exactly did these principals do in the course of leading their schools. How did this leadership impact on the school communities they serve?
This qualitative inquiry used two methods, questionnaires and interviews, to compose case study accounts of three exemplary principals, i.e., principals whom in the estimation of their peers, led differently in the course of the crisis, and had a tangible impact on their school communities. I therefore used snowball sampling using a validated open-ended questionnaire to solicit from a much larger group of principals in the same district, the names of at least five (5) principals whom they considered as exemplary leaders over the course of the pandemic (2021-2023).
I conducted three waves of in-depth, in-person interviews each with complementary foci to build the principal cases:
• Wave one: gaining valuable biographical and introductory data from my cases (structured interviews)
• Wave two: gaining an insight into the leadership of my cases during the crisis (semi-structured interviews)
• Wave three: follow up questions to further draw out the nuances and complexities of the exemplarity of my cases (semi-structured interviews)

The qualitative data analysis was conducted using ATLAS.ti software, and revealed three main findings.
One, that the main and shared feature of the leadership of these exemplary leaders during the pandemic could be described as a “work of heart”, ‘staff-child’ focused, and a voice-for-all approach.
Two, that the disruption occasioned by the pandemic would reveal principal leaders who were recognized as compassionate, reflexive and present in the moment of crisis.
And three, that there was substantive evidence for the emergent theory of leadership in that the principals in the study expressed moderate to strong evidence of all five dimensions of leadership presence: physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional and political.
The significance of the study is that is generates new insights into the operations of leadership presence under conditions of existential crisis (the pandemic) and under-resourcing in post-apartheid schools with implications and promise for similar research in the global south.

Author

• Trevor Andre DaRocha, Stellenbosch University