Moral Standards and Geo-Economic Constraints Contextualizing the School Principalship in the Caribbean: The Case of Grenada

• In Event: Reimagining Education for a Better Globalized World

Proposal

Relevance
The CIES conference theme, “Improving Education for a More Equitable World”, necessitates exposing for critique and discussion the persistent challenges to educational equity still facing the African diaspora. This theme also facilitates the emergence and/or centering of regions, peoples, and issues hithertofore ignored or sidelined in mainstream discussions of educational development. Here, I examine how inherited colonial understandings and geo-economic constraints in the Caribbean shape school leadership. Specifically, the paper reports on an empirical study of school principals in Grenada, exploring how moral standards and socioeconomic constraints shape school leaders’ understandings and practices of work. Grenada’s high public debt – US $0.73 billion as of April 2021 (Government of Grenada, 2022) – and susceptibility to hurricanes overshadow the country’s overall development. Also contextualizing citizens’ ways of knowing and doing are entrenched colonial and post-Independence ideologies and norms of work as being about service, hard work,free labour, and civic and Christian imperatives.

Framework
Work is defined as the actions principals undertake as a chief school administrator, including physical and emotional thoughts and actions (Pollock, 2016; Pollock & Hauseman, 2015). Further undergirding the study were the conceptualization of work as a social construct (Applebaum, 1992; Fineman, 2012; Grint, 2005) and the mobilization of the relational approach to the study of school principals’ work (Eacott, 2015). Examining school principals’ actions as socially constructed and constituted illuminated the school principalship in Grenada as shaped by pervading socio-historic and economic conditions and relations and principals’ lived experiences within said contexts. The relational approach privileges this attention to context, giving meaning and significance to school principals’ activities and overall behaviours. This overarching research framework allowed for a more fulsome and meaningful exploration of not just what principals in Grenada do daily but the conditions and relations that shape and reify these school leaders’ actions.

Methodology
The study that informs this paper is the first of its kind, empirical or otherwise, to document the work of school principals in Grenada. The exploratory nature of the study partly accounted for why the specific research question posed was, “What is the work of school principals in Grenada?” Sub-questions examined principals’ understandings and actions, and the conditions and challenges of their work. As researcher, I conducted two semi-structured interviews and one week of direct observations with eight public school principals, four each in primary and secondary schools. Five principals identified as female and three as male, and seven worked in denominational schools. Each participant was interviewed once, observed for five consecutive days, beginning on a Monday, and then interviewed a second time after observations were concluded. The study drew on qualitative and interpretive inquiry (Creswell, 2012), privileging participants’ accounts of their lived experiences. Interviews and observations are primary means of qualitative data collection and yield rich data in exploratory studies (Creswell, 2014; Gay et al., 2009). The research framework and questions drove data collection and analysis. Collecting and analyzing the data unfolded cyclically, iteratively, and thematically (Creswell, 2014; Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Gall et al., 2010), with repeated revisits to both the interview and observation data as data collection was ongoing to identify common themes and different findings, memo and code sections of the data, and highlight areas for further inquiry or focus, overall constituting an exercise in “digesting the contents of qualitative data and finding related threads in it” (Gay et al., 2009, p. 50). Overall, the study’s methodological design exposed for empirical scrutiny incumbent Grenadian school administrators’ perspectives around their understandings, actions, and challenges relative to their work, exposing for the analysis not just the meanings school principals ascribed their leadership actions but the conditions around which these actions flourished and were sustained in this Caribbean context. Principals’ audio interviews and the researcher’s observational recordings were the main sources of data informing the study.

Findings
As the findings revealed, the Grenadian school principalship is characterized by four main types of work, namely faith-based (religious) duties, administrivia, charity, and manual labour. School principals’ work in Grenada was shaped within the context of overall fiscal constraints, a subsequent lack of governmental supports for schools, and a pervasive colonial undertone relative to notions of work as service and hard, free labour, and the belief that work was a civic and Christian duty. These ideologies and antecedents spurred the proliferation of high volumes of work (largely administrative); long workdays (into evenings and weekends); and copious amounts of manual labour (around repairs to school building and furniture, and maintenance services such as plumbing and carpentry), fundraising (to generate resources to meet school needs), and charity (principals giving of their time, resources, and money to students and to support student needs) among Grenadian school principals. As I discuss, religious duties reflect Grenada’s colonial heritage as a Christian, largely Catholic, society, with principals in the study often justifying their acts of charity and giving of free labour in biblical contexts, such as such actions being a “Christian duty” and making statements such as their “reward is in heaven”, “God loves a cheerful giver”, and “being a good Samaritan”. Principals led denomination-based Biblical teachings of Jesus Christ, religious rituals including delivering sermons and prayers, spiritual development for their school communities.

Contributions
As the study illuminated, Grenadian school leaders espouse and practice a strong ethic of care, servant leadership, and moral standards in their work within and against stark socio-historic, cultural, and economic circumstances. From a critical perspective, the scope and nature of these leaders’ altruism compels problematization of their work within broader educational discourse of worker precarity and exploitation. The study’s results underscore the CIES conference theme of improving education for a more equitable world by illuminating the challenges still impeding such equity in the African diaspora, particularly in developing countries in the Caribbean previously colonized by Europe and now struggling to eke out an existence out of plunder, exploitation, and debt. These insights often do not contribute to mainstream discussions of educational equity and sustainable development but are vital if we are to make meaningful strides to create more equitable education systems across the globe.

Author

• Donna H. Swapp, University of Regina