Principal leadership in school partnership: A boundary work perspective

• In Event: Working within differences: boundary and boundary practices in Chinese schools

Proposal

Studies on educational leadership have widely discussed principals’ roles in transactional, transformative, distributed or instructional practices within schools. Nevertheless, these intra-school roles and practices of principals are under great challenges of social, cultural and professional boundaries brought by different partners (Firestone & Fisler, 2002; Valli et al., 2018). School principals have had to exert roles and functions both within and out of school. While scholars have widely discussed principals’ roles in buffering and bridging cross-boundary collaboration, most of them have focused on how they have practiced their leadership within their own schools (Auerbach, 2012; Stovel & Brokerage, 2012; Wang & Wong, 2019). However, what has remained underexamined is how have principals coordinated the participation of diverse partners in the school improvement agenda when partner organizations are culturally and socially diverse.

This paper is informed by the boundary work perspective and the cooperative boundary work analysis is adopted as an analytical framework (Langley et al., 2019). The qualitative research approach and case method are used to examine principals’ boundary work in a Hong Kong university-business-schools (U-B-S) partnership program. This program has been initiated by a business unit aiming to support the development of disadvantaged secondary schools in Hong Kong. An educational institute at a Hong Kong university has been latter invited by this business unit to provide professional advice. In total, 3 principals and 12 teachers from 3 schools and 6 partners from the university and the business unit were invited to take semi-structured interview. The three schools chosen for this study were recommended by the program director from the university for their principals’ excellent leadership. Interview questions mainly focused on how participants perceived and dealt with the challenges they met in the partnership, why they adopted certain strategies and what have been the effects.

Preliminary finding reveals that three modes of boundary work (Langley et al., 2019) were used by principals, in which the professional, cultural and psychological differences were reconstructed in various ways (Long & Cunningham, 2013). First, by using negotiating mode of boundary work, principals promoted the transferring of knowledge and human resources from both university and business partners to schools. Within this process, they also served as a gatekeeper to protect teachers’ professional autonomy in teaching and curriculum. Second, through embodying mode of boundary work, principals enhanced mutual understanding of varying organizational cultures to break teachers’ psychological boundaries in their teaching practices. Third, in the reconstruction of social boundaries between partners, a downplaying mode of boundary work was adopted to destruct the unequal cooperative relationship and a shared identity of ‘school improver’ was constructed through mutual engagement of partners (Wenger, 2004). Based on these findings, this paper can contribute to a better understanding of principal leadership in the context of partnership collaboration that involves multiple organizations.

Authors

• 丽佳 王, Department of Education，East China Normal University

• Manhong Lai, Chinese Univ of Hong Kong