Educational Leadership as a Bricolage: Expanding Disciplinary Boundaries in Preparation and Practice

• In Event: Theories of Learning, Teaching, and Effectiveness in Educational Leadership

Abstract

Bricolage signifies interdisciplinarity, a crossing of disciplinary boundaries. Given the growing social, cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and political diversity characterizing education in the past few decades, university faculty and public school practitioners are faced with the need to reconceptualize leadership work. The purpose of this paper presentation is to examine educational leadership as bricolage. More specifically, the paper examines requisite antecedents necessary to reconceptualizing leadership as bricolage and sets forth an argument for the educational leader as bricoleur, focusing on the importance of expanding disciplinary boundaries in preparation and practice. Argued, importantly, the deep interdisciplinarity guiding the bricoleur’s work shapes the leadership bricolage as an array of scholarly practices that are employed to illuminate, interrogate, and change social practice.

Author

• Patrick M. Jenlink, Stephen F. Austin State University