Narrative power and the engagement of subjectivities: Insights into distributed leadership from teachers in a Māori immersion infant and toddler group

Abstract

In this thesis beliefs about leadership and how it is enacted, in particular distributed leadership, are brought into narrative space where its entanglements with culture, power, politics and identity are considered. A 'playful' philosophical stance is adopted in which conservative writing structures are challenged by alternative narrative approaches. The main reason here is to draw readers' attention to the vitality of the text. Following MacLure (2003) what is curious here is the idea of understanding the research itself as writing. Located within a qualitative framework this research tries to answer the question 'how is distributed leadership thought of within an infants and toddlers team?' I employ the notion of bricolage to locate multiple paradigms, overlapping theories and conceptual understandings, in an effort to keep the research open. In order to unfold and gain a better understanding of the early childhood educational leadership context in Aotearoa New Zealand narrative methodology and methods, and critical, feminist, postcolonial and poststructural perspectives as conceptual frameworks are braided together. Inspired by the work of writers coming from these perspectives, the research is conceptually guided by questions that inevitably connect the issues of knowledge, politics, power and identity to education, to early childhood education, and to leadership within these settings. The research follows a co-participatory critical ethnographic approach where culture in the broader sense is explored alongside the context of an ' infant toddler team culture', a group of teachers working within a Maori immersion setting. This age group has been selected to authentically acknowledge what are often unheard voices in the education sector. These narrative voices reveal entangled connections between leadership, power and identity as an engagement of subjectivities. What this narrative reveals is the reconceptualisation of leadership as a shift from thinking in terms of Power and its transfer, to thinking about distributed leadership aligned with Foucault's alternative concept of power relations. A further insight is the understanding that fluidity of identities in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand which involves authentic encounters with otherness, to learn how one's identity is multiple and complex and is in a continuous process of becoming.