Shifting the Lens: Everyday Collective Leadership Activity in Education

Abstract

Effective educational leadership takes shape in many ways, and yet understanding the complexities of leadership remains hindered by two challenges. First, leadership as a practice enacted collectively by teachers and positional leaders in open teaching spaces remains under-conceptualised. Second, a view of leadership as a formal, individual position of responsibility dominates the literature. This thesis contributes a response to both challenges by shifting the leadership lens from a formal, individual position to a more inclusive, collective practice. Through this lens, an original notion of leadership is conceptualised. The aim of this qualitative, interpretivist case study was to investigate how a notion initially termed "everyday teacher leadership" (ETL), devised after reviewing selected literature, was potentially enacted by two infant-toddler teaching teams within one high-quality early childhood centre in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Focus groups, field observations, semi-structured interviews, and centre documentation helped to generate rich data from 16 teachers (with and without formal leadership positions) and 10 families. The data were analysed in three layers: deductively, using the four principles of ETL; inductively for additional insights; and abductively, to further theorise and refine the ETL principles. Data analysis led to reinterpreting ETL as "everyday collective leadership" (ECL). Both leadership theory and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) informed the methodology, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of findings. A leadership-CHAT framework helped to both shift the leadership lens from the formal-individual to the inclusive-collective and highlight the enabling values-based norms and rules that underpinned the enactment of ECL identified in the study. This leadership took shape, not as individual acts, but as intentional and sustained, object-driven activity reliant on whole-team inquiry, relational dialogue, and relational agency-in-flow. The complex enactment of this leadership was reflected in the systemic tensions and knotworking nature of teachers' joint activity within both infant-toddler rooms. Adopting leadership and CHAT theoretical perspectives to understand and theorise how teaching teams might enact leadership has potential to transform the nature of joint educationally-focused activity in open teaching spaces and improve the quality of education and care for children and their families in diverse settings. Implications for practice, policy, and teacher leadership are discussed, and research possibilities proposed to bring visibility to the potential ECL activity of teaching teams in education.