| Welcome
to the Fifteenth Annual International
Values and Leadership Conference
Conference Theme
Ethics, Resilience, and Sustainability:
Elements of Learning Focussed School Leadership
Conference Sponsor
Center
for Principal Development
(Umeå University, Sweden)
Ethics, resilience and sustainability are among the elements
of authentic educational leadership that are increasingly appropriate
to our times. More than ever there is a need for genuinely authentic leadership
for improving our schools, colleges and universities. We are identifying
these three sub-themes as a structure for our continuing discussion of
authentic leadership, ethics and moral literacy. We also invite the submission
of titles and abstracts for papers that align with these themes.
Ethics
(Keynote Speaker: Robert Starratt, Boston College, US
Ethics can be thought of as the first principles or norms of ideal behaviour
characteristic of a society, a profession, an organization, or an individual.
They are a special category of values that are culturally derived –
that is, their form and interpretation are grounded in the experiences
of a particular culture and distilled over time to an essence. They often
take the form of context-stripped statements of principle or standards
of behaviour. Moreover, in contrast to other forms of values, for example
those grounded in a concern for consequences and/or consensus, ethics
do not necessary require rational justification or empirical evidence
to warrant their special status. Within a particular culture they are
justified through faith or will, not rational argument. To this extent
they can be considered trans-rational values.
Scholars of educational leadership who adopt a foundational philosophical
perspective on the study of Ethics are much inclined to use three key
ethics as the basis for discussing ethical actions. These are the familiar
ethics of justice, care and critique. There are surely many other ethics
that can be identified from and across the cultures and societies of our
world, but these three are the classically identified ethics in the field
of educational leadership.
Professions often take these ethics and translate them into more operational
forms. Most professions and some organizations have standards or codes
of ideal behaviour derived from an ethical posture of one sort or another
and given expression in some operational form as a meta-value. Our conference
theme last year focussed on the exploration of these themes and the conversations
begun there will no doubt continue for some time to come.
Resilience
(Keynote speaker: Christopher Day, University of Nottingham, England)
Resilience is a necessary condition for successful leadership and leadership
resilience as we define it is the willingness and capacity of principals
to ‘bounce back’, to recover strengths or spirit quickly and
efficiently in the face of adversity.
Over the years, much has been written internationally about
leadership purposes, values, practices and effectiveness. More recently,
issues of succession planning, capacity building, distributed leadership,
sustainability and systems leadership have been the focus of policy and
policy related research. Yet relatively little research has focussed upon
how school leaders, principals in particular, sustain their values, motivation,
commitment and sense of effectiveness over time in changing personal,
social, organisational and policy contexts. Principals need to be able
to manage their own energy and emotional well being in order to be effective
stewards of individual, relational and collective energy and morale. This
is what we in the discourse call leadership resilience. In this sense
resilience is closely associated with a strong sense of vocation, self
efficacy, moral purpose, hope and commitment; and that is far from being
simply a personal trait, it is dynamic and developmental in nature.
Sustainability
(Key-Note Speaker: Paul T. Begley, Nipissing University, Canada)
In recent years a new professional ethic has begun to garner increasing
amounts of attention, especially in Australia. This operational value
is the notion of sustainability. While interest in sustainability as a
concept probably originates in a concern for the environment –water
conservation, global warming, and increased atmospheric pollution - it
can be argued that the term sustainability also has considerable merit
for sound leadership. A few scholars have explored sustainability as an
organizational capacity, but fewer have looked at sustainability as an
element of the leadership practices of individuals. In this sense sustainability
literally means practices which can be sustained as positive and constructive
actions over the long-term life of a society or organization. In the same
sense that our societies have begun to think in terms of 50 to 100 years
when considering the environment - in place of the usual one to five year
span of awareness usually associated with fiscal models and strategic
planning processes - the same notion can be usefully applied to the leadership
processes of school administrators.
There are educational processes and practices that build on consistency,
trust, capacity, relationships, and transformation. These are the practices
of sustainable leadership. Conversely, there are many practices commonly
espoused by leadership courses and management experts that are not contributions
to sustainable leadership. Labelling a school, as a “failed school”
does not build capacity, it may destroy it. Zero tolerance policies are
another example of destructive practices that focus on narrow interpretations
of behaviour, ignore intent, and reduce the range of discretional responses
by school leaders. Identifying and promoting leadership practices that
are sustainable as well as ethical seems to be a worthy quest for authentic
leaders.
Please
see the Call for Papers page for more details.
The due date for paper proposals is May 15, 2010.
Conference Coordinator: Olof Johansson
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