Journal of Authentic Leadership in Education (JALE) is a refereed journal established in January 2010. This journal is published quarterly, online. JALE is a project operated by Nipissing University Centre for the Study of Leadership and Ethics of UCEA, which was established centre of the University Council for Educational Administration Centre for the Study of Leadership and Ethics in 2009. The journal is housed in the Schulich School of Education, Nipissing University, Ontario, Canada under the editorship of Heather Rintoul.

Editorial Objectives:

Journal of Authentic Leadership in Education is dedicated to promoting and disseminating a broad range of scholarly inquiry relating to the areas of values and ethics, and their relationship to theory and practice in educational administration. The editor believes that the areas of values and ethics remain a critically important direction for research into the practice of educational administration, and is prepared to consider a wide range of disciplined empirical and conceptual works of interest to both scholars in the field as well as practicing administrators.

In recent years such scholarship has increasingly been referred to as authentic leadership. Authentic leadership is a metaphor for professionally effective, ethically sound, and consciously reflective practices in educational administration. This is leadership that is knowledge-based, values informed, and skilfully executed. Leadership by definition refers to practices that extend beyond the usual procedural context of organizational management. Authentic leadership implies a genuine kind of leadership – a hopeful, open-ended, visionary and creative response to social circumstances, as opposed to the more traditional dualistic portrayal of management and leadership practices characteristic of now obsolete research literature on effective principal practices (Begley 2001).

Moreover, management is often negatively portrayed as mechanistic, relatively short-sighted, and a precedent focused enterprise. An integrated image of leadership and management more in keeping with current times is a values-informed leadership –a form of leadership that acknowledges and accommodates, in an integrative way, the legitimate needs of individuals, groups, organizations, communities and cultures –not just the organizational perspectives that are the usual focus of most leadership literature. It is a perspective that has in recent years been explored by several other scholars, including Taylor (1991), Duignan & Bhindi (1997) and Starratt (2004).

The innovative dimension being proposed here is the adoption and application of a values and valuation process perspective to educational leadership to make the objectives of administration more understandable, compelling and achievable. It is in this context authentic leadership is proposed as the outcome of self-knowledge, sensitivity to the orientations of others, and a technical sophistication that leads to a synergy of leadership action (Begley, 2001; 2003).

References

Begley, P.T. (2001). In pursuit of authentic school leadership practices. International Journal of Leadership in Education 4, 353-366.

Begley, P.T. (2003). In pursuit of authentic school leadership practices. In Begley, P.T. and Johansson, O. (eds) The ethical dimensions of school leadership. pp 1–12. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press.

Duignan, P. and Bhindi, N. (1997). Authentic leadership: An emerging perspective. Journal of Educational Administration 35, 195-209.

Starratt, R.J. (2004). Ethical leadership. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Taylor, C. (1991). The ethics of authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.