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Generative Possibilities

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Paradox and the School Leader

Part of the book series: Educational Leadership Theory ((ELT))

Abstract

In Paradox and the School Leader, I have taken the constitution of principals under conditions of neoliberal governmentality to be fixed by the ontology, epistemology and practice of principal subjectivity. I have, subsequently, asserted that this subjectivity, when understood as a variegated process of neoliberalisation, becomes the site of a political struggle for the soul of the principal. Obscured by the rationalist truth claims of positivist accounts of school leadership and carried out in a predetermined field of power relations, the current rendition of this struggle has been revealed as asymmetric in its formulation – pushed to the margins by the portentous public demands that policy makes for performative acquiescence in principal practice. In turn, this acquiescence has been shown to stand over and against diffused points of agonism and possibilities held in principal self-reflection and caucusing of the like-minded.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This use of ‘praxis’ references the work of Paulo Freire, an author strongly associated with the critical pedagogy tradition. Freire (1970) says that resisting the forces of oppression ‘can be done only by means of the praxis: reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it’ (p. 48, emphasis added).

  2. 2.

    Meno’s paradox, though quite extensive in substance and reach, hangs most famously on Meno’s questioning of Plato’s assertion that ‘it’s not possible for someone to inquire either into that which he knows or into that which he doesn’t know? For he wouldn’t inquire into that which he knows (for he knows it, and there’s no need for such a person to inquire); nor into that which he doesn’t know (for he doesn’t even know what he’ll inquire into)’ (Fine, 2014, p. 83)

  3. 3.

    According to Englert (1990), Cicero kept the Stoic arguments in the background in favour of ‘various means of arguing which were more effective at grabbing the attention of Roman listeners, gaining their assent, and moving them’ (p. 131).

  4. 4.

    In a similar vein, Platt (2016) describes, in reference to the effect of Shakespearean paradox, ‘a paradigm shaking encounter with philosophical doubleness’ (p. 8).

  5. 5.

    Wenman (2013) says ‘the term agonism comes from the Greek agon meaning contest or strife’ (p. 28, italics in original).

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  1. University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

    Chris Dolan

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Dolan, C. (2020). Generative Possibilities. In: Paradox and the School Leader. Educational Leadership Theory. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3086-9_9

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