ABSTRACT
In the last decades, the perspective on leadership has shifted, moving from a mandated to a more distributed understanding of leadership. Within distributed leadership, every professional can move in and out of leadership roles, regardless of their position. The focus is not only on the leaders themselves, with the normative stances they take, but also on the plurality of leadership practices, which show how professionals interrelate and work together in a process of decision making. Another feature of distributive leadership is that the normativity of the professional performance is distributed, which implies that every professional is required to take position in the resulting morally plural context. This change has (or at least, should have) increased the awareness that subjectivity is an integral and constitutive aspect of (normative) professionalization. This chapter describes how students develop both personally and professionally during and after an educational minor program in philosophy, world religions, and spirituality. In this minor program, students are required to articulate their life orientation, which is an educational strategy to foster their normative professionalization. Drawing on dialogical self theory (DST), we have designed a new narrative analysis instrument that allows us to describe how the articulation of a personal life orientation relates to professional development. In this chapter we show how DST concepts can be used for a semi-longitudinal narrative study of moral and existential learning processes, and we substantiate the claim that a deeper insight into one’s own life orientation enables educational professionals to respect a moral plurality within their professional and societal context.
