ABSTRACT
My focal interest is in human freedom, in the capacity to surpass the given and look at things as if they could be otherwise. (Maxine Greene 1988)
While teaching a summer course on school leadership at a Canadian university, I met a teacher from Switzerland who audited the course at the request of her school in order to learn about North American school leadership practices. As it turned out, we learned a great deal from her about democratic leadership. In her school, ‘management’ is shared by an elected three-person team of teacher colleagues, while ‘leadership’ is shared by all school staff on an ongoing basis through consensus-building. Her school mirrors the larger political environment in which all citizens must vote and voting is a regular-often monthly-occurrence about all manner of issues of concern to the community and country. My point in introducing this story is not that this is an ideal that should be emulated, but that this model of democratic leadership was so outside our North American experience as to be almost unimaginable. As fascinating as we found this model, we were discouraged to learn that it was under review because of the Swiss government’s dissatisfaction with PISA (international standardised test) results-confi rming that even long traditions of direct democracy in educational practice are under siege within the homogenising policy effects of the managerialist state (Dehli 1996).
