ABSTRACT
As socially and culturally constructed worlds, schools combine the fluid, mutually transformative interactions between individual and community of practice, in which individual influences community and community influences individual. School leadership is a situated social practice that is at once an individual and a collective process, constructed within and by the individual, but situated within and transformed by community. School leader identities, and the ways that identities interact with school contexts, are at the heart of school leadership.
While the principal is often viewed as the central protagonist on the stage of school change, in this chapter I explore the identity of the middle leader as a lens through which to view and understand school leadership. Taking an autoethnographic stance, I utilise narrative inquiry to tease out the realities and humanity of being and becoming a boundary spanning pracademic, that is, a teacher, researcher, parent, woman. Through a process of writing as inquiry, as a medium of reflective and analytic thinking, I draw together my simultaneous roles and offer the ways in which I navigate (or am unsuccessful in navigating) the tensions and intricacies of life and leadership. Narrative vignettes are followed by literature review and analysis, providing a “thinking out loud” process to make sense of my lived experience and provide insights into the work and identity of school leaders. The chapter presents school leader professional identity as lifelong in the making, multiplicitous, constantly navigating seemingly dichotomous tensions and holonomous, in which there is both “I” the individual and “we” the collective. In doing so, I present a keyhole view into the lived experience of leadership in Australian schools.
