Abstract (summary)
A new paradigm of educational leadership and organizations is emerging. The approach to leadership as technical expert in a hierarchical setting is yielding to leadership as membership in a community of moral discourse. The former model is limited in its ability to address the pluralistic and ethical issues of today. What are the leadership practices and organizational contexts that enable ethical wisdom--phronesis--to flourish? This research addressed this question.
Educational leaders, both administrative and teachers in K-12 public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, were engaged in conversation designed to disclose understanding about the creation of ethical organizations. The conversations and the review of the literature were framed by three categories: ontology of leadership, community, and ethical discourse.
The linguistic grounding of critical hermeneutic research is the basis of creation of meaning and reality. Language enables the appropriation of new understanding expressed in action. The validity of this study is determined by its ability to inspire and transform participants' thinking, acting, and being.
Being an ethical leader in the school as community exists in the domain of becoming. The study disclosed seven directions, or orientations, that are constitutive of the process of becoming: questioning, self-knowing, empowering, creating community, understanding, transforming, encouraging phronesis. Leaders who are oriented to questioning and thinking in order to reveal taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions provide themselves with an interactive milieu to reflect who they are. Self-knowing is disclosed in relationship to others. When the relationships are mediated, not by domination, but by shared power, all can participate equitably in the creation of a caring community of self-determining members. There is a basis, then, for unconstrained communication that is oriented toward understanding and creating a shared normative structure. This has transformative potential as participants are open to the dialectical interplay of themselves and others, resulting in a higher universality. Phronesis is encouraged and actualized.