Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik: Non-affirmative Theory of Education

This volume argues for the need of a common ground that bridges leadership studies, curriculum theory, and Didaktik. It proposes a non-affirmative education theory and its core concepts along with discursive institutionalism as an analytical tool to bridge these fields. It concludes with implications of its coherent theoretical framing for future empirical research. Recent neoliberal policies and transnational governance practices point toward new tensions in nation state education. These challenges affect governance, leadership and curriculum, involving changes in aims and values that demand coherence. Yet, the traditionally disparate fields of educational leadership, curriculum theory and Didaktik have developed separately, both in terms of approaches to theory and theorizing in USA, Europe and Asia, and in the ways in which these theoretical traditions have informed empirical studies over time. An additional aspect is that modern education theory was developed in relation to nation state education, which, in the meantime, has become more complicated due to issues of ‘globopolitanism’. This volume examines the current state of affairs and addresses the issues involved. In doing so, it opens up a space for a renewed and thoughtful dialogue to rethink and re-theorize these traditions with non-affirmative education theory moving beyond social reproduction and social transformation perspectives

Curriculum Theory, Didaktik, and Educational Leadership: Reflections on the Foundations of the Research Program

This chapter provides concluding reflections and next steps in a research program bridging curriculum theory/Didaktik and educational leadership studies. The bridging utilizes non-affirmative education theory as the theoretical ground. To begin, we present a retrospective discussion of the project. We then relate the approach to the contributions included in this volume, especially focusing on the normativity of education theories, and pointing at how non-affirmative education theory corresponds to deliberation oriented democratic-hermeneutic initiatives. Non-affirmative education theory identifies both leadership, teaching and curriculum work as critical deliberation based professional activities driven by subjects, individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions framed by policies. Non-affirmative educational leadership practices are expected to take a critical stand regarding given policies, and other expectations, yet mindful of that education in democratic societies, typically following a Bildung tradition aim at individuals making up of their own minds and learning that practices, also moral and political ones, may and can be changed. The approach applied in this volume, i.e. to point at the roots of modern European education theory not only helps us to better see connections between this Bildung tradition, Deweyan pragmatism and deliberative democracy but is also used as a point of departure to continue towards comparative research on how educational leadership work is carried out in the intersection between curriculum as a policy document and leadership practices at different levels as discursive practices

Non-affirmative Theory of Education as a Foundation for Curriculum Studies, Didaktik and Educational Leadership

This chapter presents non-affirmative theory of education as the foundation for a new research program in education, allowing us to bridge educational leadership, curriculum studies and Didaktik. We demonstrate the strengths of this framework by analyzing literature from educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik. In contrast to both socialization-oriented explanations locating curriculum and leadership within existing society, and transformation-oriented models viewing education as revolutionary or super-ordinate to society, non-affirmative theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. Here critical deliberation and discursive practices mediate between politics, culture, economy and education, driven by individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions. While transformative and socialization models typically result in instrumental notions of leadership and teaching, non-affirmative education theory, previously developed within German and Nordic education, instead views leadership and teaching as relational and hermeneutic, drawing on ontological core concepts of modern education: recognition; summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Understanding educational leadership, school development and teaching then requires a comparative multi-level approach informed by discursive institutionalism and organization theory, in addition to theorizing leadership and teaching as cultural-historical and critical-hermeneutic activity. Globalisation and contemporary challenges to deliberative democracy also call for rethinking modern nation-state based theorizing of education in a cosmopolitan light. Non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era. We hope an American-European-Asian comparative dialogue is enhanced by theorizing education with a non-affirmative approach

Uljens, Michael, and Rose M. Ylimaki, Non-affirmative Theory of Education and Foundation of Curriculum Studies, Didaktik, and Educational Leadership, Chapter 1, pp. 3-145 in Michael Uljens and Rose M. Ylimako, eds., Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory, and Didaiktik: Non-affirmative Theory of Education. New York: Springer, 2017.

Provides an extensive exploration of the historical literature on theorizing educational leadership, curriculum, and Didaktik; makes a plea for bridging the work of all three types of theorizing; offers a non-affirmative theory of education as a framework for accomplishing this effort of bridging all thre