Exploring cross-cultural perspectives of teacher leadership among the members of an international teacher leadership research team: a phenomenographic study

Abstract

This presentation is based on a study that explores the culturally diverse understandings, experiences and perspectives of teacher leadership among the membership of an International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) research team comprised of 20 academics working in universities in Australia, Canada, Latin America, South Africa, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, China and Europe. The impetus for this study emerged as a direct result of discussions at a 2018 conference in which ISTL team members expressed interest in exploring perspectives of teacher leadership among the team to inform their ongoing collaborative ISTL research. Literature on educational leadership and teacher leadership suggests that both teachers' and researchers' understandings of these concepts are widely varied (Webber, 2018). It is also well recognised that notions of what constitutes effective leadership are context specific and subject to cultural bias (AHRC, 2018; Rogoff, 2003; van Emmerick, Euema & Wendt, 2008), with the literature on teacher leadership typically found to offer interpretations, conceptual frameworks, and recommendations reliant on a knowledge base in which Western notions of leadership are embedded as if they were culturally transferable (Hallinger & Walker, 2011; Webber, 2018). This study aims to address these issues by paving the way for fuller, richer, more inclusive, and thus potentially more sophisticated understandings of the concept. Using phenomenography – an approach to qualitative research focused on capturing how the world and phenomena in the world appear to other people (Marton, 1988; Marton & Booth, 1997), the researchers (also members of the ISTL research team) use mind mapping (Arden, 2016; Buzan & Buzan, 2003) and semi-structured, online interviews to explore the ways that the participants related with the phenomenon of interest, 'teacher leadership' (Larrson & Holmstrom, 2007). A phenomenographic data analysis procedure is followed to discover conceptions and experiences of teacher leadership reflected in the data, identifying and highlighting the critical differences, or variation, therein. The findings – in the form of categories of description in the phenomenographic outcome space – constitute a map of the qualitatively different ways that teacher leadership is viewed and experienced by teacher leadership researchers from different geographical contexts and cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In this presentation, the researchers present the rationale for the study, an overview of the methodology and some preliminary findings. A discussion will follow with Symposium participants to explore how the findings can contribute to the work of the ISTL research team by providing an 'experiential framework' (Pham, Bruce & Stoodley, 2002) for thinking about cross-cultural understandings of teacher leadership and teacher leadership research