School Principals\u27 Work in Grenada

Abstract

This dissertation explores school principals’ work in Grenada, a former British colony in the Caribbean. The dearth of perspectives of school leadership in/on the Global South, broader tensions in the field around standards, frameworks, and expectations around the principalship, and, particularly in Grenada, the lack of documentation around principals’ work, geo-economic challenges including fiscal constraints, and sociohistoric ideologies and tensions around labour, civic duty, and Christianity contextualized the study. The study was qualitative and interpretive, utilizing direct observations and semi-structured interviews to garner eight (four each in primary and secondary schools) public school principals’ understandings, actions, and challenges relative to their work. The research framework constituted a relational understanding of principals’ labour as embedded and embodied in context intertwined with a conceptualization of work as a social construct. This necessitated a focus on principals’ thinking about their work and the actions they undertook daily but also probing the conditions and relations around which such thinking and actions unfolded. Principals understood work as, a calling/vocation, service, and commitment to student learning. Consequently, they undertook many denominational-based actions and other duties around organizational management, instructional supervision, and community relations, overall reporting high volumes of administrative tasks, little time for instructional supervision, and high volumes of unfree labour. Limited governmental and denominational supports, inadequate and outdated infrastructure, pedagogy, and resources, negative public regard for some schools, and intimidation dictated day-to-day undertaking of work, driving high rates of manual labour, fundraising, and charity among principals. The findings underscore the highly administrative nature of the work of school principals and corroborates incumbents’ admissions in the literature of time constraints in undertaking instructional work. The findings also illuminate wider evidence in the field of the highly compliant nature of principals’ contemporary work, with Grenadian principals working long, arduous hours notwithstanding grave socio-economic hardships – not of their making – constraining their abilities to perform their work. Principals ascribed this commitment to their Christian (moral) principles and broader civic beliefs, but it was apparent that broader societal expectations around principals’ labour and some principals’ fear of victimization also ensured compliance and control of principals’ labour in Grenada