The Elusive What and The Problematic How: The Essential Leadership Questions For School Leaders and Educational Researchers

The series, Educational Leadership and Leaders in Contexts, emphasizes how
historical and contextual assumptions shape the meanings and values assigned to
the term leadership. The series includes books along four distinct threads:

• Reconsidering the role of social justice within the contexts of
educational leadership
• Promoting a community of leadership: Reaching out and involving
stakeholders and the public
• Connecting the professional and personal dimensions of educational
leadership
• Reconceptualizing educational leadership as a global profession

Perhaps to a greater extent than ever before, today’s educational leaders find
themselves living in a world that is substantially different from what it was just a
decade ago. The threads of social justice, community leadership, professional and
personal dimensions, and globalism have added contextual dimensions to
educational leaders that are often not reflected in their local job descriptions. This
book series will focus on how these changing contexts affect the theory and
practice of educational leaders.
Similarly, the professional lives of educational leaders has increasingly
impinged upon their personal well-being, such that it now takes a certain type of
individual to be able to put others before self for extended periods of their working
life. This series will explore the dynamic relationship between the personal and the
professional lives of school leaders.

With respect to communities, recent educational reforms have created a need for
communities to know more about what is happening inside of classrooms and
schools. While education is blamed for many of the ills identified in societies,
school leaders and school communities are generally ignored or excluded from the
processes related to social development. The challenge facing school leaders is to
work with and build community support through the notion of community
leadership. Thus, leadership itself involves working with teachers, students, parents
and the wider community in order to improve schools.
As for the fourth thread, globalism, school leaders must now work with multiple
languages, cultures, and perspectives reflecting the rapid shift of people from one
part of the world to another. Educational leaders now need to be educated to
understand global perspectives and react to a world where a single way of thinking
and doing no longer applies.