Abstract
Our legacy to the late philosophical historian, Hayden White, is to question the truths of the myths we create in our work. Collectively, we co-create records of interactions with students, teachers, and leaders as we inquire into the practical past of participants. Philosophy enables us to map perceptions of what is valid, in order to make meaning from their understandings of known realities. Research is dependent upon the analysis of the fictional narratives of those we interpret. Hayden White’s discordant imagery of a concentration camp reconstructed into a zoo prompted me to consider the importance of exposing and interrogating our own subjective assumptions and representations as educators and researchers. Like the zoo, we utilise myths and metaphors as palatable mediums for exploring confronting truths. Our critical theory group has inspired us to interrogate our assumptions, to utilise myth as a tool of liberation, and to risk representing others instead of serving ourselves. White (Historein, 10, 10–19, 2010) explores how creativity helps us conceptualise solidarity, solutions, and new possibilities in education.
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According to White (2010), history is teacher. Those who write and speak of people and events in the past to teach others do so selectively based upon their emotions and assumptions and purposes. It is inevitable that humans see the present through the lenses of their emotions and experiences, which form the building blocks for accruing knowledge, which in turn shape the assumptions people build over time. If education is about challenging and disrupting assumptions, what does this mean for designing a post graduate university course for future educational leaders? What are the essential knowledges and skills, philosophy, and research that educational leaders should access and consider? What is most important? Current rhetoric suggests that we should equip our educational leaders to understand evidence-informed practice directly from our research. Is that all we should do? Is it practical to consider shaping a course around a history of the field of educational leadership? What even is this field? How does the course align with the social justice agenda of our school and faculty? What do these challenges mean for the role of educational leaders in leading change in education?
The role of the educator is to be a pedagogue. Being a pedagogue is achieved through understanding content and history, and through action, by practising pedagogy through classroom relationships. One cannot be adequately performed without the other. I would like to reflect on the pedagogical decisions Low (Chap. 18) made about teaching ethical leadership and how students responded to them and how these both resonated with me and inspired me in course design, and more broadly about the purpose of the field of educational leadership.
Leadership: international perspectives is a one-semester unit that invites students to see educational leadership framed in alternate ways, drawing upon international perspectives of educational leadership theory and practice, perspectives about learning and educational leadership, ethical perspectives, and issues of identity. Rather than gathering information, each framing of educational leadership invites inquiry and choice about theories and perspectives. In this way the course reflects White’s view of the contemporary historian who “has to establish the value of the study of the past, not ‘as an end in itself,’ but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time” (White, 1966, p. 125). Low’s chosen topic was ethical leadership. Drawing upon the life histories and educational leadership experiences of two philosophers and educational leaders, Low sought to understand ethical worlds and decisions from their contrasting backgrounds, and for leaders to be inspired by their actions, driven by their ethical purposes.
Ethical leadership is as necessary for our time as it ever was. However, student responses from our international classroom demonstrated that ethical leadership means different things to different people. As Low writes, “White is making the case that not all information about the past is useful because it is not all truthful or representative” (Chap. 18). The challenge was to make the coursework representative for an international cohort, in a way that enables them to reimagine the useful and practical in their contexts, rather than have theories “wash over them” (White, 2010, p. 15). This is particularly important, as Low suggests, when educational leadership is about inner and outer change. White challenges us not to paint over truths, with his example of converting a place of atrocity to a zoo and that we cannot predict the future. However, he argues that we can use narrative aesthetics and imagination to draw understanding. Drawing understanding is the starting point for learning. Hope is where understanding leads to action. Hope can fill the gaps through conscious acknowledgement of past atrocities and intentional actions for change. As Arendt (1985) writes, hope is nascent. Hope is an action.
The course draws extensively upon practice theory as a way of understanding what educational leaders actually do, say, and how they relate and the arrangements that surround their practices (Kemmis et al., 2014). Practice theories relate well to British philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of “the practical past” and what we can learn from yesterday’s practices in our schools. These are our “versions of the past that most of us carry around within our minds and draw on in the performing of our daily tasks where we are compelled to judge situations, solve problems, make decisions and, more importantly, perhaps respond to the consequences of decisions made both by us and for us by those institutions of which we are more or less conscious members” (White, 2014). These are the daily practices of an educational leader. In this way, doing the present is doing history through practice theory.
A key question for the educational leadership field is whether we choose to ignore the history of educational leadership in our coursework today (Eacott, 2021). Many courses draw upon critical theory and post-structuralism as an alternative, and our course also presents these perspectives. Words and experiences and the representations of both through theory are always limited. Myths are the lived theories of our understandings. Their creativity helps us conceptualise solidarity, solutions, and possibilities for our limited human minds, like children playing make-believe or like the animals we view almost voyeuristically at play in a zoo. And yet, do multiple shared perspectives in our classroom add to increased understanding? White warns against the detachment rhetoric where our souls might be starved from the truth that only the creative and poetic can represent or distort. Nietzsche (1874) himself turns history itself into an artwork, as Low writes: “What he is proposing is history as exhortation to action, as motivating myth, even as therapy and spirituality” (Chap. 18). The contemporary education context invites educational leaders to consider myth, metaphor, spirituality, and wellbeing as a necessary part of their daily work.
On what basis do we become like a zoo of confusion and distortion, or liberation and release? How do breakout rooms and shared narratives help future educational leaders to gather and consider these truths? What pedagogy enables and constrains these practices, and how do language barriers, assessment structures, and lack of time play a part in the growth of these understandings?
What do we leave in and remove? Hayden White’s discordant imagery of a concentration camp reconstructed into a zoo reminded me of the importance of exposing and interrogating our own subjective assumptions and representations within educational leadership research. Myth enables us to understand the complexity of human interaction. In a similar way to the zoo, we utilise myths and metaphors through theory and philosophy as palatable mediums for exploring confronting truths, which cause us to ask what is history? What is fiction? What is an international perspective in educational leadership? Remy provides answers as he invites future leaders to understand history by “doing the work on ourselves” by examining the life work of Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (1854–1964)—the philosopher, African American community activist, and educator and Black feminist—and Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941)—who opened a school in India as he explored the dialect between colonial and his own culture as “hospitality and dialogue between cultures” and their spiritual convictions. Through the lens of Foucault (1987), Low openly declared what he chose to share and omit, as we do when we teach and when we lead.
Our tribute to the late philosophical historian, Hayden White, is to question the truths of theory and practice we create as researchers, and in the classroom. Collectively, we co-create records of interactions with students, teachers, and leaders as we inquire into the practical past of participants and utilise philosophy to map perceptions of what is valid, in order to make meaning from their understanding of known realities.
What horrifies us the most drives us to research and write, and so it should if our desire is to create ethical educational leaders seeking to improve schooling. The horrendous alternative is to create leaders driven by improvement without questioning what, or who, is to be improved and at what cost. We carry around our history, our assumptions, our insecurities, and our experiences into our teaching and leadership agendas. Our writing, our teaching, and our actions become the poetry of those navigations, melding the theoretical and the mythical with the practical, capturing perspectives grounded in the perceived reality of words or figures. White (2010) explores how our creativity helps us conceptualise solidarity, solutions, and possibilities for our limited human minds.
There are unrepresented voices within our coursework. My greatest fear being in the academy is that I will become a conformist academic caged in captivity within my educational institution, disconnected with the daily reality of schooling and with international perspectives and global philosophers. We perform our work as institutionalised beings in both schools and universities. To what extent can we connect with reality any more than the animals in captivity? Who is in the cage? Freedom comes from demonstrating compassion, representing broader philosophies, interrogating our assumptions, and thinking as ‘outsiders within’ (Wilkinson & Eacott, 2013) our institutions, as our critical theory group from which this writing project originated has inspired us to do.
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Grice, C. (2024). What Stories to Tell: A Response to Remy Low. In: Y.S. Low, R., Egan, S., Bell, A. (eds) Using Social Theory in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39817-9_19
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