The first half of the article outlines features of a theoretical framework for curriculum work as educational leadership. The second half of the chapter examines the curriculum development process as a non-hierarchical top-down and bottom-up educational leadership process in which the National Council of Education (NBE) mediates between political decision-making, pressure groups and school practice.
Results
These changes and amendments are included in the 2014 national core curriculum (National Board of Education 2014). The neighborhood school principle was launched and included in the Basic Education Act 1998.
Positions and Changes in
Internationally, the educational mentality of the last two decades has increasingly reflected a stronger discourse on excellence, efficiency, productivity, competition, internationalization, increased individual freedom and responsibility, and deregulation in all social fields. The final move, in position 4, is a stronger re-realisation of the curriculum which means that in the 2004 national curriculum a much stronger control was taken over the content of the aims.
Educational Leadership Policy 1972-2012 in Finland
In this preparatory political phase of the curriculum work, political tensions in the group were clearly visible. This can be seen as part of the consensus policy in curriculum work. The government decree pointed the way to introducing competencies for the first time in the Finnish national core curriculum.
The descriptions of competences are codified by government decree and are defined in relation to changes in the environment. This is also a way to support – and drive – the curriculum work that needs to be done at the local level.
Interpretations and Discussion
Thus, the school is seen as a learning community with the task of developing the general culture of school activity, i.e. if resources are allocated to qualified development plans, this will be a strong incentive to take these plans seriously at the municipal and school level. A key question for the reform work to be successful is how school communities will cope with the process of transformation due to the new reform.
The development work at school level is a major challenge for the school and there is a need for developed educational leadership and new collaboration. The school leaders, together with the municipal education inspectors, are in a key position in promoting the development of a professional learning community with room for reflection, sharing experiences and knowledge and to obtain sufficient unanimity in the school community to promote the reform work in practice . .
Non-affirmative Curriculum Leadership
The teacher's classic freedom to choose and work with the right methods is now complete with seeing the school as a whole. The Board of Education's steering committee therefore points out that there must be room and support for educational development at local level (Halinen 2013). Therefore, we call curriculum making as educational management on a national level a non-affirmative practice.
According to the key players in the curriculum design process, trust is of utmost importance: “Trust is key. As stated above, the National Council of Education is entrusted with making autonomous decisions regarding political direction, while municipalities have the right and obligation by law to manage, evaluate and develop basic education.
It is non-affirmative both in the sense that the National Council of Education itself is authorized to decide on the approval of the curriculum, as well as in the sense that the municipalities have the final responsibility for the evaluation of compulsory education and for their own interpretation. curricular goals. Government regulation on general state goals and the allocation of lessons in primary education. Reports of the Ministry of Education and Culture, Finland 2012:3. oph.fi/download/148961_The_Education_and_Research_Development_Plan.pdf.
Opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön raportit, 2012, 6. Toimiva kunnallinen palveluorganisaatio: Työelämän laadun, asiakastyytyväisyyden ja palvelukustannusten suhde strategisen henkilöstöjohtamisen näkökulmasta. Perusopetuksen kansallisen perusopetussuunnitelman muutokset ja muutokset. oph.fi/english/education_development/current_reforms/curriculum_reform_2016 Opetushallitus.
Curriculum and Leadership in Transnational Reform Policy: A Discursive-Institutionalist
Introduction
Curriculum Theory
Finally, we make use of the institutional framework to discuss (i) the ways in which the established discourses of educational leadership associated with curriculum problems are linked to the basic notions of societal needs, (ii) how the transnational significance of educational leadership is maintained. through a coordinating discourse, and (iii) how this agreed opinion is promoted to the nation-states through a communicative discourse. The main aim of this perspective has been to establish a critical response to historiography studies and empirical conceptual approaches which were part of the dominant tradition of curriculum studies in the Anglo-American field in the 1960s. The main point of view of the new sociologists was that knowledge is produced and reproduced by dominant groups in society and therefore has a very ideological and political character.
In the early 2000s, a pertinent question is how schooling as an institutionalized pursuit is challenged by the notions of what count as core units of analysis, such as competencies and outcomes, compared to other types of goals and pursuits. as part of the larger context of society. The interest in scientific approaches to school education reform, which has been followed by a constructivist approach to research and teaching, has also called for a stronger focus on the actors and systems and how they contribute to both the reproduction of the society as the renewal of society. education system.
Leadership Research
In this case, the leader is expected to coordinate goals and activities, as he is the main initiator of the delegation of tasks and responsibilities by regulating the mindset and activities of other people. This perspective also invites discussion of what constitutes democratic leadership in the light of discursive and political aspects. In transformational leadership theories, shared goals and shared visions are a key focus. Therefore, the formation of organizational members' ideologies is a key issue in these studies (Leithwood 1994).
This brief overview of leadership theories shows that educational leadership research represents a diverse field that would benefit from a theoretical framework with the ability to simultaneously capture the level of social and ideological politics and the various dimensions of institutionalized education governance. From an instructional and transformational perspective, and based on the latest discussion on distributed perspectives, it becomes clear that a deep understanding of the context of educational reform and policy changes is as important as an awareness of relevant school actions. principals, teachers and others involved in school leadership.
A Theoretical Framework: Discursive Institutionalism and Curriculum Theory
However, the understanding of leadership in education, as described in articles and textbooks, is in danger of being either too general (that is, there is no distinction between leading a school or leading other social practices (see Young 2008 ), or be too limited – that is, each school/district is considered its own independent unit. We thus suggest that the meaning of leadership in education should be conceptualized through a multi-level institutional analysis, involving both transnational educational policy formations as national governance discourses, curriculum issues and local school leadership practices are considered. In the next section, we turn to the theory of discursive institutionalism to frame our analysis in an integrative approach that links transnational educational leadership policies to curriculum theories and -issues.
Our goal is to create a framework through which educational leadership can relate to curriculum theory, including the broader societal/ideological perspectives that are helpful in understanding the discourse of educational leadership. The construction of policy and educational leadership discourses can be understood as processes that recontextualize discourses by moving between different arenas, thereby reinterpreting certain dominant concepts of a discourse (Bernstein.
The Policy Documents: Data and Analysis
Themes were discovered by reading selected documents and combining terms in the light of theoretical perspectives framed by institutional-discursive theory. Dimensions such as spheres, normative and cognitive ideas, and coordinative and communicative discourses guided our reading of the documents and thus our means of identifying and categorizing themes. By analyzing the themes and narrative descriptions condensed through re-reading of the documents, we were also able to highlight the ways in which leadership and leadership research were conceptualized within reform policy discourses for each of the domains and levels included in our study.
Normative ideas are concerned with legitimizing policy programs that express the proposed solutions by referring to how they are rooted in a deeper understanding of the world. An overview of the combined framework for the present study is presented in Table 14.1 below (see also Wahlström & . Sundberg 2017).
Societal Ideas and Programmatic Discourses on Educational Leadership in the Transnational Arena
For example, the way the OECD is addressing this issue is by linking student skills, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), to economic growth through recent economic modelling. A similar idea was expressed by the EU in the Lisbon Strategy in 2000: "Today the Union has set itself a new strategic goal for the next decade: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world." (European Council 2000, p. 2, italics in the original ). In order to meet the demands of change, the main normative idea in the transnational arena is continuous learning from the cradle to the grave.
Both the OECD and the EU have formulated frameworks of key competences, and both competence systems are measured by the PISA surveys (European Commission Rychen and Salganik 2005). By implementing the frameworks of key competences, both the OECD, through the PISA surveys, and the EU (European Council 2000), through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), have the normative tools to monitor and evaluate their member states. adaptations of a framework for lifelong learning.
Programmatic Ideas of Education and Leadership in the Transnational Policy Arena
It should also be noted that the number of applications for school management positions in the Member States is often very low. It is about “getting the right people to become school leaders”, providing “those people with the right skill sets” and structuring “roles, expectations and incentives to ensure that principals focus on instructional leadership, not school administration” (Barber and Mourshed 2007 , p. 30). In the same vein, the European Commission (2012b) argues that the core competences for leadership in education can be supported by policy, for example, the influence of the principal is stronger where the degree of school autonomy is higher.
Until now, there have been strong connections between personal (transformational) leadership and collective (distributed) leadership in the programmatic ideas of the transnational policy arena. In fact, the latter is particularly emphasized in the claim that leadership is highly influential in learning and outcomes at all levels of the school system.
Educational Reform, School Improvement, and Leadership
The concept of leadership that emphasizes both 'leading' and spreading collective leadership is related to the modernization of the public sector in terms of the New Public Management (NPM). From this coordinated view, there has been a gradual shift towards distributed leadership involving both formal and informal school leaders (Leithwood and Jantzi 2006; Lingard et al. 2003). There is a strong discourse about getting “the right person” to be a leader coupled with transformational leadership (Barber and Mourshed 2007).
Against this background, we argue that a deeper understanding of the meaning of educational leadership discourse and the conditions under which such discourse is enacted is crucial. The Curriculum of the Future: From the "New Sociology of Education" to the "Critical Theory of Learning."
