Leadership learnings from crises: voices on empowerment and community relationships

Crises mark decisive moments in context, as external disruptions to school leadership demanding immediate action. Scholars continue to identify potential sources of crises in schooling, from well-being (Riley et al., 2020; 2021), to natural disasters and the most recent global health pandemic (Harris & Jones, 2021; Sum, 2022). Such crises continue to demonstrate the significance of community as critical to the work of leading schools. This proposal shares initial findings exploring how school leaders build and sustain community relationships within and across school life during crises, contributing to the emergent scholarship on the place of crisis in Educational Leadership. It is through a range of several different crises that school leaders share their shifting landscapes of role, responsibility and relationships. Examined through a Freirean (Roberts 2016) lens on empowerment, we unpack how school leaders navigate relationships during crises, to address the diversity of needs and the complexity of responsibilities, highlighting pathways and challenges to empowered relationships.

This collaborative auto-ethnographic study centres the voice of school leaders to explore the implications of crises on the changing nature of relationships experienced, led and enacted by school leaders, both within school walls, and across broader school communities. Four school leaders and two academic researchers have engaged through a combined methodology of dialogue (Diaconu 2008) and collaborative autoethnography (Denzin et al. 2014), to interrogate lessons emergent from experiences of crises. Shared narratives of the principals and educational researchers are used to interrogate individual perspectives on crises. These dialogues were inspired by personal experiences of the principals reflecting upon the meaning of crises, and its impact on the nature of relationships significant to the work and values. The collective elucidation of the diverse impacts of crises, from a leadership perspective, helped the group trigger responses from each other on the topic, building bridges of understanding.

Our work speaks to the significance of voice, truth and place in addressing the lessons from contemporary crises, in these places of work, through the voice of school leaders themselves as collaborators in the study. The findings highlight opportunities for empowerment that strengthen relationships within school and immediate community, offset by tensions with policy that potentially disempower the scope of school leader effectiveness.