Abstract:
Considerable attention is given to ‘whole of system’ capacity building within the educational reform literature, whereby leaders within education offices supporting schools, and leaders in schools are connected and committed to learning for all, with a focus on enhancing student learning. However, system capacity building is often conceptually limited in scope and purpose because it is understood within the current regulatory and performance focused education environment. It will be argued in this presentation that alternative perspectives are necessary that transcend the existing structures and mindsets of education reform. This presentation, drawing on recent doctoral research, will invite an exploration of education systems as complex, open, and dynamic, and system capacity building as a complex and emergent process of learning. In particular, it will focus on how leaders, in a system-initiated project, in one education system, enabled system capacity for learning.
One of the challenges of the study was to describe phenomena that emerged as a result of the dynamic and nonlinear interactions across the multiple dimensions of the system. This lead to the development of a detailed and intense thematic analysis process that was more heuristic than predetermined, and informed by the view that complete and defined understandings of such systems are not possible or even desirable. While the orientation to the research process was exploratory, the challenge remained of how to represent and understand complex and emergent environments, and the experiences of those within them, without seemingly to represent this in a procedural manner. One way this was addressed was by experimenting with drawings inspired by images of ‘living systems’ to communicate the dynamic, fluid and emergent characteristic of human social systems; this signaled an attempt to move away from static, linear and standardised representations and the meanings that they communicate.
The four key findings of the study will be presented, providing insight into the enactments of leadership that enabled system capacity building, the conditions of emergence enabled by these enactments of leadership, and the emergent behaviours understood as expressions of system capacity building. Such findings bring attention to interesting ideas such as ‘participation in the system’, ‘spaces of possibility’, and ‘disruption and coherence’. The practical recommendations of this research will be considered with examples given from the study. By engaging with perspectives underpinned by complexity theory, this study was able to offer new possibilities for ways of working, learning, and being within education systems and how the capacities of leaders might be fully expressed and focused on the enactment of the education system’s educative purpose.
One of the challenges of the study was to describe phenomena that emerged as a result of the dynamic and nonlinear interactions across the multiple dimensions of the system. This lead to the development of a detailed and intense thematic analysis process that was more heuristic than predetermined, and informed by the view that complete and defined understandings of such systems are not possible or even desirable. While the orientation to the research process was exploratory, the challenge remained of how to represent and understand complex and emergent environments, and the experiences of those within them, without seemingly to represent this in a procedural manner. One way this was addressed was by experimenting with drawings inspired by images of ‘living systems’ to communicate the dynamic, fluid and emergent characteristic of human social systems; this signaled an attempt to move away from static, linear and standardised representations and the meanings that they communicate.
The four key findings of the study will be presented, providing insight into the enactments of leadership that enabled system capacity building, the conditions of emergence enabled by these enactments of leadership, and the emergent behaviours understood as expressions of system capacity building. Such findings bring attention to interesting ideas such as ‘participation in the system’, ‘spaces of possibility’, and ‘disruption and coherence’. The practical recommendations of this research will be considered with examples given from the study. By engaging with perspectives underpinned by complexity theory, this study was able to offer new possibilities for ways of working, learning, and being within education systems and how the capacities of leaders might be fully expressed and focused on the enactment of the education system’s educative purpose.