Year: 2024
Type of paper: Symposium
Abstract:
Recent scholarship has analysed the emotional and affective dimensions of principals’ work. For example, Blackmore identified the invisibilisation of emotional work in neoliberal school leadership contexts (2004). Wilkinson (2021) has employed the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis & Wilkinson et al., 2014) and feminist practice theorists (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016) to foreground the role that emotions play in the practice of educational leadership.
This paper draws on an Australian Research Council study of public-school principals’ emotional labour that seeks to understand the structural drivers of principal burnout and stress, and inform policy and activism. We share some early analysis of data collected via a nation-wide, anonymous survey of principals about their professional and personal responses to critical incidents.
Examining these data, we ask:
• What emotional labour are principals undertaking?
• How might a dual feminist/practice architectures approach inform our understanding of the emotional dimensions of principal work?
• What are the implications of this analysis for educational leading and in particular, the gendered dimensions of principals’ work?
This paper argues that principals undertake care work in complex material and discursive contexts. This work is often invisible and is accommodated within hyper-rationalised management frameworks in schools. This is not sustainable, and principals are acquiescing, drowning and/or resisting in different ways.
We make a theoretical contribution; by bringing together the feminist concepts of emotional labour with practice architectures theory, we propose a way forward for understanding the problems that our principal testimony data bring to light.
This paper draws on an Australian Research Council study of public-school principals’ emotional labour that seeks to understand the structural drivers of principal burnout and stress, and inform policy and activism. We share some early analysis of data collected via a nation-wide, anonymous survey of principals about their professional and personal responses to critical incidents.
Examining these data, we ask:
• What emotional labour are principals undertaking?
• How might a dual feminist/practice architectures approach inform our understanding of the emotional dimensions of principal work?
• What are the implications of this analysis for educational leading and in particular, the gendered dimensions of principals’ work?
This paper argues that principals undertake care work in complex material and discursive contexts. This work is often invisible and is accommodated within hyper-rationalised management frameworks in schools. This is not sustainable, and principals are acquiescing, drowning and/or resisting in different ways.
We make a theoretical contribution; by bringing together the feminist concepts of emotional labour with practice architectures theory, we propose a way forward for understanding the problems that our principal testimony data bring to light.