Narrative inquiry and school leadership identities

Abstract

This article reports further findings from the 'Carpe Vitam: Leadership for Learning' project, based on a close examination of some of the interview narratives with an Australian principal. Positioning analysis is used as an empirically-grounded means of making sense of who this Australian principal is and what she does as a leader to improve her school's focus on leadership for learning. The complexities of the principal's leadership practices are opened up for scrutiny through an analytic focus on the production of the principal's narrative identity formation in her storytelling practices. The findings underscore that engaging in leadership for learning is complex and varied. In this instance, the process began with the principal's main focus on constructing management strength and only slowly moved to a distributed model of pedagogical leadership for learning. The article demonstrates that treating interview narratives in this way can be seen as an additional site of professional practice, not just reflection on practice, in that interviews contain courses of questioning and methods of accounting that allow storytellers to generate educational knowledge.