Values And Valuation In The Practice Of Educational Administration

Author : Malcolm J. (Malcolm Joel) Richmon
Publisher : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
ISBN 13 : 9780494026557
Total Pages : 942 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (265 download)

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Download or read book The Value Impress [microform] : Toward a Normative Account of Educational Administration written by Malcolm J. (Malcolm Joel) Richmon and published by Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada. This book was released on 2005 with total page 942 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an attempt to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of such a re-conceptualized perspective on values in educational administration, I interviewed twelve elementary public school principals in Ontario with a view towards gathering an evidentiary base to enhance, refine, revise, and critique the framework. Data collected from participants were largely found to be amenable to the socio-cultural analyses provided for by the conceptual framework. Participants were able to identify a range of external sources which impressed upon them valued understandings of professional practice. Similarly, participants described numerous socio-cultural processes whereby values became inscribed into their professional understandings. As well, participants were found to have constructed the administrative values they held in many different ways. The findings of this study reinforce the original critique of the literature. Professional values, far from being uniquely subjective or emerging from individuals themselves, have clear---though certainly complex---socio-cultural origins. This suggests that far both theory and practice increased attention needs be paid not only to administrative understandings per se, but to the sources of these understandings, the ways in which they become known, and the ways in which they are constructed. Most of all, an emphasis on the socio-cultural nature of administrative knowledge behooves a heightened sense of epistemological humility with regard to administrative phenomena. Inasmuch as professional knowledge appears to be a function of social interaction, it is necessarily impermanent, incomplete, and perpetually changing. The epistemological ramification of this is that 'goad' administration---the 'right' professional values---are not ontologically real, but rather a singular, temporary, socially moderated phenomenon. To this end, I argue that school leadership needs to transcend any prescriptive account of what allegedly should constitute effective administration, rather providing for the intellectual facility of educational administrators to recognize and effectuate 'good' school leadership. This dissertation reports on a study of elementary school principals and the professional values they held by. An extensive examination of the literature on values in education administration found that though there appeared to be little conceptual agreement as to the nature of values' role in influencing professional practice, there was a general agreement that values somehow belong to people, and should be understood within subjectivist or relativist frames. I strongly critique this prevalent perspective, drawing an contemporary scholarly work from various fields, including canstructivist sociology, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience, which together seem to indicate that values actually have social, cultural, historical and linguistic antecedents, suggesting that values are impressed upon people, rather than emerging from within them. Supported by existing theoretical work from these various fields, I advanced an alternative framework for values inquiry which focused on three central areas: the socio-cultural domains in which values are manifest, the socio-cultural processes whereby values became known to pimple, and the socio-cultural construction of values themselves.