Exploring visual method in the field of educational leadership: Co-creating understandings of educational leadership and authority in school organisations

This paper contributes to method development in educational leadership research. The focus is on a visual method and the inclusion of visual material in data collection and analysis. Core concepts in this paper are educational leadership, power and authority. The method was used in face-to-face inte...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Educational management, administration & leadership administration & leadership, 2023-09, Vol.51 (5), p.1219-1238
Main Authors: Grimm, Frida, Norqvist, Lars, Roos, Katarina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
authority
Educational leadership
Ethics
Foreign Countries
Governance
Instructional Leadership
Interviews
method development
Persuasive Discourse
Power Structure
Research Methodology
Research Projects
school organisation
Visual Aids
Visual method
Visualization
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This paper contributes to method development in educational leadership research. The focus is on a visual method and the inclusion of visual material in data collection and analysis. Core concepts in this paper are educational leadership, power and authority. The method was used in face-to-face interviews in a research project that studied the steering and governing in, and of, Swedish schools. The method enhances verbal narratives when informants reason and motivate their understandings of positions, relations and hierarchies within the organisations. We found that using visual material encouraged informants to reason and problematise formalised leader positions, their relations and the hierarchies that appear. The method helps to visualise the informants’ understandings of the power distribution within the organisation depending on whether positions are described as distant or close, horizontal or vertical. The method made the informants take a stand on complex matters, reflect, and gain insights about their organisations. It provided us, as researchers, with rich data material. By making subjective understandings visual, implicit assumptions were made explicit. This could challenge the knowledge on existing leadership and power norms within educational organisations, and most likely in other forms of organisations as well.
ISSN:1741-1432
1741-1440
1741-1440
DOI:10.1177/17411432211030747