Theorising school leadership preparation and development in Sub-Saharan Africa with particular reference to Kenya

On a global scale education reforms focused on school improvement have been a key political agenda over the past few decades. As a result the field of educational leadership has received significant attention due to a growing recognition that leadership is critical in improving school outcomes. Within these broad discourses the significance of the preparation and development of school leaders has been brought into sharp focus. In particular, whether preparation and development programmes equip current and aspiring school leaders with the knowledge and skills they need to address current and emerging challenges. If school leadership does make a difference then how leaders are prepared should be a concern for policy makers and scholars. With concern for the preparation and development of school leaders being a focal point in many developed countries, there is increased scholarly attention emanating from Africa as seen in the work published internationally. However there remains a sustained criticism regarding the lack of theorisation in this scholarship. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach that brings together theoretical resources from educational leadership, economics, and sociology this thesis consists of a series of papers engaging with the theoretical problem of the legitimation of the narrative of ‘leadership’ and its implications for leadership preparation and development programmes in Kenya. Data generated from a survey of educational administration and leadership programmes offered by universities and one management institute in Kenya combined with a diverse but complimentary range of analytical and methodological approaches, the overall project that led to this thesis interrogate the underlying generative principles of discourses that call for universality yet pay attention to the particular. The argument is presented in a series of published and submitted journal articles. The central argument of this thesis is that with the comparative turn in education policy, contemporary school leadership preparation and development initiatives (primarily undertaken in Africa by Aid organizations or partners frequently from the global north) are serving as a mechanism for the universalisation and legitimation of Anglophone constructs of ‘leadership’. This is evident even in African focused scholarship. I argue that leadership is a spatio-temporal construct. Therefore context or localisation matters. The equivalence and stability of constructs/labels cannot be assumed across contexts. This is problematic in a time when ‘leadership’ is being fronted as a panacea for education reform. Building from the above, any understanding of school leadership preparation and development has to be grounded empirically in the particular spatio-temporal conditions. It is this grounding that gives meaning to actions and interventions. In an era of easy access to ideas, the interplay of universal and local conditions is constantly being challenged. To this end, an alternative conceptualisation of leadership is proposed. This approach blurs social boundaries. There is neither a universal nor local construction of leadership, but rather the weaving of the macro and the micro in which there is no right or wrong way of doing leadership. What is given prominence are the relations between individuals and collectives. More significantly, the thesis proposes an alternative way of knowing, being and doing school leadership preparation and development that makes context not has context.