Philip Woods
University of Hertfordshire
Philip A. Woods is Director of the Centre for Educational Leadership and Professor of Educational Policy, Democracy and Leadership at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, as well as Immediate Past Chair of the British Educational Leadership, Management and Administration Society (BELMAS). His work focuses principally on leadership as a distributed and democratic process and on issues of governance, equity and change towards more democratic and holistic learning environments. He is author of over 130 publications and has wide-ranging experience and expertise in leading, managing and participating in major funded projects for organisations including the British Academy, UK government and European Union. His latest book, Collaborative School Leadership: A critical guide, co-authored with Amanda Roberts, will be published by SAGE in 2018.
How can we gain depth of understanding concerning the practice of leadership in education, especially from the viewpoint of those engaged in forms of leadership distribution such as teachers, students and support staff? Drawing on their extensive use of collage in researching such leadership, the authors of this paper theorise the value of collage, an arts-based method of enquiry, as a methodological approach in leadership research. They extend this theorising to consider implications for the use of collage creation in leadership development.
The paper discusses the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through research and examines the illuminative potential of arts-based methodologies (e.g. Loads, 2009; Spouse, 2000; Leitch, 2006; Black, 2002). The paper then makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership, drawing on collage-based studies undertaken by the authors. A variant of the ‘think aloud’ process, used in conjunction with collage, is proposed as a route to producing deep understandings of the multiple ways in which leadership is experienced and understood as a social process. The paper identifies three key dimensions integral to the practice of collage creation:
— physicality - the value of moving artefacts and materials to create images;
— wholeness - the ability of an image to allow a picture of the phenomenon to be seen, as distinct from a linear account (Berger 1972);
— participant agency - the collage creator being the designer and expert in the meaning of the image.
We suggest that theorising these three dimensions offers crucial insights into how collage creation helps in accessing and sharing of profound levels of experience not accessible through words alone. Implications for leadership development are explored. The argument is made that the elements of physicality, wholeness and participant agency enable the creative self-reflection important to developing leadership for learning (Kools and Stoll 2016).
References
Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. BBC/Penguin.
Black, A. (2002) Making sense of what it means to teach. Teacher Development, 6(1), 75-88.
Kools, M. and Stoll, L. (2016) What Makes a School a Learning Organisation? OECD.
Leitch, R. (2006) Limitations of language. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 12(5), 549-569.
Loads, D. (2009) Putting ourselves in the picture. International Journal for Academic Development, 14(1), 59-67.
Spouse, J. (2000) Talking pictures. Nursing Times Research, 5(4), 253-261.
