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Rural Educational Leadership and Sustainability:Challenges, Costs and Opportunities
Professor John HalseySidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and
Communities, Flinders University, August 2012http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/education/rural/rural.cfm
VASSP2012
Conference
Sidney Myer Chair
The Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities has been established through a 5 year, $1 million grant as part of the Myer Foundation 50 years and Sidney Myer Fund 75 years Commemorative Grants Program, in partnership with Flinders University.
Sustainability
• Planet will not carry consumption load indefinitely
• “Present patterns of OECD per capita resource consumption and pollution cannot possibly be generalized to all currently living people, much less to future generations without liquidating the natural capital on which future economic activity depends… the profligate and inequitable nature of current patterns of development, when projected into the not too distant future, lead to biophysical impossibilites”. (Van Dieran, p. 99)
Dimensions
• By the middle of the 21st century, the world’s population will be between 9 and 10 billion. Australia’s will be around 35 million
• An estimated 2/3 of the world’s people will live in cities by 2050 (Brugmann, 2009)
• To bring a personal perspective to the magnitude and impact of these figures, during my working life of 46 years, the world’s population has doubled
The premise• The importance of rural communities is going
to increase over the next 4 decades
• From knowledge for building the modern world (20th century) to knowledge for sustaining the world (21st century)
The project
Stresses• Tectonic stresses (Homer-Dixon, 2006)
• Population• Energy• Environmental• Climate• Economic
• Others• Materialism dominating moral commitment (Stiglitz, 2009)• Political• Cultural• Globalisation, great reliance on markets to deliver basic service
entitlements, rationalisation
Stresses exemplified
• Irony of fish stocks decline
• Impact of consuming now with no regard for the future
• To bring to life some of the profoundness of the stresses identified by Homer- Dixon, think of the decline that has occurred to major fisheries and fish stocks around much of the world and, while doing so, also ask yourself is there not something profoundly ironic about farming fish when nature can ‘supply’ fish so more effectively if given ‘half a chance’.
• Kurlansky’s deeply insightful and disturbing book on the biography of the cod and its demise overtime—“abundance turned to scarcity through determined short sightedness” (1997, rear dust jacket)—ought to be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand how human intervention can bring renewable natural resources to the brink of extinction.
Nature
• “when there’s trouble in nature, there’s trouble in society”
• “Nature bats last”
• “The twenty- first century will…be the Age of Nature. We’ll learn, probably the hard way, that nature matters: we’re not separate from it, we’re dependent on it, and when there’s trouble in nature, there’s trouble in society.” (Homer-Dixon, 2006, p.13)
• “All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last” (Ernest Callenbach in Barlow, 2007, p.1),
Leadership matters
• “leadership not only matters: it is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning… Effective education leadership makes a difference in improving learning [and in the capacities of communities to…]”. (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson & Wahlstrom, 2004, p.1)
• leadership and education are ‘non-negotiables’ for building a sustainable future
Educational leaders and leadership
• Critical for:– Creating, nurturing and refining contexts for learning and
growth (Leithwood et al, 2004)
– Fostering and supporting teachers and teaching (Mulford,
2003) – Raising student outcomes and opportunities (Robinson, 2007)
– Community engagement and capacity building (Epstein et al, 2011)
– Voice, change, generating & leading communities of common purpose (Halsey, Schubert and others)
Imperative- rural educational leadership becomes a premier career pathway
• National rural educational l/ship research in 2010• 683 respondents• 82.6% first leadership position in a rural location• 46.2% no preparation for leadership; 29.2% short
courses only• 88.5% said rural leadership career pathway needs
to be made more attractive
Enhancing rural leadership as a career pathway
• Professional– Workload re-design and re-sizing– Improve support networks- better ways to handle
isolation– Better professional development and study– Techniques/approaches for living and working
effectively in small population contexts– Work and service valued by central agencies– Sufficient resources to do the job– Mental health training/support– Rights of return– Resolve teaching-administration pressures in small
schools
Making rural educational leadership a more attractive career pathway
Action % Respondents
Employer recognition 81.8 449
Financial incentives 80.5 442
Value for promotion 78.5 431
Better career p/ways 72.7 399
Suitable accommodation 71.2 391
Specialised preparation 66.3 364
Metro return rights 56.1 308
Asst tertiary educ own ch 53.4 293
Partner employment 50.8 279
Annual return $ 40.5 247
Rural Educational Leaders(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban)
• Greater role range and closer connections with nature
• Attracting, inducting and retaining staff
• Accessing specialists
• Greater range and diversity of responsibilities other than teaching and learning such as school bus transport, route determinations, drivers, safety inspections; teacher housing and accommodation; community leadership expectations; closer ‘connections’ with nature
• Recruiting and retaining staff is more problematic/demanding; fewer applications per vacancy; higher turn over; less experienced staff; greater demand for induction into the profession as compared to updating and fine tuning of expertise
• Accessing specialist assistance for students
with learning needs and behavioural challenges requires more time spent on negotiating and arranging services
Rural Educational Leaders(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban)
• Education and mobility
• Testing is a subset of what schools do and achieve
• A major tension/dynamic, which rural principals have to manage, is learning for staying, learning for leaving or learning for choice. Unlike urban contexts where post secondary options are local, rural students who want to pursue post secondary, frequently have to move out of their community. This in turn has consequences for the local demographic mix and the future sustainability of a community.
• National testing shows that a higher proportion of rural students than urban students are below benchmarks, fewer complete secondary schooling and fewer transition to tertiary. Improving these outcomes differentials is a constant source of pressure for rural principals, who in many instances, do not control the primary means to do so- access to the very best teachers available and addressing SES issues. As well, the intense focus on national outcomes may also diminish other forms of outstanding achievement.
Rural Educational Leaders(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban)
• Greater span of control eg year level range
• Small schools, multi-grades
• Indigenous challenges and opportunities
• 24/7
• Year level range of responsibilities often larger (R-12) than urban; different industrial conditions for primary and secondary teachers can create complexities for developing a high performing whole school culture
• Small schools (<100) are predominantly in rural and remote locations. They have complex multigrade teaching and administrative demands; there is frequently a very large management load as well as teaching load for the principal; middle management frequently non- existent
• Significant Indigenous enrolments which may also be mobile and require a diverse range of health services and other community supports which impact on teaching and learning
• The pressure/expectation to be available and accessible to the local community ‘24/7’
Opportunities• Rural communities
• Rural Educational leadership
• Rewarding and demanding
• Vibrant, productive rural communities are integral to Australia’s (and the world’s) sustainability
• Educational leadership is critically important for charting new directions, making organisations work, human capacity building and nurturing potential
• Some of the most challenging and professionally rewarding leadership opportunities are in rural Australia- ‘the A team!’
• Local access
• Globalisation
• Critical tension
• Rural people want schools, want local access, want leaders and teachers who want to be in their communities
• Rural communities and contexts are complex, are diverse, are changing, are acutely impacted by globalisation
• At the heart of a rural educational leaders job is an going tension:
– am I leading learning for staying?
– am I leading learning for leaving? or
– am I leading learning for choice?
Opportunities
Opportunities
• Place matters
• Stories & relationships
• Landscape
• Place matters-“A multidisciplinary analysis of place reveals the many ways that places are profoundly pedagogical.… as centers of experience, places teach us about how the world works and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy. Further, places make us…”(Gruenewald, D.A., 2003, p. 621)
• “Our relationship to place is constituted in our stories/relationships…Our relationship to place involves multiple contested stories”. (Sommerville, Aust Journal of Language and Literacy, 2007, p. 154, 155)
• “[i]n Australia, landscape carries our experience of the sacred other… [n]o matter how we attempt to package or construct it, the land will always break out of whatever fancy dress we foist upon it” (Tacey, 1995, pp 6-7).
Capitals
Natural capital- “natural resources, ecosystem services and the aesthetics or beauty of nature”.
Human capital- “the abilities, knowledge and skills of individuals”. The “attributes that are seen as particularly valuable for achieving community viability- often in combination with social capital- are leadership, ability to solve problems and commitment to the locality”.
Social capital- “relationships between people linked in various ways… bonding and bridging”. “The role of human agency in achieving community sustainability is underlined by the distinction made in some of the social capital literature between capital (the stock of social resources) and capacity (the ability to draw on capital for valued purposes)”.
Institutional capital- “the institutional structures and mechanisms present in a community…public, private and non-government, not for profit”.
Produced- “sometimes referred to as the ‘economic capital’- [includes] harvested or manufactured products, the built environment… communication systems… financial resources… intellectual and cultural property”. ( All quotations from Cocklin &Dibden, 2005, pp 4-6).
Natural Human Social Institutional Produced Context
Significance
Rating
Vision
Place
People-
Youth esp
Learning-
Life-long
Economic/
Employment
Governance &
Government
Others
Capitals
Sustainability
Assets mapping for sustainability
Rural schools and communities are…
• A unique source of capitals/resources for progressing and supporting sustainability and new futures:– Human– Infrastructure– Social– Knowledge/intellectual– Youth- future oriented– Relational – Engaging urban; city-country
Global- local simultaneously• Creating and progressing sustainable futures for
Australia and the globe requires professionals and champions who:– understand the pervasive forces, demographics
and superstructures of change– can shape and deliver at a local level– are imbued with a sense of radical hope- hope
which is… “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand [fully] what it is… [it] anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it”. (Lear, 2006, p.103)
Game changing challenge: creating space for creativity
• Similarities with the prelude to the demise of the Roman Empire
• create a space for creativity
• the circumstances we are broadly facing today driven by population growth and the pervasiveness of growth economics, political cycles and so forth, are reminiscent of the prelude to the demise of the Roman Empire. (Homer-Dixon, 2006).
• “The collapse that followed was dramatic…[but] trouble doesn’t have to be calamitous in its ultimate results though… catastrophe could create a space for creativity that helps build us a better world for our children, our grandchildren, ourselves” (emphasis added, pp. 6-7).
Emergence “Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical
connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead we need to connect with kindred spirits… networks are not the whole story… as [they] grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges… the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale”.(Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, The Birkana Institute)
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March, 2012 from:http://api.ning.com/files/*xqYtgtZ1YVTXSINMhczrysRSTl3ljkqiMDo0DhJv5MZ9z7yLZebET9LJWnGv3HnHmeVJD52*OkU14T*St6VP6Uagjo*lzc6/usingemergence.pdf
