The Ethics of Leadership Search
Discourse and communication are powerful aesthetic features, to be sure, when it comes to influence and persuasion. The responsibility for evaluating the epistemic and ethical legitimacy of these features, including the epistemic and ethical legitimacy of engaging the emotions of potential candidates, rests with three groups: the board (the progenitor of the position description), the search consultant (the framer of culture and opportunity, involved to varying degrees in the presentation of the position description), and the candidate her/himself (the interpreter of the position description, with an eye to securing the position and leading the school).
The Stream of Now
Curriculum providers, accreditation agencies, and recruitment agencies need to pay attention to the stream of now as well, as should those commercial enterprises that provide products and services to schools. The stream of now isn’t some notion from science fiction; it is already available. It is the nature of our age that everyone is already in the stream of now. Question: how are we responding to it?
Our Bigger Dream
In Eastern philosophy, there is a great question posed: what is the nature of this age? What is the nature of our age? I submit that it is the globalisation of superficiality. Being ‘friends,’ for example, can mean one thing in a bricks-and-mortar school, whilst meaning something entirely different in the largest country on planet earth, Facebook. Lest you think I am joking, consider that Facebook has borders (virtual, bandwidth all around you), it has a population, it has rules of conduct (terms and conditions of use), it exhibits a certain ethos. I’m not providing a value judgement; I am only looking at it, as an entity. It should shock you, at least somewhat, that I would want to categorise Facebook as a nation. Yet, what is the nature of our age?
Toward a New Typology of Professional Learning
We've spent over 150 years layering a newer 'geography' atop that one by means of trains, cars (highways), and airplanes. We might call each one of these a typology, rather than a geography. They too constitute maps (rail maps, highway maps, flight maps), but these typologies can change as a result of connection (a concept that employs two companions, velocity and time). Allow me to provide an example. How far apart are London and Mumbai? In geographic terms, that would be 4,466 miles [7,187 km], but in typological terms, we'd have to say "that depends." For instance, it could be 10 hours by plane, or it could be 0.6 milliseconds by fibre-optic cable.
Reimagining Global Citizenship
We all would say that we are educating global citizens, that such citizenship is a hallmark of international education. Though I am ideologically aligned to that statement, I submit that we are (perhaps dramatically) out of alignment with reality. We are educating citizens for a world dominated by traditional power arrangements, yet those arrangements are being undermined by new, networked approaches to which the traditional arrangements don't (yet) know how to respond.