educational leadership

deconstructing_diversity_discourse_blackmore_2006_1.txt

I will provide the article that will be annotated. In this annotation, I am looking for the summary, key point and potential bias/weakness in argument the author may have regarding the topic.

Educational Management
Administration & Leadership

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Deconstructing Diversity Discourses in the Field of Educational Management
and Leadership
Jill Blackmore
Educational Management Administration Leadership 2006; 34; 181
DOI: 10.1177/1741143206062492

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ARTICLE
Educational Management Administration & Leadership
ISSN 1741-1432 DOI: 10.1177/1741143206062492
SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi)
Copyright © 2006 BELMAS Vol 34(2) 181–199; 062492
Deconstructing Diversity Discourses in the
Field of Educational Management and Leadership
Jill Blackmore
ABSTRACT
Discourses of diversity have supplanted those of equal opportunity or social justice in
many Western democratic societies. While the notion of diversity is seemingly
empowering through its recognition of cultural, religious, racial and gender difference
within nation states, the emergence of this discourse during the 1990s has been in the
context of neoliberal managerialist discourses that assume social action is fully
explicable through theories of maximizing self interest. Thus notions of diversity, while
originating in collective demands of social movements of feminism, anti racism and
multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, have in recent times privileged learning and
leadership as an individual accomplishment and not a collective practice. Thus the
dominant discourse of diversity is more in alignment with the deregulatory aspects of
the increasingly managerial and market orientation of schooling, decentring earlier
discourses of more transformatory notions premised upon reducing inequality and
discrimination and developing ‘inclusivity’ in and through schooling. This paper
provides a contextual and conceptual framework through which to explore the
intersections and divergences of discourses of diversity in schools and their practical
application.
KEYWORDS diversity, equity policy, leadership, social justice
Introduction
During the 1990s, a discourse of diversity has come to supplant discourses of
equal opportunity in the public and private sectors of many Western democracies,
as well as in all education (Bacchi, 2000). Recent educational reform
discourses argue that schools, teachers and educational leaders should be
responsive to cultural, racial, gender, sexual and religious diversity within their
‘client’, student and indeed, parent and community populations. Similarly,
more culturally diverse societies could expect greater diversity in political,
educational and business leadership. In Australian schools, for example,
students may learn in classrooms in which English is the second language for
181

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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
the majority, with up to 24 different languages spoken at home, as well as
numerous Aboriginal dialectics. The Adelaide Declaration on the National Goals
for Schooling in the Twenty First Century (Australian Ministerial Council on
Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs [MCEETYA], 1999: 3) links
socially just schooling to freedom from discrimination, but also raises the
expectation that students ‘understand and acknowledge the value of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander cultures to Australian society . . . the value of cultural
and linguistic diversity, and possess the knowledge, skills and understanding to
contribute to, and benefit from, such diversity in the Australian community and
internationally’.
Despite this seemingly progressive stance, the discourse of diversity during
the 1990s, I suggest, has been mobilised and operationalized in educational
policy and practice within market and managerialist frames that tend to limit
the possibilities of delivering its promise of more inclusive and equitable
schooling. As one principal of a small working class high cultural mix
secondary school stated with the move to self managing schools in Victoria
during the 1990s:
The main change has been the focus, switching away from a view of students based
on an assumption that they can all learn and that they are all entitled to access to
life’s goodies (which includes access to tertiary institutions), and that it took longer
and more resources, to a view that young people must fit into economical imperatives,
be ‘polished up’ in a particular way. If the teachers don’t succeed in that, then
the fault lies in the teachers . . . So it is the switch from a system that gave space to
an optimistic view about young people and their entitlement to learn and their
entitlement to us trying as many ways for them to learn to achieve, and an
instrumentalist view of them and of the institutions that are to serve them and of
teachers.
For this principal, diversity was about addressing highly specific cultural,
linguistic, economic and social needs; building individual and collective
cultural and social capital. But the move to managerialism and more market
oriented schooling put her school under threat. Student diversity was indeed
the major reason for this school’s ‘failure’ as indicated by reducing enrolments.
Upwardly mobile parents chose nearby schools where there were people ‘more
like us’, seeking cultural and class homogeneity (Blackmore and Sachs, in
press). Diversity was risky particularly when associated with socio-economic
disadvantage. Likewise, systemic dispositions favouring standardised student
outcomes as evidence of success (measuring up against like schools), failed to
recognize the diversity of her school’s student population and how this school
‘added value’ in immeasurable ways in terms of student wellbeing and imparting
a sense of belonging, important preconditions to learning, by promoting
community rather than individual competitiveness. Likewise, many aspirant
women leaders still consider that representations of leadership, both visual and
textual, are homogenized, monocultural, and often masculinist, thus discouraging
female, minority and indigenous applicants (Blackmore, 1999; Brooking,
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Blackmore: Deconstructing Diversity Discourses
2005). In a study of the declining interest generally in the principalship, local
selection procedures were found to be more about ‘homosocial reproduction’;
appointing low risk applicants who did not challenge comfort zones or who
were just like us in terms of ‘best fit’ (Blackmore et al., 2005).
This article explores the context, nature and implications for schools and
school leadership of this discursive policy shift from equal opportunity to
diversity that occurred in conjuncture with reforms promoting a new managerialism
and market orientation in schools and school leadership at both state
and federal levels in Australia. Drawing from an analysis that tracks the
emergence of the discourse of diversity in the USA and UK as well as in the
Australian context, I consider how particular discursive strands have been
mobilized with significant effects for equity. In concluding, I suggest how a
transformatory conceptual framework of diversity can provide practical
strategies highly relevant to school leadership.
Tracing the Discourses of Diversity
In most education policy, diversity is now construed to be a positive force in
educational work. The Victorian Office of Training and Further Education
(OTFE, 1998: 11–12) states: Human diversity is a ‘source of societal resilience
and educational vitality . . . a compelling educational priority, important to
every campus, every learner and the wider society’; it is a ‘dimension of
educational mission, community, curricular quality and service to the larger
society’. An organization ‘managing diversity through best practice’ was one
‘characterised by the presence of representatives from a rich variety of different
cultures, backgrounds and perspectives’, with a ‘genuine commitment
towards representation’, and an environment with a ‘respect for differences
while fostering a caring relationship, cross cultural understanding and common
educational commitments’ (1998: 13). ‘Managing diversity’ was about ‘negotiating
the multiple interfaces of local diversity, pluralistic citizenships and global
connectedness’ (1998: 14). Leaders were expected to balance the tension
between a respect for difference while developing and nurturing shared
organizational goals.
On the one hand, the notion of diversity as expressed above appears to be all
encompassing of all forms of difference based on race, ethnicity, disability,
linguistic difference, socio economic background, as well as gender. This move
appears to enrich earlier legalistic and procedural equal opportunity policies
based on anti-discrimination and affirmative action legislation initiated in
many Western nation states during the 1980s, viewing difference not as a source
of deficiency but of productive relationships. On the other hand, the discourse
of diversity emerged in conjuncture with the radical restructuring of education
characterized by a post-welfarist state moving away from full provision of
education, health and welfare services other than for marginalized groups and
individuals, and towards governing through regulation, with a consequent
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
individualisation of responsibility. These new public administrative reforms
were underpinned by neo liberal market principles based on choice and
competition; human capital notions of the self-maximizing autonomous individual.
Given this conjuncture, it is important to query why, and with what
effect, particular discourses of diversity interacted with/against neo liberal
discourses.
Capitalizing on Diversity
Two discourses of diversity as articulated in Australia and most Anglophone
nation states can be traced in terms of their origins within wider economic
and social movements. One is the discourse of ‘capitalising on diversity’, the
‘corporate discourse’ originating in business largely mobilized in mission and
strategic statements as exemplified in the OTFE policies (Cope and Kalantzis,
1997). This discourse focuses on improving service delivery by meeting the
individual needs of clients, appropriating cultural and linguistic diversity to
gain new markets as a response to the globalizing of the market place with new
flows of transnational migration, the growth of multinational companies
seeking new global markets, and a shift in USA, UK, Australia, Canada and New
Zealand from manufacturing to service economies. Greater workplace and
client diversity means an increased reliance on person-to-person contact for
productivity. Service work requires good interpersonal relations and communication.
Service is a ‘game between persons’, requiring flawless interaction, with
the ability to ‘understand the customer’s perspective, anticipate and monitor
the customer’s needs and expectations, and respond sensitively and appropriately
to fulfil these needs and expectations’, that is customer and intercultural
literacy (Jackson et al., 1992: 14).
Managing diversity policies have symbolic value in international markets,
and practical value in capturing the creativity arising from diverse work-
forces; an economic rationalist position based on human capital theory with
the aim to assimilate and promote consensus or cohesion through diversity.
This assimilationist view of organizational culture is often celebrated with
evocative metaphors of a melting pot or cultural mosaic associated with
‘images of cultural hybridity, harmonious coexistence and colourful heterogeneity’
and the ‘richness’ that diverse groups bring to organizations (Prasad
and Mills, 1997: 4). Whereas anti-discrimination and affirmative action recognized
structural and procedural disadvantage in work and organisations,
managing diversity was about systematically recruiting and retaining
employees from diverse backgrounds based on the view that ‘traditional monocultural
organisations cannot function effectively in the context of today’s and
tomorrow’s workforce’ (Prasad and Mills, 1997: 8). The focus is cultural in
seeking to change the beliefs, ideologies and values of individuals to benefit
the organization.
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Transformative Diversity
A second discourse, one premised on social justice, emerged out of 1970s global
social movements (civil rights, second-wave feminism) and the multicultural
movement in Australia of the 1980s. It is a discourse mobilized largely by the
political and educational aspirations of racial, ethnic and linguistic social groups
together with the resurgence of new knowledges. Local ethnic and indigenous
communities have claimed access to more inclusive education. This transformative
discourse symbolises the shift from a politics of redistribution with
its focus on socio-economic disadvantage and class in the 1960s, to a politics of
recognition of cultural and linguistic difference as a basis for the claims made
upon the nation state by the 1980s (Fraser, 1997). Post colonial and feminist
practitioners, teachers and scholars have argued that recognition of difference
requires a fundamental transformation of organizations and the need to make
leadership more ‘inclusive’ of women and minority groups (Fraser, 1997; Mirza,
2005). While significant differences exist among feminists/post-colonialists as
to the strategies to achieve this end, most would agree leadership is a collective
practice based on participation and a capacity to produce change within
democratically organized and family friendly workplaces. The purpose for
leaders from this standpoint is to achieve more equitable outcomes for all. This
perspective overtly identifies racism, sexism and homophobia as embedded in
organizational life and society, and promotes the redistribution of organizational
power. It sees organizations as contested sites of political, cultural and
social difference. Contrary to managing diversity discourse’s assimilationist
view of corporate culture, the transformative perspective argues against the
assumption that effective organizations require consensus. Creativity based on
dialogue over difference and not compliance within organisations will increase
productivity (Cope and Kalantzis, 1997).
This transformative discourse of diversity goes beyond the symbolic and
representational that in equal opportunity policies is often operationalized as
promoting a ‘token’ woman or ‘ethnic’ into leadership, or having a gender/race
balance on committees. This feminist/post-colonial discourse is also about
fundamentally different assumptions about the role and practices of education
and leadership, and the nature of society and organizations in multicultural
democratic societies in a pluralist and democratic society (e.g. AhNee-Benham,
2003; Battiste, 2005; Ngurruwutthun and Stewart, 1996; Tuhiwa-Smith, 1993).
Organizations should work on democratic principles based on recognition of,
and respect for, and not assimilation of, difference. This position therefore sees
the endurance of a predominantly homogenous white male leadership in
politics, business, as well as in schools, as a democratic and not just an
educational issue.
Diversity is therefore understood in multiple and competing ways, referring
equally to improving service responsiveness but also democratic notions of
citizenship and social cohesion. There is no predictability of outcomes with
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
either discourse. The transformatory notion of cultural recognition can produce
conservative equity outcomes. An example of this is, that appeals to cultural
tradition in what are now hybrid cultures are another way in which modes of
masculine dominance can also be reasserted, for example the exclusion of
women from leadership (Moreton-Robinson, 2000; Narayan, 1997). Each
discourse assumes a different view as to the role of the state: the ‘capitalising
on diversity’ preferring a free market less interventionist more voluntarist role
with regard to equity; and the transformative discourse seeking ways in which
the state can provide some balance between the politics of recognition of difference
and that of redistribution of resources, the latter requiring intervention in
markets. There is an inherent tension in both discourses, apparent in education
policies and schools, as in most organizations, between valuing diversity (based
on racial, linguistic and ethnic difference) and the desire for social cohesion;
between diversity of ideas/values and consensus building.
Articulations of Diversity in Education
The concept of diversity is discursively articulated in education as managingof-
diversity, managing-for-diversity, diversity-in-management and diversifying-
management. These discursive articulations need to be understood within the
context of structural reform in education since the 1990s.
In education, the managing of diversity discourse became popular during a
period of radical workplace restructuring in most Anglophone democracies
marked by the introduction of the new public administration that infused
private business principles into the public sector; reduced public expenditure
in education, health and welfare; deregulated financial and labour markets; and
devolved governance. Educational restructuring was informed by new managerialism
and market notions of choice, competition and contractualism during
the 1970s in the UK, the 1980s in New Zealand, and 1990s in Australia
(Blackmore and Sachs, in press). Governments sought to steer self managing
schools from a distance through funding based on enrolments; and a market
focus that sought comparable national and international performances as
measured by standardised educational outcomes. Furthermore, the discourse
of diversity has also been mobilized within the policy context of the ‘internationalization
of education’. Western education is now seen as a commodity
to be sold to non-domestic (non-Western) students and states. Internationalization
is underpinned by a weaker post-colonial discourse regarding the mutual
benefits of cultural exchange (Matthews, 2001). Diversity is therefore a new
source of commodification of education, of education capitalism promoting the
expansion of multiplicity of educational providers, particularly in the private
sector with outsourcing, and competition within and between public and
private sectors.
The discourse of diversity takes on a different trajectory in workforce
planning. In Australia, the managing diversity discourse was promoted in the
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Karpin Report on Management Education in Australia after 1995. Karpin (1995)
predicted a world of global business that by 2010 would rely on ‘productive
diversity’ with the ‘leader-enabler’ who was male or female, and most likely
non-Anglo, possessing a range of ethnicities and citizenships. Leaders would
require excellent communication skills and a capacity to delegate (1995: xi).
Karpin’s mobilisation of ‘managing diversity’ discourse shifted the policy frame
of equity. Australia during the 1970s and 1980s stood out as an examplar of
gender equity and multicultural reform with the incorporation of representatives
of social movements through the institutionalization of the femocrats
(feminist bureaucrats) within the federal and state bureaucracies during the
1970s, followed by multicultural and indigenous policy activists during the
1980s and 1990s (Yeatman, 1998). Mobilizing the discourse of equal opportunity,
the femocrats implemented a legislative and policy framework of
gender equity reform, creating a national gender equity infrastructure that was
financed and supported by the state in areas of health, welfare and education,
informed by bottom up activism by practitioners and ‘policy activists’ and
monitored centrally by the Affirmative Action Agency (Yeatman, 1998). In so
doing, the femocrats mobilized managerialist techniques of accountability, for
example a gender audit requiring the review of all policies before cabinet to
assess their effect on women, a strategy now used by global policy communities,
such as UNESCO (Sawer, 1999). Equity principles (e.g. merit) were
institutionalised in most education systems during the 1980s, embedded in
selection of principals and teacher promotion procedures, particularly with the
move to local selection of principals. Knowledge of equity policies, for example,
was a criterion of promotion in Victorian schools.
However, educational restructuring after 1987 marginalized equity discourses
(Blackmore and Sachs, in press). By the mid 1990s, the discourse of managing
diversity was being mobilized as diversity is ‘better for business’ and ‘in the
national economic interest’ (Sinclair, 1998: 4). The new corporate managerial-
ism in most federal and state bureaucracies devolved equity responsibility
down to local units and managers, incorporated equity units into human
resource management, and provided less rigorous training and monitoring of
local principal selection panels. In the highly devolved New Zealand system,
lack of training in, or monitoring of, merit and equity for principal selection
has facilitated the resurgence of sexist and racist discrimination (Brooking,
2005). Likewise, Deem et al. (1995: 105) indicate that Governing Boards in
England composed of a third women and 10 per cent ethnic minority representatives
who felt excluded from the ‘allocative and authoritative’ functions.
Equity in a deregulated environment now relies for enforcement on the
goodwill of individual executives to raise expectations through managerial fiat.
In Australia, the uneasy and temporary alliance between the second wave of
the women’s movement and federal ‘corporate’ Labor collapsed in 1996 with
election of a neo-liberal Howard government. Howard promoted social conservativism
(anti-feminism, multiculturalism and reconciliation) and market
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
radicalism, reducing funding in education, health and welfare, while ignoring
the equity implications of deregulating markets; increasing accountability
demands for compliance on outcomes and finance, but loosening compliance
with regard to equity. Howard down graded, defunded and downsized the
federal equity infrastructure and sidelined representative bodies. Thus
managerial (efficiency) rather than transformatory (equity) discourses dominated
nationally. By 2005, all state and federal government bureaucracies,
including education, have workforce policies promoting managing diversity,
although equal opportunity principles remain implicitly embedded in operational
plans that build on past practice. Ten years on, there is a significant
levelling out of the numbers of women and minority groups in executive
positions in both public and private sectors, with women concentrated in
middle management managing public systems and schools increasingly at risk
(Blackmore and Sachs, in press).
In this policy context, schools have to, of necessity, be more client focused,
as funding and flexibility in programme has become contingent in performance
based regimes of governance on being able to attract and retain students within
a policy context promoting parental choice and the naming and shaming of
‘failing schools’ unable to either attract students and/or improve performance
(Gleeson and Husbands, 2001). But racial, cultural and linguistic diversity in
and of itself was often, as cited earlier, a negative in attracting students. Indeed,
school choice in the USA (Wells et al., 1997), the UK (Whitty et al., 1998; Woods
et al., 1998), Australia (Teese and Polesel, 2003), and New Zealand (Wylie, 1999)
tends to promote a trend for ‘like’ students to concentrate in particular schools,
encourages the rise of specialist and selective schools, and by default promotes
the demise of comprehensive schools, thus intensifying the concentration of
advantage/disadvantage within particular localities and of particular equity
groups (Campbell and Sherington, 2003; Vinson, 2002). Social exclusion, not
inclusion, of marginalised groups has been one effect of these reforms in
Australia as elsewhere (Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Power et al., 2003; Teese
and Polesel, 2003).
Diversity framed by the neo-liberal discourse of choice is thus reduced to
meeting the preferences of individual choosers in terms of offering a diversity
of schools and programmes, while ignoring how some have more choices, or
how choice facilitates any disposition to be with those ‘like themselves’. This
managing-of-diversity perspective tends to disregard the inequitable structural
and specific cultural conditions under which particular schools and their
leaders operate that actually impede their capacity to deliver equity. The focus
on student diversity within a school effectiveness/improvement frame is
perceived to be a matter for individual preference, and individual treatment,
not of group difference, in ways that view cultural backgrounds and the world
views that students bring to school as problematic and not beneficial for
learning. Such perspectives are premised less on principles of inclusive
communities, citizenship and voice, or the cultural exchange arising from
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two-way learning, and more equated to individual choice in market oriented
systems where parents are active choosers to be attracted and retained but can
choose to go elsewhere (Vincent, 2003). In this ‘managing-of-diversity’ perspective,
diversity tends to be constructed as ‘a managerial problem’ and diversity
as an individual attribute.
The second perspective is that of managing-for-diversity. That is, diversity is
a desirable component of the educational experience to be promoted by leaders,
that is ‘productive diversity’. This position requires a level of recognition of, and
respect for, diversity that gets beyond the individual and recognizes cultural
difference and group identity. It was most evident in the push for linguistic,
cultural and gender inclusiveness in curriculum and pedagogy during the
1980s, such as bilingualism in schools in USA, New Zealand and Canada and
multiculturalism in Australia. But too often, these policies reduced in their
articulation to multicultural food and music festivals, ‘dress up in another
culture’ days in schools, and ‘learning to get along together’ as a form of
‘practical tolerance’ (Hage, 1994). More recently it aligns with the recent
educational focus on individualized learning arising from new learning theories
informed by concepts such as multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996),
multiple intelligences, learning styles, the inclusive curriculum, and more
recently ‘cultural awareness’ to be developed as one aspect of ‘productive
pedagogies’ (Lingard et al., 2003; MCEETYA, 1999). Curriculum and pedagogy is
seen to be about the formation of new identities. But again, these progressive
notions when framed by instrumentalist discourses of generic and transferable
competence and skills, common outcomes and standardized tests lose the
positive valuing of cultural difference.
Neither the managing-of-diversity and managing-for-diversity discourses as
currently articulated in policy and practice require school systems or schools
to either reflect upon their own lack of linguistic, cultural or ethnic diversity
in leadership, although they are expected to see recognition of diversity and
inclusion as important curriculum and pedagogical principles. Indeed, the
Australian multicultural movement of the 1980s, informed by some cultural
traditions that exclude women from leadership, focused on developing
inclusivity in curriculum and pedagogy, but had little to say about the cultural
homogeneity of the feminized teaching population and the male dominated
school leadership. Even in 2005, few discursive links are made between the
normative image of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Angloness’ associated with educational
leadership and a school’s capacity to manage diverse student populations.
Instead, there is a moral panic around the lack of male role models for young
masculinities in crisis, with national moves in Australia towards positive
discrimination for ‘men only’ teaching scholarships (Mills et al., 2004).
Then there is the diversity-in-leadership approach. This is where the ‘women
and leadership’ literature, for example, can be located. The claim is for a
more equitable (but not necessarily equal) representation of particular
outsider groups. Drawing from a cultural feminist position, this notion of
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representational diversity argues that there needs to be representation and
recognition of women’s ways of leading and doing things differently. This is
worrisome, first, because of its essentialist connotations about women as a
homogenous group that ignore first order differences among women based on
race, class, ethnicity and how this is embodied through images of leadership;
but also second order differences in terms of the significant contestation over
values, ideologies and educational positions among women; that is ‘intellectual
diversity’ (Phillips, 1996). Second, this view also ignores how systemic and
school discourses, cultures and structures shape the possibilities of those in
school leadership to practice inclusive and democratic leadership. Furthermore,
the cultural feminist discourse has been too easily subsumed by managerialism.
Women (as a group) are seen to bring particular attributes to leadership
that are positioned as complementary to male attributes in leadership, without
changing the masculinist frame of educational leadership and management
(Blackmore, 1999). There is little consideration of systemic disadvantage or
advantage, the social relations of power/gender, or the privileging of particular
value systems.
Most of the above discourses mobilised around diversity assume some essentialist
and static notion of culture, of women ‘as a class’ or of an ethnic group.
The solution is to seek inclusion, usually from an assimilationist perspective,
premised upon ‘mosaic multiculturalism’; that is a mosaic of different ‘cultures’
aggregates into a harmonious unity (Benhabib, 2002). There is no recognition
of power and status differentials between and within cultural groupings, but
based on a narrow notion of representation within liberal theory, a ‘politics of
presence’ that assumes representation alone will lead to voice and reform
(Phillips, 1996). Others argue that the notion of productive diversity (Cope and
Kalantzis, 1996) also takes into account intellectual diversity in arguing that
creativity (and productivity) arise from a representation of ideas arising from
wider representation of different cultural groups. But just as the procedurally
focused equal opportunity discourse based on merit was readily incorporated
into the line management of corporate governance in the 1980s, so too the
diversity-in-leadership approach has been readily appropriated as symbolic
value is gained through the token presence of women and minority groups as
signifiers of a caring and inclusive organization.
More recently, there has been tentative take up within mainstream policy of
this diversity-in-leadership stance. Now the presence of women and minority
groups within school leadership is perceived to be a solution to an emerging
crisis of disengagement with leadership (Gronn and Rawlings-Sinnaei, 2003).
Numerous government and media reports in the UK, USA, Australia and New
Zealand cite principals under stress. Applications for leadership positions are
in decline, particularly in the more culturally diverse and often socioeconomically
disadvantaged schools (Blackmore et al., in press). Women and
minority social groups are increasingly viewed as a new source of leadership
talent, best suited to work with those with whom they have linguistic, cultural
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Blackmore: Deconstructing Diversity Discourses
and communitarian ties. But there exist countless stories of ‘leadership rooted
in respect for traditional cultural ways of knowing and commitment to social
justice’ undertaken by women leaders who are ‘othered’ by the dominance of
whiteness and masculinism (AhNee-Benham, 2003: 35). For those women,
indigenous, and minority group leaders who take up the risky job of educational
leadership under the gaze of others through the ambiguous lens of gender, race,
class, being perceived to be the ‘representative’ of a particular minority is
dangerous, as they are seen to be too close to their communities through affiliation.
They are also likely, within more performative self-managing systems,
where the onus is on individual principals, to be more vulnerable, and thus to
bear the brunt of any failure to make a difference according to predetermined
externally imposed outcomes despite the challenging circumstances. Heroic
leaders quickly become celebrities within school systems, but equally quickly
are forgotten and rejected by systems that make such positioning unsustainable.
Presence and voice is not enough unless there is also the possibility of a
more inclusive process of democratic deliberation that enables agency and a
capacity to influence decisions (Blackmore and Sachs, in press; Deem, 1996;
Mitchell, 2001; Sinclair, 2000a, 2000b).
Mosaic multiculturalism when linked to equity groups as operationalized
through policy produces the paradox of categories (Hart et al., 2004). Categories
such as race, class, gender, ethnicity when associated with ‘disadvantaged’,
‘underachieving’ and ‘at risk’ assume particular authority through policy and in
practice. Categories often become unified and homogenized, essentializing
difference in politically and socially damaging ways as it freezes categories in
ways that encourage social fragmentation rather than recognising the fluidity
and multiple overlapping of categories. For example, the discourse of ‘recuperative
masculinity’ about boys’ underachievement in schools results from a
narrow focus on all boys as a homogenous group on the one hand, and
academic performance outcomes in alignment with the performative and
competitive culture of 21st-century schooling on the other (Lingard 2003; Mills
et al., 2004). While boys are over represented in literacy remediation, this
discourse ignores not only how masculinity continues to dominate spaces and
places in schools, and how particular masculinities (homosexual) are marginalised
by dominant masculinities (heterosexual), but also how particular
femininities (working class, non-English speaking background, rural and
Aboriginal) are not achieving as well as white middle-class masculinities. That
is, there is no recognition of how power and privilege works in and through the
social relations of gender intersecting with race, class and linguistic difference.
Treating boys as a homogenous group not only ignores how masculinity brings
with it certain privileges, but how socio-economic disadvantage coincident with
location and ‘race’ have significant impact on particular girls and boys (Lamb
et al., 2004). While working-class, ethnic and indigenous masculinities and
femininities are under threat, white and some ethnic middle-class masculinities
and femininities are doing quite well (Lingard, 2003). Culture, race, class
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
and gender are not static or ‘naturalized’ categories but social constructs
(Benhabib, 2002). The policy issue and any practical strategies in schools therefore
should ask the more nuanced question: which girls and which boys benefit
or are at risk?
Finally, what’s missing in policy and mainstream educational administration
literature is a transformative discourse to diversify management and leadership.
This position would put dominant management and leadership paradigms
under the critical gaze of the ‘the other’. It would mean considering how organisations
may better address issues of student and workforce diversity within a
broader conceptual framework of how schools as organizations relate to culturally
diverse societies. It may require school redesign and multiple modes of
leadership that are thick, socially contextualized and constantly under revision
and negotiation. From this perspective, mobilizing the notion of diversity
provides ‘an opportunity not only to theorise about privilege, but also to take
stock of the condition of our much vaunted reflexivity as well’ (Cavanagh, 1997:
47). How does privilege work in and through schools and school systems
around the inextricable intersections between race, gender, class, ethnicity in
ways that focus on the relations of power, hybridity and fluidity of multiple
identities that arise from cross membership in different groups (Benhabib
2002)? The issue, therefore, is not just a representational one but about deliberative
democratic practices that enable agency. How is representation and
voice negotiated through structures and processes of deliberation for a particular
marginalised group? It also means considering leadership and management
in terms of who manages and leads beyond proportional representation of
different minority groups, but asks questions about what values and power is
invested in particular positions. It would require the processes of decision
making as well as the structures and cultures of administration to be informed
by public processes based on the notion of participation as educative, and
management as being about providing the conditions conducive to student,
parent and teacher agency, creating conditions and processes that impart a
sense of empowerment to act and capacity to influence decisions (Forester,
1999). It would enhance earlier approaches by underpinning them with a clear
sense of respect for difference beyond a practice tolerance, a reflexive engagement
with how oneself as a leader is privileged and positioned by race, class
and gender, and the ways in which school organization facilitates cultural
exchange and two-way learning.
The question is whether cultural recognition as an organizing principle of
school provision is adequate to produce greater equity in educational outcomes
and/or social cohesion. Schooling organised around first order differences of
gender, race, class, language as the result of parent’s choosing to have schools
with ‘those like us’ could be seen to encourage social fragmentation and intolerance
of ‘the other’. Neo-liberal policies of parental choice tend to privilege
individuals and promote social/economic exclusion, but can also mobilize
particular ethnic/race/class groups’ legitimate demands for education, many
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Blackmore: Deconstructing Diversity Discourses
having experienced exclusion from mainstream schooling (e.g. charter schools)
(Wells et al., 1997). But cultural pluralism, together with social fragmentation
and the individualization of risk and responsibility, converge when demands
for cultural recognition are framed by discourses of marketization and managerialism.
This juxtaposition privileges individual preferences with little regard
to any social justice discourses calling upon historical legacies and responsibilities
of government and organisations for marginalized groups. Fraser (1997)
argues, that to obtain social justice and equity, policies must simultaneously
address redistribution in order to redress disadvantage and discrimination,
because only then can the interactions between gender, race, class, ethnicity
be addressed (Gewirtz, 1998). Any improvement of student outcomes for
Aboriginal children in Australia, for example, requires both cultural recognition
but also strategic redistributive policies with regard to resources.
So if we are to manage for student diversity and take seriously the notion of
participation (inclusivity) and agency (the capacity to act) of minority groups,
then we have to distinguish between formal (representation) and substantive
(capacity to influence) citizenship (Deem et al., 1995: 146). The latter would
require a significant transformation of management and leadership practices
based on clearly articulated principles of social justice underpinned by democratic
theory. Central to how we would think about school organization and
practices would be the principles identified above—redistribution based on
theories of exploitation, fairness and capabilities; recognition based on theories
of representation, interpretation and communication (Fraser, 1997); association
based on theories of deliberative democracy (Forester, 1999; Young, 2000); and
agency based on theories about the conditions that promote individuals
capacity to act.
So What Does this Mean for Educational and Leadership
Practices in schools?
If the concept of diversity is to be mobilized in ways that will produce greater
equity, it needs to be located within broader notions of the role of schools in
democratic pluralistic societies in terms of citizen formation, an analysis of how
structural and cultural inequality occurs and how privilege works, and a theory
of social justice that provides principles that will inform policy and practice
locally as well as centrally. Diversity is both an empirical concept (a seemingly
neutral documenting of difference), and also a normative concept (‘not what
the differences are, but rather what we make of those differences’), in terms of
the categories we employ about students and colleagues (Riffel et al., 1996: 113).
We need to better understand how difference works through schooling by
considering specific groups of students and examining the socio-economic,
educational and cultural circumstances associated with their educational
experience to better understand the factors behind their achievement or lack
of it. We also need to consider how we as teachers and administrators respond
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
to categories, and how our own practices shape the educational experience.
With regard to curriculum and pedagogy, a Queensland longitudinal study
identified that while teachers are very good at creating caring environments,
many lack a pedagogical repertoire of how to deal with student difference
(Lingard et al., 2003). Developing this repertoire requires encouraging a culture
of teacher inquiry and professional learning over time. This has implications
for school leadership in practical terms. What strategies can a leader adopt and
adapt in their particular context?
Working from the transformative position of diversifying management and
leadership, and premised upon the four principles of recognition, redistribution,
participation and agency, here are some possibilities. The principle of redistribution
would require putting equity on the policy (and therefore resource)
agenda. This could mean running an equity audit of school policies, practices
and resources with regard to personnel and leadership; curriculum, assessment
practices and pedagogies; as well as auditing the use of school space and time.
Who benefits from the allocation of funds and resources; who misses out?
The principle of participation would require us to ask: how do curriculum
offerings, disciplinary policies and enrolment strategies exclude some students
(and groups) and privilege others? Is the curriculum inclusive (content,
language, assessment) and intellectually challenging? Does the pedagogy
capture student experiential learning? Teachers need to assume high aspirations
and impart high expectations for all student groups. Asking students
about how they view school particular policies, curriculum and assessment
practices is informative as to how they position themselves as success/failures,
as belonging to the school community or feeling excluded.
With participation is the associated principle of agency. What are the
processes of decision-making that occur in the school? Who is represented on
decision-making bodies? Do the processes of decision making facilitate both
voice and agency (i.e. a capacity to influence?) through student councils,
parental forums and school councils/governing bodies? Which parents have a
voice and which do not? What do staff know about their communities, how do
they engage with parents, what are the forums, processes and practices that
shape staff–parent relations? How can more parents be encouraged to participate
in a range of activities in the school, given their circumstances? What are
the communication practices of the school (monolingual or multilingual)? Are
there opportunities for two-way cultural exchange where parents are valued for
their local and cultural knowledge, experiences and expertise? Student voice is
an important dimension of understanding issues of student engagement,
achievement and well-being. What are the dominant cultural/gender/racial
images of leadership in the school for students and staff? How can informal
leadership and teacher leadership be identified and recognized? Who are the
student leaders?
Based on the notion of recognition and representational diversity an environmental
scan may consider the types of networks within which the school, its
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Blackmore: Deconstructing Diversity Discourses
teachers and its students are located. Does the school student profile represent
that of its geographical neighbourhood? If not, why not? Is this desirable in
terms of how the school understands its educational community? How can
there be stronger links made with various communities within the geographical
neighbourhood as well as the student/parent community? How would such
networks be utilized to encourage student community activities? What are the
school and societal discourses that produce marginality and lead to hostility
against particular social groups? Consider the ways in which individual and
collective biographies are shaped in this school’s cultural contexts. This
requires reflecting upon the images and representations that are evident in any
school—who gets recognised and rewarded for what activities, and in what
context? Do student sporting, academic, community achievements all get the
same space and time? Equally important in terms of student engagement are
extracurricular activities, such as sport, drama, theatre, and clubs. These activities
can be both links to the community, but also provide alternative spaces for
student achievement and recognition outside the academic (Mansouri, in
press).
Addressing diversity normatively would mean discussing what fairness and
diversity means amongst staff and students, and consideration of how they are
operationalized through policy and practice. Is it tokenistic, practical tolerance,
or meaningful engagement? In discussing issues of diversity, it may mean staff
through professional development being reflexive about their personal histories
and professional biographies rather than focusing first on the disadvantage or
difference of others. What does this then mean for their practice? It would mean
recognizing that all students and their families have educational aspirations and
life ambitions, and that desire, anxiety and alienation is not just invested in
particular social groups (Mansouri, in press: 18; Mirza, 2005). The association
between identity and school achievement is implicit and explicit. Mansouri (in
press) in a study of Arabic Speaking Background (ASB) Australian secondary
students concluded that:
the educational and social experiences of ASB and non-ASB students . . . differ in
the key areas relating to teacher-student relations, perceptions of interethnic
relations at school, confidence in achieving a tertiary place, beliefs about whether
racism affects learning and behaviour and family emphasis upon and attitudes
towards education. ASB students were more likely to express distrust towards
teachers, particularly based around a perceived lack of cultural understanding.
They were less confident in their abilities to achieve education or training beyond
secondary school, and were more likely to hold more limited educational ambitions
than students from other backgrounds. While all students tended to think that their
parents regarded education to be of importance, ASB students were less likely to
discuss their education with their parents . . . Some ASB students, particularly
young women, expressed a tension between their cultural roles and their
educational ambitions. The research also shows that ASB young people, particularly
boys, are concerned about the levels of racism and discrimination they face in a
broader social context. This last point is especially important given the negative
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Educational Management Administration & Leadership 34(2)
impact social marginalisation and exclusion can have on one’s sense of worth and
belonging.
Educators need to understand difference and diversity within a single
humanity in order to make education more equitable for all on a daily basis.
This means getting beyond practical tolerance, and getting past the
sameness/difference tension (we are all treated the same or reduce all difference
to ‘other’ than the dominant). And as with all equity issues, this means it
is about political will by government, reflexivity on the part of leaders, mobilising
resources for equity, and strong equity policies locally and centrally. It
also puts pressure on school leaders to put issues of diversity on the agenda,
but as I have argued, framed by principles of social justice in order to work
within/through/against education markets and managerial accountabilities
(Blackmore, 2002). But ‘what we make of it’, I have indicated, is dependent
upon which conceptual framework we draw from and in what context. A
discourse of diversity within a liberal pluralist frame, for example, while based
on notions of tolerance and fairness, gives priority to individual over group
rights. A social democratic position would argue that diversity is also about
recognition of both individual and collective rights within a wider notion of a
good and democratic society.
Acknowledgement
I thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms of the earlier
version.
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Biographical note
JILL BLACKMORE is Professor of Education at Deakin University, researching in
educational administration, leadership, policy and equity. Publications include
Troubling Women: Feminism, Leadership and Educational Change (Open University Press,
1999) and the forthcoming Performing and Reforming Leaders: Gender, Educational
Restructuring and Organizational Change (SUNY).
Correspondence to:
JILL BLACKMORE, Faculty of Education, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC 3217,
Australia. [email: jillb@deakin.edu.au]
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