Leading Schools between Outcomes and Democratic Bildung – in a Governance Perspective

Leading Schools between Outcomes and Democratic Bildung – in a Governance Perspective 

The point of departure of the seminar is a discussion of the governance and leadership contexts of school leadership. In most European countries we can see that over the past 40-50 years the issue of leading schools has been put on the agenda. Partly because the OECD (The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) has wanted to inspire end influence governments to focus on the relations between management levels from national, through regional and local to school themselves should be discussed. A major perspective to this discussion is centralization and decentralization and the modes of steering relations being suggested e.g.: hard and or soft governance, discourses, and social technologies. The discussion will take Denmark as a case that in many aspects can be generalized to other nations because part of the development has been enacted in parallel and had identical inspirations that produce identical discourses about the purposes and aims of schooling: A discourse of learning outcomes and another of Democratic Bildung, general pedagogic. The seminar will intend to combine and discuss two perspectives on school leadership: A governance and a pedagogical.

Lefj Moos • Aarhus University

Associate Professor Emeritus at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University. He has for many years been doing research, teaching and publishing about education, leadership and governance. He has been involved as president in international and European research associations, like the ICSEI (The Conference for School Effectiveness and Improvement); NERA (Nordic Educational Research Association) and EERA (European Education research Association). He has edited journals and the Springer Book Series, Educational Governance Research.