This ongoing R&D project, partially financed by the Ministry of Education in Finland (KOPETI JO) and carried out at the Unit of Educational Leadership and Development at Åbo Akademi University, had three aims.
First, a new principal education program (25 ECTS) was developed at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies. It focuses curriculum leadership, management and development.
Second, the project co-authored a new text-book on educational leadership in Swedish.
A fundamental point of departure in this project is the assumption that understanding and developing educational leadership requires need to be based in educational theory, rather than organisation theory or policy research. Educational theory offers us a language for different dimensions of educational leadership:
a) a theory of its object, i.e. the aims, tasks and operations of the school and its pedagogical work and
b) an idea of the pedagogical aspects of educational leadership activity itself,
c) understanding school leadership in the tension between societal interests and the relative autonomy of educational institutions, and how societal interests transform into pedagogical activity,
d) conceptualizing leadership for school development as a distinct form of pedagogical leadership of the school’s operational culture.
Arguing for a reflexive and systemic approach, we view pedagogical curriculum leadership as curriculum work and evaluation occurring at different but inseparable levels of the same whole. Adopting a non-affirmative general education approach allows us to consider policy work, educational leadership and teaching as dimensions of one and the same whole, rather than separable entities.
Publications from this project:
Uljens, M. (in press). Pedagogical dimensions of curriculum leadership – a non-affirmative approach. In R. Ahtiainen, E. Hanhimäki, J. Leinonen, M. Risku & A-S. Smeds-Nylund (Eds.), Leadership in educational contexts in Finland: Theoretical and empirical perspectives. Springer Open Access.
Uljens, M. & Smeds-Nylund, A-S. (red.). (2021). Pedagogiskt ledarskap och skolutveckling. Lund: Studentlitteratur. 462 p.
Uljens, M. (2020). Pædagogisk ledelse og uddannelsesreform – en ikke-affirmativ pædagogik. Kognition & Pedagogik 30(3), 8-24.
Uljens, M. (2019). Entender el liderazgo educativo y la reforma curricular: más allá del economicismo global y el nacionalismo neoconservador (fue traducido por el Trad. y Prof. Lucas Damián Vini). In: C. Balagué (ed.), Desafíos para una educación emancipadora (pp. 173-197). Santa Fe, Argentina: Ministerio de Educación de la Provincia de Santa Fe. ISBN 978-987-1026-79-1
Uljens, M. (2018). Understanding Educational Leadership and Curriculum Reform – Beyond global economism and neo-conservative nationalism. Nordic Journal of Comparative and International Education (NJCIE), 2(2-3), 196-213.
Hardy, I. & Uljens, M. (2018). Critiquing Curriculum Policy Reform in Finland and Australia: A non-affirmative, and praxis-oriented approach. Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 15(2).
Uljens, M. (2018). カリキュラム研究の１つの基底としての非是認的な教育理論 (Non-Affirmative Education Theory as a Foundation for Curriculum Research). The Japanese Journal of Curriculum Studies 2(27), 89-98.
Uljens, M. & Ylimaki, R. (Eds.), (2017). Bridging Educational Leadership, Curriculum Theory and Didaktik – Non-Affirmative Theory of Education. Cham: Springer.