Re-imagining Teacher Leadership: An Autoethnographic Inquiry

Leadership has been given deliberate prominence in education in the quest to activate educational capacity and improve educational performance within schools (Hargreaves & Ainscow, 2015). Expectations for the teaching profession as a whole, and in particular teacher leadership, are central to the hopes of “improving school outcomes, improving the educational attainment of students, and replacing conceptualizations of leadership” (Torrance & Humes, 2015, p. 792). In spite of the positive rhetoric regarding teacher leadership, it has not been successful in achieving these aims, especially on a wider scale (Barth, 2013; Coggins & McGovern, 2014). Re-imagining teacher leadership raises the question of what teacher leadership is, why it has not been deemed successful, and what spaces exist for teachers to lead within. The author’s experiences are situated through self-narrative writing and compared to existing literature on teacher leadership, raising questions as to why existing educational landscapes might remain inhospitable to the legitimacy of teacher leadership. While micro-events are the focus of this research, their relationship to macro-structures indicates the need for re-imagining the spaces where teachers can lead within school systems. This autoethnographic inquiry illustrates how reflection on career events and teacher leadership experiences can enrich the description of educational leadership and the role educators can take in fostering leadership.