'Leading beautifully': A phoenix arises in new research in educational leadership

During the period 2012-2016 field research was conducted in Australia and America which led to a different conceptualisation of educational leadership with an entirely new metaphor, that of ‘leading beautifully’ instead of either ‘effectively’ or ‘successfully’. This new image of leadership emanated from a two-pronged inquiry that side-stepped the dominant business and economic models in which leadership logic and practice were situated in both countries. In a quest to expand the vision of the nature of leadership in an area where success and attainment are not only as complex, but arguably more creative, the researchers turned to the arts and the concept of ‘performance’ as the indicator of attainment. They were especially influenced by the work of Elliot Eisner and his notion of the construct of connoisseurship, a term that included not only competence and skill development, but advanced considerably beyond those indices to include the acquisition of fine-grained distinctions rendered by a ‘discerning eye’. The empirical base for the study included interviews with 10 artists (painters, sculptors, dancers, choreographers, theatre directors and musical composers) and a similar number of educators who were school principals, a community arts educator and a school superintendent in America and an equivalent position in Australia. The results were presented in refereed papers at conferences of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) and the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The study revealed how artists and leaders develop a ‘discerning eye’ and seven attributes of both groups of how this ability was developed and nurtured. The research also revealed 10 core dimensions of connoisseurship. The final outcome was a book published by Routledge, Leading Beautifully: Educational leadership as connoisseurship (English & Ehrich, 2016)