Developing Leadership for Social Inclusion in Higher Education
This paper will consider potential frameworks and directions for developing leadership in higher education, which specifically address issues of social inclusion, access and participation. In recent decades with the expansion and massification of higher education, access to and widening participation (WP) in higher education has become a central theme in educational policy globally. National governments have made a significant commitment to diversification, expansion and WP, in the attempt to address persistent patterns of under-representation of certain social groups in universities. This has included a considerable investment in resources, including that of human resources and a growing professional body dedicated to issues of diversity, access and equity in universities. New roles have been created, such as the WP Director to provide leadership on these issues. Yet, inequalities have persisted and a large body of research exposes the limitations of some of the current strategies and frameworks for widening participation. This paper, drawing on critical and feminist pedagogical perspectives, will argue for reflexive aproaches to leadership development that work to explicitly address and challenge deeply embedded social, cultural and discursive inequalities and misrecognitions. Reflexive aproaches bring together theory and practice, requiring that individual leaders locate and contextualize their work in relation to complex formations of identity and relations of power (Burke & Jackson, 2007). Such aproaches foreground collaborative and participatory methods of leadership that privilege processes of negotiation and pay close attention to the subtle and insidious micro-politics and operations of exclusion within institutional spaces. Such an aproach makes a commitment to creating inclusive institutional cultures and practices, challenging the hegemonic discourses of exclusion that locate the problem of WP in individual students and teachers. I will offer a feminist poststructural critique of widening participation to draw attention to the politics of identity and the complex ways that mis/representations, mis/recognitions and exclusions are constructed, challenged, resisted and produced (Ball, 1987, Ball, 1990, Epstein et al., 2003, Fraser, 1997, Gillborn & Youdell, 2000, Reay, 2001, Reay et al., 2005, Skeggs, 1997, Skeggs, 2004).
Penny Jane Burke
Institute of Education, University of London
国际会议
北京
英文
1-6
2008-11-11（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）