Abstract: In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis on the promotion of collegiality as an impetus for management in Scottish schools. Collegiality is promoted as having the potential to transform teachers and hence education. This study confronts this ambitious claim arguing that the concept of collegiality has suffered from a lack of theoretical and intellectual scrutiny. Collegiality lacks proper understanding as a concept and as a discourse. Terms associated with it are frequently used in perfunctory ways which are inattentive to its conceptual sophistication. This study attends to complications which emerge when we reflect rigorously on what collegiality means, and how it impacts on various organisations, but in particular school management. Current attempts at developing a collegiate culture in schools are underexploiting its potential as a transformative management model. We are not managing to be collegiate in the most normative of understandings because we are not Managing collegiality in ways which take account of its conceptual and discursive complexity. The key research questions are: From where has the discourse of collegiality come and how has it been promoted? Whose interest might the discourse of collegiality serve? The study takes two main approaches in addressing these. It considers collegiality as a concept, focussing on meaning and implications arising from the application of limited understandings of the idea in a variety of organisational contexts. It then draws on continental philosophy to uncover arguments which position collegiality, currently promoted, as a discourse. The dissertation locates key sources of the discourse of collegiality and the politics and practices of its promotion. It explores the interests claimed to be served by collegiality, contrasts these with the interest more likely to be served, before going on to make normative claims about a rehabilitated understanding of collegiality. It identifies current approaches to collegiality more as being technologies for organisational expediency rather than as conduits of the more attractive and normative understandings which could contribute creatively to a more democratic and ‘dialogic’ school organisational culture. In seeking a more creative and potentially transformative conception and practice of collegiality, the study looks at one particular example of a radical reappraisal and critiques this, finding it attractive in some senses but at odds with the parameters within which school managers work. A discussion develops which explores more attractive and normative understandings and casts these before a backdrop of common approaches to the professional practice of school management. The dissertation contributes to a discussion by which popular understandings of collegiality may be rescued to become more befitting the democratic and socially oriented facets of a school, rather than as a managerialist technology, impacting on learners, teachers and the wider constituency of interest in schooling in rather more limited ways. The study defends normative understandings of collegiality as an organisational impetus tailored for professional arenas, but in so doing it defends management as a necessity in organisational contexts characterised by complexity. Collegiality cannot be an alternative to Management. It is an attractive approach for schools which can be managed if Managed appropriately.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:559899 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Cavanagh, John Bartholomew |
| Publisher | University of Glasgow |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2254/ |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds