Transcript Slide 1
VASSP 2012 Conference Rural Educational Leadership and Sustainability: Challenges, Costs and Opportunities
Professor John Halsey Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities, Flinders University, August 2012 http://www.flinders.edu.au/ehl/education/rur al/rural.cfm
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Sidney Myer Chair The Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities has been established through a 5 year, $1 million grant as part of the Myer Foundation 50 years and Sidney Myer Fund 75 years Commemorative Grants Program, in partnership with Flinders University.
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• Challenges • Costs • Opportunities • Summary • References
Presentation
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Sustainability
• Planet will not carry consumption load indefinitely • “Present patterns of OECD per capita resource consumption and pollution cannot possibly be generalized to all currently living people, much less to future generations without liquidating the natural capital on which future economic activity depends… the profligate and inequitable nature of current patterns of development, when projected into the not too distant future, lead to biophysical impossibilites”. (Van Dieran, p. 99) [email protected]
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Dimensions
• By the middle of the 21st century, the world’s population will be between 9 and 10 billion. Australia’s will be around 35 million • An estimated 2/3 of the world’s people will live in cities by 2050 (Brugmann, 2009) • To bring a personal perspective to the magnitude and impact of these figures, during my working life of 46 years, the world’s population has doubled [email protected]
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The premise • The importance of rural communities is going to increase over the next 4 decades The project • From knowledge for
building
world (20
th
sustaining
the world (21
st
the modern century) to knowledge for century)
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Stresses
• Tectonic stresses (Homer-Dixon, 2006) • Population • Energy • Environmental • Climate • Economic • Others • Materialism dominating moral commitment (Stiglitz, 2009) • Political • Cultural • Globalisation, great reliance on markets to deliver basic service entitlements, rationalisation [email protected]
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Stresses exemplified
• Irony of fish stocks decline • Impact of consuming now with no regard for the future • To bring to life some of the profoundness of the stresses identified by Homer Dixon, think of the decline that has occurred to major fisheries and fish stocks around much of the world and, while doing so, also ask yourself is there not something profoundly ironic about farming fish when nature can ‘supply’ fish so more effectively if given ‘half a chance’. • Kurlansky’s deeply insightful and disturbing book on the biography of the cod and its demise overtime— “abundance turned to scarcity through determined short sightedness” (1997, rear dust jacket)—ought to be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand how human intervention can bring renewable natural resources to the brink of extinction. [email protected]
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Nature
• “when there’s trouble in nature, there’s trouble in society” • “Nature bats last” • “The twenty- first century will…be the Age of Nature. We’ll learn, probably the hard way, that nature matters: we’re not separate from it, we’re dependent on it, and when there’s trouble in nature, there’s trouble in society.” (Homer Dixon, 2006, p.13) • “All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last” (Ernest Callenbach in Barlow, 2007, p.1), [email protected]
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Leadership matters
• “leadership not only matters: it is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning… Effective education leadership makes a difference in improving learning [and in the capacities of communities to…]”. (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson & Wahlstrom, 2004, p.1) • leadership and education are ‘non-negotiables’ for building a sustainable future [email protected]
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Educational leaders and leadership
• Critical for: – Creating, nurturing and refining contexts for learning and growth (Leithwood et al, 2004) – Fostering and supporting teachers and teaching (Mulford, 2003) – Raising student outcomes and opportunities (Robinson, 2007) – Community engagement and capacity building (Epstein et al, 2011) – Voice, change, generating & leading communities of common purpose (Halsey, Schubert and others) [email protected]
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Imperative- rural educational leadership becomes a premier career pathway
• National rural educational l/ship research in 2010 • 683 respondents • 82.6% first leadership position in a rural location • 46.2% no preparation for leadership; 29.2% short courses only • 88.5% said rural leadership career pathway needs to be made more attractive [email protected]
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Enhancing rural leadership as a career pathway
• Professional – Workload re-design and re-sizing – Improve support networks- better ways to handle isolation – Better professional development and study – Techniques/approaches for living and working effectively in small population contexts – Work and service valued by central agencies – Sufficient resources to do the job – Mental health training/support – Rights of return – Resolve teaching-administration pressures in small schools [email protected]
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Making rural educational leadership a more attractive career pathway
Action % Respondents
Employer recognition Financial incentives Value for promotion Better career p/ways Suitable accommodation Specialised preparation Metro return rights Asst tertiary educ own ch Partner employment Annual return $ 81.8
80.5
78.5
72.7
71.2
66.3
56.1
53.4
50.8
40.5
449 442 431 399 391 364 308 293 279 247 [email protected]
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Rural Educational Leaders
(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban) • Greater role range and closer connections with nature • Attracting, inducting and retaining staff • Accessing specialists • • • Greater range and diversity of responsibilities other than teaching and learning such as school bus transport, route determinations, drivers, safety inspections; teacher housing and accommodation; community leadership expectations; closer ‘connections’ with nature Recruiting and retaining staff is more problematic/demanding; fewer applications per vacancy; higher turn over; less experienced staff; greater demand for induction into the profession as compared to updating and fine tuning of expertise Accessing specialist assistance for students with learning needs and behavioural challenges requires more time spent on negotiating and arranging services [email protected]
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Rural Educational Leaders
(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban) • Education and mobility • Testing is a subset of what schools do and achieve • • A major tension/dynamic, which rural principals have to manage, is learning for staying, learning for leaving or learning for choice. Unlike urban contexts where post secondary options are local, rural students who want to pursue post secondary, frequently have to move out of their community. This in turn has consequences for the local demographic mix and the future sustainability of a community.
National testing shows that a higher proportion of rural students than urban students are below benchmarks, fewer complete secondary schooling and fewer transition to tertiary. Improving these outcomes differentials is a constant source of pressure for rural principals, who in many instances, do not control the primary means to do so- access to the very best teachers available and addressing SES issues. As well, the intense focus on national outcomes may also diminish other forms of outstanding achievement. [email protected]
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Rural Educational Leaders
(some ‘typical’ selective comparisons with ‘typical’ urban) • • Greater span of control eg year level range Year level range of responsibilities often larger (R-12) than urban; different industrial conditions for primary and secondary teachers can create complexities for developing a high performing whole school culture • • Small schools, multi-grades Small schools (<100) are predominantly in rural and remote locations. They have complex multigrade teaching and administrative demands; there is frequently a very large management load as well as teaching load for the principal; middle management frequently non- existent • Indigenous challenges and opportunities • Significant Indigenous enrolments which may also be mobile and require a diverse range of health services and other community supports which impact on teaching and learning • 24/7 • The pressure/expectation to be available and accessible to the local community ‘24/7’ [email protected]
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• Rural communities
Opportunities
• Vibrant, productive rural communities are integral to Australia’s (and the world’s) sustainability • Rural Educational leadership • Educational leadership is critically important for charting new directions, making organisations work, human capacity building and nurturing potential • Rewarding and demanding • Some of the most challenging and professionally rewarding leadership opportunities are in rural Australia- ‘the A team!’ [email protected]
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• Local access • Globalisation • Critical tension
Opportunities
• Rural people want schools, want local access, want leaders and teachers who want to be in their communities • Rural communities and contexts are complex, are diverse, are changing, are acutely impacted by globalisation • At the heart of a rural educational leaders job is an going tension: – am I leading learning for staying?
– am I leading learning for for leaving?
choice?
or – am I leading learning [email protected]
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Opportunities
• Place matters • Stories & relationships • Landscape • Place matters-“A multidisciplinary analysis of place reveals the many ways that places are profoundly pedagogical.… as centers of experience, places teach us about how the world works and how our lives fit into the spaces we occupy. Further, places make us…” (Gruenewald, D.A., 2003, p. 621) • “Our relationship to place is constituted in our stories/relationships…Our relationship to place involves multiple contested stories”. (Sommerville, Aust Journal of Language and Literacy, 2007, p. 154, 155) • “[i]n Australia, landscape carries our experience of the sacred other… [n]o matter how we attempt to package or construct it, the land will always break out of whatever fancy dress we foist upon it” (Tacey, 1995, pp 6-7).
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Capitals
Natural capital-
“natural resources, ecosystem services and the aesthetics or beauty of nature”.
Human capital-
“the abilities, knowledge and skills of individuals”. The “attributes that are seen as particularly valuable for achieving community viability- often in combination with social capital- are leadership, ability to solve problems and commitment to the locality”.
Social capital-
“relationships between people linked in various ways… bonding and bridging”. “The role of human agency in achieving community sustainability is underlined by the distinction made in some of the social capital literature between capital (the stock of social resources) and capacity (the ability to draw on capital for valued purposes)”.
Institutional capital-
“the institutional structures and mechanisms present in a community…public, private and non-government, not for profit”.
Produced-
“sometimes referred to as the ‘economic capital’- [includes] harvested or manufactured products, the built environment… communication systems… financial resources… intellectual and cultural property”. ( All quotations from Cocklin &Dibden, 2005, pp 4-6).
Assets mapping for sustainability
Capitals Natural Sustainability Human Vision Social Place People Youth esp Learning Life-long Economic/ Employment Governance & Government Others Institutional Produced Context Significance Rating
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Rural schools and communities are…
• A unique source of capitals/resources for progressing and supporting sustainability and new futures: – Human – Infrastructure – Social – Knowledge/intellectual – Youth- future oriented – Relational – Engaging urban; city-country [email protected]
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Global- local simultaneously
• Creating and progressing sustainable futures for Australia and the globe requires professionals and champions who: – understand the pervasive forces, demographics and superstructures of change – can shape and deliver at a local level – are imbued with a sense of radical hope- hope which is… “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand [fully] what it is… [it] anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it”. (Lear, 2006, p.103) [email protected]
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Game changing challenge: creating
space for creativity
• Similarities with the prelude to the demise of the Roman Empire • create a space for
creativity
• the circumstances we are broadly facing today driven by population growth and the pervasiveness of growth economics, political cycles and so forth, are reminiscent of the prelude to the demise of the Roman Empire. (Homer-Dixon, 2006).
• “The collapse that followed was dramatic…[but] trouble doesn’t have to be calamitous in its ultimate results though… catastrophe could
create a space for creativity
children, our grandchildren, that helps build us a better world for our ourselves” (emphasis added, pp. 6-7).
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Emergence
“ Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections . We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead we need to connect with kindred spirits… networks are not the whole story… as [they] grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn’t that they were hidden; they simply don’t exist until the system emerges… the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how life creates radical change and takes things to scale”.
(Margaret Wheatley & Deborah Frieze, The Birkana Institute) [email protected]
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References
• • • • • • • • • • • • • Barlow, M. (2007). Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water. Melbourne: Black Inc.
Brugmann, J. (2009). Welcome to the Urban Revolution How Cities Are Changing the World. St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press.
Cocklin. C. & Dibden, J. (Eds.) (2005). Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Cornell, S. (2001). Enhancing Rural Leadership and Institutions: What can we Learn from American Indian Nations? International Regional Science Review, 24, n 1: 84-102. Cribb, J. (2010). The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid it. University of California Press.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. London: Allen Lane Penguin Books.
Epstein, J. L. ; Galindo, C. L. & Sheldon, S.B. (2011). Levels of Leadership: Effects of District and School Leaders on the Quality of School Programs and Community Involvement. Educational Administration Quarterly. http://eaq.sagepub.com/ Eriksen, T.H. (2007). Globalization The Key Concepts. New York, Berg.
FAO Media Centre: 2050: A third more mouths to feed http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/35571/ downloaded 13/9/2011 Giles, D. & Morrison, M. (2010). Exploring Leadership as a Phenomenon in an Educational Leadership Paper: An Innovative Pedagogical Approach Opens the Unexpected. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 2010, Volume 22, Number 1, 64-70 http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/ ISSN 1812-9129 Gruenewald, D.A. (2003). Foundations of Place: A Multidisciplinary Framework for Place-Conscious Education. American Education Research Journal: 40 (3); pp 619-654.
Halsey, R. J. (2006) Towards a ‘self-help’ map for teaching and living in a rural context. International Education Journal, 2006, 7(4), 490-498.
Homer-Dixon, T. (2006). The Upside of Down. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company.
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References
• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • Hugo, G. (2005). The state of rural populations. In C. Cocklin. & J. Dibden, (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Kotter, J. P. & Cohen, D.S. (2002). The Heart of Change; Harvard Business School Press.
Lear, J. (2008). Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Leithwood K., Louis, K.S., Anderson,S. & Wahlstrom, K. (2004). How leadership influences student learning (Executive Summary). Canada :The Wallace Foundation.
Mendham, E., Hannah, G. & Curtis, A. (2011). Agricultural Land Ownership Change and Natural Resources Management: Comparing Australian and US Case Studies, in Luck, G. W., Race, D. & Black, R. (eds). Demographic Change in Australia’s Rural Landscapes Implications for Society and Environment, Australia, CSIRO and Springer Publishing.
MacGilchrist, B., Myers, K., & Reed, J. (2004). The Intelligent School. London: Sage Publications.
Mulford, B. (2003). School Leaders: Changing Roles and Impact on Teacher And School Effectiveness. A paper commissioned by the Education and Training Policy Division, OECD, for the Activity Attracting, Developing and Retaining Effective Teachers.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton University Press.
Pretty, J. (2002). Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature. London: Earthscan Publications.
Robinson, V. M. J. (2007). The impact of leadership on student outcomes: Making sense of evidence. Research Conference 2007, New Zealand.
Salt, B. (2004). The Big Shift. Victoria, Australia: Hardie Grant Books.
Schubert, R. (2009). Building sustainable communities: The connection between learning, leadership and social capital. TAFESA.
Sommerville, M. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, 2007, p. 154, 155 Stayner, R. (2005). The changing economics of rural communities. In C. Cocklin. & J. Dibden, (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Stiglitz, J. (2010). Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy. Tacey, D. J. (1995). Edge of the Sacred. North Blackburn Victoria: Harper Collins.
Tonts, M. (2005). Government policy and rural sustainability. In C. Cocklin. & J. Dibden, (Eds.) Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
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References
• • Van Dieran, W., (ed). (1995). Taking Nature into Account, Toward a Sustainable Income: A Report of the Club of Rome. New York: Copernicus.
Wheatley, M. & Frieze, D. (n.d.) Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale. The Berkana Institute. Retrieved on 9 March, 2012 from: http://api.ning.com/files/*xqYtgtZ1YVTXSINMhczrysRSTl3ljkqiMDo0DhJv5MZ9z7yLZebET9LJWnGv3HnHmeVJD52*OkU14T* St6VP6Uagjo*lzc6/usingemergence.pdf
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