Educational leadership and global crises; reimagining planetary futures through social practice/ Alexander Charles Gardner-McTaggart

The world is facing increasing crises such as climate, inequality and disease, which are set to impact student futures in devastating ways. Without a change in the way citizens think at the ballot box and the supermarket, these crises indicate an intensification of global disaster with very real consequences. This paper deploys critical theory in order to examine the efficacy of Educational Leadership in the 21st Century. It finds that the crises facing the planet are due to a domination of knowledges serving system-interests detrimental to the survival and happiness of the many. Despite such dismal outlooks, educational leadership is potentially highly influential and represents hope. It is ideally placed to facilitate the global mindedness and intersubjectivity required for future citizens to collectively tackle planetary problems. Despite the potential of educators to create change, this paper finds educational leadership thinking to be rooted in the system-world, producing, and demanding strategic action in line with post-Comptian positivism. This advances a focus upon external goods and a blindness toward its own advantage. Educational leadership requires an urgent change in thinking: one that embraces a critical hygiene of intersubjectivity, global mindedness, and communicative action, reimagining educational leadership as social practice in an interdependent world.

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