Centering Educational Administration: Cultivating Meaning, Community, Responsibility

I had to read this re my masters course. It relates to actual situations and was very relevant to the field of educational leadership across the board. Great user friendly resource.

Centering Educational Administration is a veritable tour de force. Erudite, thought-provoking, and compelling, it effectively marshals the many strands of social, pedagogical, and organizational theory to weave its main message: in the noble service of the next generation, educational administration can uphold education's humanistic value by cultivating meaning, community, and responsibility. For Starratt, one of education's most encyclopedic and articulate public intellectuals, this entails moving beyond simply considering the "discrete functions of administration" and towards engaging "the essentials of administering." Much as the overtones of Starratt's argument may have W. B. Yeats turning in his grave (i.e., there is a center to educational administration... that can hold), it should be heeded for its critically normative orientation and purpose: to move educators and institutions from what is to what ought to be.The book does so by centering educational leadership on the cultivating and monitoring of a learning agenda that begins with the self and students and extends to teachers and the community. Our ecological interdependence means that "School communities do not exist in isolation from their surrounding communities. What and how they learn needs to be in dialogue with their surroundings" (233). To this end, Starratt explores the separate and intersective synergy of theory and practice, teaching and learning, of individual and community, to organically develop a vision of school as "a humane and socially nurturing environment in which the pursuit of academic learning would go hand in hand with social learning" (96). He extends the conceptual foundations for ethical education first developed in Building an ethical school (1994) and engages substantive aspects of moral leadership, keeping students at the centre of the educational enterprise and offering perspectives to help educators through this late-modern era of high-stakes accountability, diversity, and uncertainty.Starratt achieves this ambitious purpose through thoughtful organization of material, clear, vivid prose, and rich illustrative examples. The eight chapters of Part I, Elements of the Leader's Vision, take readers through the conceptual foundation of his argument about what school renewal looks like, why it's needed, and how it can be achieved. As the book's sub-title suggests, Starratt's vision for a new centre of educational administration comprises three main themes: cultivating meaning, community, and moral responsibility. For Starratt, school renewal is fundamentally about enriching and enhancing the learning of the schoolhouse's many selves - student and staff - in relation to their physical, social, and human worlds. It is about nurturing "moral excellence" in all learners, a sense of being responsible to, and for, what one learns. To this end, educational administration's core is therefore about cultivating personal, public, applied, and academic meaning-making by i