The aim was to investigate what transpired in the field after universities bridged theoretical concepts of social justice and human rights with school principals’ practice. One university was embedded in a high-stakes testing and accountability context (University of California, Berkeley), while the other was embedded in a low-stakes testing and accountability context (University of Oslo).
Background
Public schools reflected society’s values. Their images mirrored the principles and norms that a society had chosen to cultivate in its citizenry, as well as its deep-seated assumptions about the purposes of public schooling. When universities prepared practitioners to lead schools, they therefore engaged in inherently value-laden processes. They privileged some goals for principals’ work over others. They stressed which priorities should come first and which could be secondary to the overall aims of the school.
When these leaders entered their schools, the public trusted that principals had the capacity to enact these values. However, the project asked in what ways schools’ political contexts enabled or constrained public-school leaders’ goals, hopes, and commitments. It investigated which values survived, which changed, and which were abandoned.
As middle managers, school principals had to mediate between the values that prevailed in their local contexts and those that weighed on them from afar. They led within a zone of mediation—that is, a site that required them to test the limits of what the local public was willing to tolerate and the macro-level institutional systems in which their work was embedded. For some principals, these contexts delimited their sphere of influence in unexpected ways. For others, they expanded these boundaries.
Project period: 2016 - 2019
The project was funded by the Peder Sather Center for Advanced Study
Research Question
• How do principals in each political setting define and understand democracy and social justice?
• How do principals in each political setting make sense of each other's school contexts and practices?
- In what ways do principals see the potential for sustaining equity and democracy as orientations when they confront different types of testing and accountability policies?
- Which contextual conditions enable and constrain schools potential to promote democracy and social justice under test-based accountability policies?
Research Design
• 2 four-day analytical exchanges for 11 school principals, 5 alumni from an American university’s principal preparation program, 6 from a Norwegian university’s program. The principals serve as participants in the study. In each exchange, we will facilitate visits to the host principals’ schools, during which the research team and visiting principals will observe classrooms and interview other school leaders.
• Pre-readings: educational policy contexts and political histories of each country
UC Berkeley (October, 2016)
University of Oslo (April, 2017)
• 3 focus group interviews per exchange
One composed of the Norwegian school principals
One composed of the American school principals
One joint focus group in which both sets of principals interact and discuss cross-cutting themes.
• 11 individual principal interviews
Project Organization
A collaborative project across University of Oslo and UC Berkeley: Professor Jorunn Møller acted as Principal Investigator for the Norwegian part of the project, and Associate Professor Tina Trujillo acted as a Principal Investigator for the American part of the project.
Project Group
- Associate Professor Tina Trujillo, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education
- PhD student René Kissel, UC Berkeley, Graduate School of Education
- Professor Jorunn Møller, University of Oslo, Dep. of Teacher Education and School Research
- Associate Professor Ruth Jensen, University of Oslo, Dep. of Teacher Education and School Research
- Research Fellow Eivind Larsen, University of Oslo, Dep. of Teacher Education and School Research
