Leadership for Learning as Experience: Introducing the Use of Vignettes for Research on Leadership Experiences in Schools

Abstract

Research on the link between educational leadership and student learning employs a variety of quantitative and qualitative research designs. Surprisingly, there are relatively few studies on methods for researching educational leadership practices. This article addresses this gap in research and discusses how the experiences of different participants can constitute potential starting points for learning processes. This leads to the question, how and to what extent the educational leadership practices manifest in students’ experiences and how “Leadership for Learning as Experience” can be empirically researched. The phenomenologically oriented vignette as research method for studying educational leadership practices will be introduced. Vignettes are narratives that are based on the experiences of participants. In vignettes, the co-experienced observations in the field are captured in form of vivid narratives. Vignettes thus open up a new, supplementary perspective, in which the traces that leadership practices have left on school participants are revealed.