Rethinking authority in educational leadership

Abstract

Our first experiences with authority, Luxon reminds, are profoundly personal. As children, we experience authority in relationships of varying degrees and orders of intimacy, i.e. parents and other caretakers, teachers, physicians, religious leaders, among others. Invoking elements of Freud and Foucault, I attempt to rethink authority in educational leadership. Freud offers a system supporting the negotiated reconstruction of one’s interpretive architecture that is at once personal and professional. His version of psychoanalysis privileged the relationship, not the roles, of analyst and patient, ritualizing subjective and social reconstruction through ongoing and often complicated conversation that questioned the very terms that communicated lived experience. Like psychoanalysis, teaching is a collaborative if structured dialogical encounter across asymmetries of authority. Like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Foucault’s truth-teller (parrhesiastes) links individual projects of self-formation with collective practices (Luxon). Like psychoanalytic free association, parrhesia is candid conversation that does not coincide with structures of power. Whereas Freud developed interpretative acumen so as to support – even synthesize – the psyches of individuals in the distress of disintegration, Foucault cultivates its potential to intervene in an over-stabilized and socially submerged self. The link between Freud and Foucault lies in their insight that self-formation can result from encounters with authority, under certain specific mutually constituted conditions, even as these encounters simultaneously renegotiate and rewrite the terms of authority that initiate them. Can such conceptions of subjective and social reconstruction contribute to our understanding of how educators can be subordinated subjects and yet nonetheless become authorial agents of educational leadership?