Building Global Leadership

It was a huge honour to be invited to lead a session on equality as part of the Global Leadership Development week at Nottingham University’s School of Education. I met scholars from across the globe, and thoroughly enjoyed a morning that ended with a visioning session (see pic below).

I kicked off the conversation by introducing the idea of long-term change in culture.  20 years ago things were very different in our profession, and gatherings like ours are still rare: professional women led by a disabled academic. They had shared their feelings about the lack of women in leadership the previous day, so it made sense to start with the scale of change needed to address inequality in education – and beyond. 

We then went on to think about other group marginalised by the education systems in our respective countries. While the list grew, we started to explore the elitism within the system. On the issue of political correctness I reminded them of the importance of participation. We needed to “change the conversation – not just the words. We then started to unpack the lack of change in many areas, despite the growing voice of the civil right movement across the world.

With regard to education more specifically I drew their attention to the specific - if often unmentioned – systemic discrimination caused by elitism. Secured and perpetuated by forms, classes, grades and streams. For those who still believe in intelligence a fixed and linear - the world is still very flat indeed.  I outlined the levels at which power and privilege may be understood within locality, community and society. 

We talked about how this had an impact on learners. Marginalising many, some accused of labels or loaded with assumptions. How these unwittingly influence decisions made about institutional organisation. From the feedback we acknowledged the impact on learners (the internalised oppression) and the action or behaviour we had created ourselves. It is these myths we all agreed that needed challenging! Indeed, viewed thus leadership action is the demonstration of professionalism - the knowledge we hold as a community of ethical practitioners.

Jackie Dearden then facilitated a fabulous graphic! We reviewed the mornings learning, and outlined our vision grounding action to come with a shared sense of purpose.