Decentring Leadership: Rethinking Leading in Education Contexts

This book is about the practices of leading and their arrangements in a range of contemporary
educational contexts. It seeks to shift the traditional, individual, and role- based
educational leadership narrative, to more transformational, shared, and ongoing practices
between people, thereby decentring leadership.
In this volume, contributors consider leading from a practice perspective across a
range of educational contexts. Focusing on leading, rather than leadership, they examine
how educational leaders lead through decentring from a range of positions and across
a range of educational sectors from schools to higher education. Chapters attend to
the practices of leading to ‘decentre’ normative, traditional notions of leadership that
focus on the individual leader as the unit of study. They draw on the theory of practice
architectures to understand leading as a shared and ongoing process rather than as an
individual act. This growing body of work that uses the theory of practice architectures
(TPA) is disrupting people’s thinking towards leading as a practice. Focusing on practices
and their arrangements shifts the traditional, role- based educational leadership narrative
to the more transformational elements of practice architectures in thinking about leading
in contemporary contexts.