Educational leadership in northern Canada: Where cultures collide

This report describes the completed second stage of an investigation and analysis of the state of educational leadership, policy, and organization in northern Canadian schools. It presents and discusses the different perspectives held by constituents with respect to the goals and purposes of schooling, and the curriculum and language of instruction found in the schools. Two schools in northern Alberta, Moose River and Church Point, were selected for study; administrators, teachers, students, and community members were interviewed. Interview results show a lack of congruence between expectations of the local community and educators at the schools that are culturally based. One example involves school governance issues where the locus of power is determined by government regulations outside the community; this power structure does not address local community issues and needs, such as supporting local Aboriginal languages. There is a tendency to support the status quo and to provide what the educational system in the southern part of Canada describes as a suitable educational experience. Unfortunately, this orientation is Anglo-centric. Principals must attend not only to the voices of the professional and educational elite but also to the voices of those who are generally marginalized, dispossessed, and ignored by this system. (Contains 64 references.) (RT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. AERA 2002: Goddard & Foster 1 Educational leadership in northern Canada: Where cultures collide J. Tim Goddard University of Calgary goddardOucalgary.ca Rosemary Y. Foster University of Manitoba fosterry@ms.umanitoba. ca Paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Division G) New Orleans, Louisiana April 2002 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it. Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY This research project was made possible due to funding from SSHRC j 6 [The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada] 1 1 EST COPY AVALABLE TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) AERA 2002: Goddard & Foster Educational leadership in northern Canada: Where cultures collide In this paper we report on the completed second stage of an investigation and analysis of the current state of educational leadership, policy, and organization in northern Canadian schools. The larger, ongoing study is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and explores student, educator, parent, and community member perceptions and expectations of educational leadership in northern schools in three western Canadian provinces. Specifically, the objectives of this paper are to report the extent to which stakeholders in two northern Albertan schools perceive the select schools adapt to their specific cultural contexts. Here we present and discuss the different perspectives held by constituents with respect to (1) the goals and purposes of schooling and, (2) the curriculum and language of instruction found in the schools. The study reported here was conducted in two ethnoculturally diverse communities in Alberta, Canada. The communities are located in what is considered to be Northern Canada, defined as the area coterminous with the boreal forest region south of the arctic (Bone, 1992). The governance and delivery of K-12 education in communities such as those described here involves issues of school organization, leadership, teaching, and culture that are substantively different from those encountered in the rest of Canada. Context Within the education research literature, a recognition is developing of the role played by culture in the formulation and exercise of educational leadership (e.g., Hallinger & Leithwood, 1996; Heck, 1996, 1997). We accept the observation of Boyle-Baise (1999) that many anthropologists often view with some trepidation, indeed alarm, the definitions of culture presented by educationalists. It is therefore important that we define our meaning of the concept. Following Agar (1996), culture is "the knowledge you construct to show how acts in the context of one world can be understood as coherent from the point of view of another world" (p. 33). As such, we move beyond viewing culture simply as "the normative glue that holds a particular school together" (Sergiovanni, 2000, p. 1). Such particularity appears, to us,