| Summary: | This research aims to disrupt and expand "given" understandings of educational
leadership by exploring particular leadership instances of the everyday practice of adult
education. Seven adult educators, including the author, offer narrative accounts of
planning, designing, teaching, managing, and creating programs for adult learners with a
particular interest in the little examined dimension of practice - educational leadership.
The author works with the conceptual resources of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical
hermeneutics, primarily through the theoretical, evocative, and scholarly work of David
Jardine.
Phenomenology and the corner of this philosophical field referred to as
interpretive inquiry, seeks not to explain why or even how we may practice leadership
within our educational practices, but rather to understand the phenomenon and its living
manifestations through the particular. Narrative texts are interpreted hermeneutically
through a constructed conversation that highlights both the common and uncommon
understandings of what it means to be an educational leader. Through writing and reading
each of these stories, a living and breathing notion of educational leadership is created. In
dialogue with others, the author becomes more literate about the meaning of her own
experience. Such a dialogue invites the possibility of recognizing the significance of
teaching as leading, and educational leadership as leading conversations about what
matters in adult education, and in doing so one gains a greater sense of one's own
leadership capacity. Implications for the development of educational leaders are
considered. === Education, Faculty of === Educational Studies (EDST), Department of === Graduate
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