Ranciere and Leadership for Reforms to School-to-Work Transition: The Presupposition of Equality of Theoretical Assets from Diverse Educational Cultures

Abstract

A key challenge in the twenty-first century is how to prepare educational researchers for much needed intellectual dialogues between the ‘East’ and ‘West’, as much as ‘North’ and ‘South’, problematic constructions though these are. The research reported in this chapter focuses on how the Western Anglophone system of higher degree research training can build on non-Western students’ diverse intellectual heritage and linguistic assets in their transition from education to work. Here, the internationalisation of Western Anglophone education is defined as extending and deepening the capabilities of students—local, international, immigrant and refugee—to create theoretical tools from non-Western languages and to use them in their research into education and training in the West. Given the dynamics and stakes in the transition from education to work, the research reported in this chapter is part of an exploration of the ways in which non-Western students’ bi- and multilingual capabilities might be used to enhance their career trajectories in the world’s multilingual knowledge societies. The particular project reported upon in this chapter focuses on research into students from diverse educational cultures engaging non-Western metaphors, images and concepts to theorise the leadership of Western reforms to school-to-work transition. This research is contributing to an understanding of how research education may take this key dimension of cultural diversity as a vehicle for producing ‘worldly theoretic-linguistic connectivities’ made possible by the presence of research students from diverse educational cultures in Western Anglophone universities. To do so, the first section of this chapter uses Weber’s (In: Gerth H, Mills C (trans & ed) From Max Weber: essays in sociology. Routledge, London, 1991) ideal types of bureaucratic and charismatic leadership to contrast Fullan’s (Leadership & sustainability. Crown Press, San Francisco, 2005) bureaucratic leadership with Lear’s (Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2006) charismatic indigenous leadership and concludes with an account of Ranciere’s (The ignorant schoolmaster. Stanford University Press, Palto Alto, 1991) charismatic educational leader.