Qualitative Studies

Educational Leadership in Higher Education

Sanna Lassen — 2024-09-20

Educational leadership in collegial decision-making? How course leaders and teachers participate and influence decisions in planning meetings

Ulrika Bennerstedt — 2024-09-20

Although decision-making is central to development and change in higher education, few studies unpack how leadership is enacted and negotiated in situ in collegial planning tasks where decisions are at stake. This article addresses this gap in educational leadership by examining influencing work in decision-making processes at a Swedish university. It explores educational leadership in course-planning meetings with course leaders and teachers. The empirical material consists of video recordings of meetings from two teams with challenging conditions: not only was the data recorded during the pandemic, but the teams also had a high teacher turnover. Drawing on the tradition of leadership-in-interaction, this article explores educational leadership in meeting interaction by illustrating and contrasting how course supervisors and teachers participate in and influence decision-making on pedagogic and didactic designs.
Analyses of empirical episodes show how team members struggle to find common ground in the past and formulate decision proposals for educational change in backward- and forward-looking cycles. A key finding is how the trajectory of decision-making processes differs between the studied teams. The article discusses high teacher mobility as an organizational constraint that limits the collective competence of course teams, providing problematic conditions for smooth decision-making and, thus, educational change and leadership. This constraint places a heavy burden on course leaders to navigate ambiguities of knowledge, power, and emotion in interaction that highlight underlying assumptions about the course leader’s role as a collegial leader without managerial decision-making power.

Ethical Pressure and Moral Distress in Middle Leadership: Perspectives from Higher Education in Welfare Professions

Bjørn Ribers — 2024-09-20

This article illuminates the complex work practices of middle leaders in the higher education sector of welfare professionals. It is based on an empirical qualitative interview study exploring ethics and values dilemmas in the work-life of middle leaders and is methodologically anchored in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), which combines hermeneutics and phenomenology with an idiographic approach to qualitative interview research. The empirical foundation consists of five research interviews with middle leaders at university colleges in Denmark, investigating their experience of ethics and values in leadership while being influenced by the complex role of their managerial position, including a particular cross-pressure that originates from hierarchical organisational structures. Building on the informants’ narratives, this article offers an extensive analysis of the complexities of middle leadership in the higher education of welfare professionals. Three central topics evolved through a cross-case analysis of the interviews: 1) values and ethical dilemmas in educational middle leadership, 2) cross-pressure and moral distress in middle leadership and 3) trust, corruption and the significance of listening in middle leadership. This article focuses on the first-person perspective of middle leaders, and the analysis reveals how middle leaders reflect on ethical dilemmas in the practice of educational leadership. Based on these empirical findings, how middle leaders experience ethical pressure and moral distress because of tension between professional values and political and organisational governance is discussed.

Using Solicited Audio Diaries to Capture the HE Educational Leader's Ad-Hoc Tasks

Sanna Lassen — 2024-09-20

This article explores the qualitative method of audio diaries and assesses their effectiveness in capturing ad-hoc tasks in Higher Education (HE), drawing on a single-case study. There is a shortage of studies linking audio diaries to ad-hoc tasks within the research field. This article contributes new methodological insights by exploring and expanding on previous uses of audio diaries. The focus is on the ad-hoc tasks performed by educational leaders outside the managerial line. This role is often overlooked, as it does not fit within traditional management structures or ordinary collegiality. To highlight the uniqueness of the organisational role, it becomes essential to understand its function, which essentially involves ad-hoc tasks. Methodologically, it is challenging to capture ad-hoc tasks. Participants can have difficulties remembering the momentary work in a later interview, and the researcher cannot be present and observe every moment. In conclusion, exploring the audio diary shows that the method can effectively capture the ad-hoc tasks of educational leaders and, from a single case, provide in-depth information on the educational leader's navigation between professionalism and collegiality. However, it is essential for future research to provide clarity on definitions and instructions.

Cornered by Corona while writing a master’s thesis - Juggling multiple and opposing roles in a confined time and space

Helle Merete Nordentoft — 2024-09-20

Writing a master’s thesis is often loaded with expectations and sometimes also a certain amount of anxiety. In this regard, previous research has mostly focused on the importance of the supervisor–supervisee relationship and not how students’ everyday lives and working conditions affect their writing process. Based on a single case study, we reveal tacit understandings and typifications of how everyday life affects master’s thesis writing, Looking at the pandemic as a breach, the analysis shows how COVID19 can function as a magnifying glass and expose how a female student managed to study when confined to home during lockdown. The analysis shows how she struggled to fulfil her ideals of being a good mother, a good student, and a good citizen and how the compression and collision of these typifications within limited time and space placed her in a double-bind situation, which led to emotional exhaustion and was counterproductive for her writing process. In conclusion, we argue that these findings call for a more holistic end ethical approach to master’s thesis supervision taking into consideration the moral and emotional pressures that master’s students encounter in their everyday lives.