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The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between curriculum and leadership research with examples of three recently completed mixed methods studies of assessment cultures and leadership as interlinked activities of governance and school management. We employ curriculum theoretical concepts like e.g. codes and arenas to illustrate their usefulness as a point of departure to further theorize a changing educational landscape. In our study, we illustrate how curriculum and leadership research are historically linked. We put forward some concepts to address the increased complexity of the governance system, and we stress the need to strengthen how different ways of forming the steering system interplay with key curriculum questions. Leadership researchers have, to a large extent, studied school development on a municipality- and organizational level asking questions on how to manage and guide school development. In contrast, curriculum researchers have studied school development from a reform- and governmental perspective more asking questions on how to steer educational development through law, curricula and evaluation. We suggest that these research traditions ought to be further united in order to develop both traditions in less normative, and more, critical ways, and to answer crucial educational questions in glocal times (Marginson and Rhoades. Conceptualising global relations at the glonacal levels. Paper presented at the annual international forum of the Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Richmond, VA, November 15–18, 2001). This chapter concludes with an argument for a new comparative curriculum code due to major shifts including curriculum practices, message systems, levels, arenas and number of curriculum-makers engaged.

Our first experiences with authority, Luxon reminds, are profoundly personal. As children, we experience authority in relationships of varying degrees and orders of intimacy, i.e. parents and other caretakers, teachers, physicians, religious leaders, among others. Invoking elements of Freud and Foucault, I attempt to rethink authority in educational leadership. Freud offers a system supporting the negotiated reconstruction of one’s interpretive architecture that is at once personal and professional. His version of psychoanalysis privileged the relationship, not the roles, of analyst and patient, ritualizing subjective and social reconstruction through ongoing and often complicated conversation that questioned the very terms that communicated lived experience. Like psychoanalysis, teaching is a collaborative if structured dialogical encounter across asymmetries of authority. Like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Foucault’s truth-teller () links individual projects of self-formation with collective practices (Luxon). Like psychoanalytic free association, is candid conversation that does not coincide with structures of power. Whereas Freud developed interpretative acumen so as to support – even synthesize – the psyches of individuals in the distress of disintegration, Foucault cultivates its potential to intervene in an over-stabilized and socially submerged self. The link between Freud and Foucault lies in their insight that self-formation can result from encounters with authority, under certain specific mutually constituted conditions, even as these encounters simultaneously renegotiate and rewrite the terms of authority that initiate them. Can such conceptions of subjective and social reconstruction contribute to our understanding of how educators can be subordinated subjects and yet nonetheless become authorial agents of educational leadership?

This chapter reconstructs the making and implementation of the new national curriculum in Finland (2012–2016). This research draws on non-affirmative theory of education and discursive institutionalism. The curriculum making process is perceived as a non-hierarchical educational leadership process where the National Board of Education (NBE) mediates and positions itself concerning (a) aims, (b) contents and (b) methods between transnational policies, national political decision making and policy work, various pressure and expert groups as well as school practice. The data consisted of interviews with three key actors within the Steering Committee of Curriculum Development (SCCD) and document analysis. The results demonstrate a shift towards stronger political steering, which in fact is a deviation from previous, trustbased policy regarding national education administration. In terms of discursive institutionalism the policy culture in Finland framing the curriculum leadership is still and dialogical, i.e. typical of a political consensus culture with broad governments, providing more autonomy for the educational administration. Second, curricular in the New Curriculum from 2016 reflect a movement towards a based curriculum, i.e. a more performative educational ideal is supported. The key competencies promoted are now similar to those promoted by the OECD since 2006. Third, a collaborative and development oriented professional culture around teaching is strengthened. Learning of the should now promote the development of more general key competencies. There are no indications of that the school system in Finland would be leaving a strong subject centered curriculum and evaluation.

Educational leadership research has in general focused on organizational conditions and expectations for managing and leading activities (Leithwood et al. 1994, pp. 38–61; Spillane and Healey 2010; Møller 2006, pp. 53–69) in parallel curriculum theories have offered insights into substantial societal problems that must be addressed in school and society (Hopmann 1999, pp. 89–105; Westbury 2000, pp. 15–54). This chapter presents a study in which we link curriculum theory both to discursive institutionalism and educational leadership policy and research findings. By including discursive institutionalism (Schmidt 2012) within a framework of curriculum theory, it is possible to distinguish between different forms of discourses and their functions in forming and conveying ideas. Thus, we explore educational leadership policy using a reflexive approach to reforms as intertwined with public discourses and research. A transnational perspective on leadership confirms the applicability of reforms across geographical territories, relating to wider societal and cultural contexts. Following an institutional-discursive approach, we argue that the ways in which social and educational questions become intertwined in actual reforms are dependent on cognitive and normative ideas in the public sphere. Thus, reforms to education leadership are related to coordinative and communicative discourses beyond the individual reform, while solutions to curriculum and leadership problems are anchored in educational policies and practices. Against this background, we argue that a deeper understanding of the meaning of educational leadership discourse and the conditions under which such a discourse is conducted is crucial.

This chapter provides concluding reflections and next steps in a research program bridging curriculum theory/Didaktik and educational leadership studies. The bridging utilizes non-affirmative education theory as the theoretical ground. To begin, we present a retrospective discussion of the project. We then relate the approach to the contributions included in this volume, especially focusing on the normativity of education theories, and pointing at how non-affirmative education theory corresponds to deliberation oriented democratic-hermeneutic initiatives. Non-affirmative education theory identifies both leadership, teaching and curriculum work as critical deliberation based professional activities driven by subjects, individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions framed by policies. Non-affirmative educational leadership practices are expected to take a critical stand regarding given policies, and other expectations, yet mindful of that education in democratic societies, typically following a Bildung tradition aim at individuals making up of their own minds and learning that practices, also moral and political ones, may and can be changed. The approach applied in this volume, i.e. to point at the roots of modern European education theory not only helps us to better see connections between this Bildung tradition, Deweyan pragmatism and deliberative democracy but is also used as a point of departure to continue towards comparative research on how educational leadership work is carried out in the intersection between curriculum as a policy document and leadership practices at different levels as discursive practices.