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This chapter presents non-affirmative theory of education as the foundation for a new research program in education, allowing us to bridge educational leadership, curriculum studies and Didaktik. We demonstrate the strengths of this framework by analyzing literature from educational leadership and curriculum theory/didaktik. In contrast to both socialization-oriented explanations locating curriculum and leadership within existing society, and transformation-oriented models viewing education as revolutionary or super-ordinate to society, non-affirmative theory explains the relation between education and politics, economy and culture, respectively, as non-hierarchical. Here critical deliberation and discursive practices mediate between politics, culture, economy and education, driven by individual agency in historically developed cultural and societal institutions. While transformative and socialization models typically result in instrumental notions of leadership and teaching, non-affirmative education theory, previously developed within German and Nordic education, instead views leadership and teaching as relational and hermeneutic, drawing on ontological core concepts of modern education: recognition; summoning to self-activity and Bildsamkeit. Understanding educational leadership, school development and teaching then requires a comparative multi-level approach informed by discursive institutionalism and organization theory, in addition to theorizing leadership and teaching as cultural-historical and critical-hermeneutic activity. Globalisation and contemporary challenges to deliberative democracy also call for rethinking modern nation-state based theorizing of education in a cosmopolitan light. Non-affirmative education theory allows us to understand and promote recognition based democratic citizenship (political, economical and cultural) that respects cultural, ethical and epistemological variations in a globopolitan era. We hope an American-European-Asian comparative dialogue is enhanced by theorizing education with a non-affirmative approach.

The neo-liberal move to depoliticise and deregulate governance of public sectors by transferring them to the technocratic and administrative marketplace management endangers the political and democratic processes at all levels. It influences education and educational leadership at their very core: the purpose of education is shifting from intending to raise autonomous and critical participants in democracies, to aiming to produce an affirmative and employable workforce. This chapter analyses current developments in politics, administration and governance at state, municipal and institutional levels from a democratic perspective, and discusses concepts and practices of education and educational leadership with these same views. Two paradigms are described, in order to find the core of both kinds of theories: an outcomes-oriented, and a participation-oriented perspective. From a normative, democratic, viewpoint, it is argued that the core of each should be non-coercive relationships, developing deliberative practices in contemporary contexts is the main perspective in the chapter.

While ‘head teacher’ is still a prominent designation in many countries, there has been a tendency over the past two decades to refer to those ‘in charge’ of schools with a number of other words, most recently, that of lead learner. While one could say that these are ‘only words’ they nonetheless have a significant impact on how the position, role and responsibility of the head teacher is being understood. This chapter analyzes these conceptual shifts and the impact they have on perceptions, identities and relationship. For instance, the idea of lead learner fits within the ongoing ‘learnification’ (Biesta GJJ, Good education in an age of measurement: ethics, politics, democracy. Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, 2010a; Biesta GJJ, Stud Philos Educ 29(5), 491–503, Biesta 2010b) of educational thought and practice, that educational endeavours are increasingly being understood through a language of learning, learners – and now also lead learners. While the notion of the lead learner suggests democratic and empowering relationships, I will argue – mainly informed by a ‘Continental’ understanding of education (i.e. German ‘kritische Pädagogik’ and Philippe Meirieu’s French educational thought) – for the need to reclaim the idea of the head teacher, in order to highlight that the responsibility of the head teacher is fundamentally an educational one, one that can only be accessed and conceptualized in terms of an updated understanding of curriculum/teaching.

Echoing Ettore Scola metaphor “Bruti, Sporchi & Cativi”, this chapter challenges how hegemonic and specific (or so called) counter hegemonic curriculum platforms – so connected with Western Eurocentric Modernity – have been able to colonize the field without any prudency to “fabricate” and impose a classed, raced and gendered philosophy of praxis, as unique, that drives the field to an ideological surrealism and collective suicide. Such collective suicide framed by a theoretical timesharing unleashed by both dominant and specific counter dominant platforms that tenaciously controlled the circuits of cultural production grooms the field as a ghetto, flooded with rudeness, and miserable ambitions, a theoretical caliphate that wipes out any episteme beyond the Western Eurocentric Modern terrain, insolently droving to sewage of society the needs and desires of students, teachers and the community.

Drawing from key decolonial thinkers, this chapter examines the way Western eugenic curriculum of modernity created an abyssal thinking in which ‘this side’ of the line is legitimate and ‘the other side’ has been produced as ‘non-existent’ (Sousa Santos B, Another knowledge is possible. Verso, London, 2007). The paper suggests the need to move a post-abyssal curriculum that challenges dominant and counter dominant traditions within ‘this side’ of the line, and respects ‘the other’ side of the line. The paper challenges curriculum studies to assume a non-abyssal position one that respects epistemological diversity. This requires an Itinerant Curriculum Theory (Paraskeva JM, Conflicts in curriculum theory: Challenging hegemonic epistemologies. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2011), which is a commitment and a ruthless epistemological critique of every existing epistemology.

In the late 1990s, scholars from the Anglo-American curriculum community began a conversation with scholars in the German didaktik tradition (see Westbury I, Hopmann S, Riquarts K, Teaching as a reflective practice: the German Didaktik Tradition. Erlbaum, Mahwah, 2000). One major difference between these traditions is the perspective on content. In the US tradition, content is often seen as (a) a given that does not need to be analyzed and (b) inert, i.e., unchanging as it passes from curricular documents through classrooms to pupils (and even to standardized tests). Within this frame, school leadership need not be centrally concerned with the content of curriculum. In didaktik, content is fundamental and regulation is ideally normative and intellectual, i.e., it provides tools for teachers to come to pedagogical terms with the contents they teach. What didaktik thinking potentially brought to life for US curriculum thought was a more fruitful understanding of content processes as (a) formation for community and society and (b) transformation to rich pedagogical potential. This chapter elaborates more fully the lines of similarity and difference between the didaktik and curriculum traditions and explores the reasons why didaktik has had only a modest impact on turning the Anglo-American curriculum tradition toward a more fully developed sense of content and content enactment.

School leadership nowadays is confronted with ever-changing and fast-growing expectations of what schools should be able to achieve. However, school leadership is an embedded activity, i.e. much depends on the underlying structure and culture of schooling. For instance, different traditions of defining schooling play a significant role in defining the role of school leaders. Therefore, it could be worthwhile to compare different traditions and current practices of defining school leadership with the traditions of conceptualizing the schooling within which they have evolved. Taking the well-known differences between the Didaktik and the Curriculum traditions as a starting point: Should one assume that these deeply rooted traditions have an impact on the leadership “pathways” which are determined by new expectations of the outcome of schooling? This becomes a fascinating empirical question the moment both traditions meet, e.g. by implementing in a Didaktik setting control patterns that historically have been developed within the curriculum tradition. For example, how do school leaders respond to the challenge of being measured by parameters that traditionally were none of their business? This chapter addresses conceptual issues of this question and empirical findings, based on a research project in Lower Austria.

In this chapter, I attempt to theorize and historize the current global education reform movement which the Finnish education policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg (Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland. Teachers College Press, New York, 2011) has coined the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement), the “virus that is killing education.” The key drivers of that global education movement adopted in Western countries with very few exceptions render the triad of accountability, standardization and privatization as a marker of the corporatization of educational provision. More specifically, I will analyze the intellectual history of neoliberal ideology, its complicit academic contributions in instrumental curriculum theory and educational psychology with its historical succession of theories from behaviourist psychology to cognitive and learning theories. In this sense, William Doll’s (1993) recognition of the Tyler Rationale’s (Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1949) intellectual affinity to Descartes’s Method as a core of modernization is not incidental. Descartes’ s curriculum theory overtly co-equalizes between knowledge and ethics, but actually subordinates ethics to instrumental science and knowledge. Descartes’ s initiatives led to the modernist stratagem where ethics seeks its refuge in the self-referentiality of logocentric Reason and, by implication, seeks to legitimate the moral supremacy of instrumental mode of rationality in human activities: the good in terms of instrumentality is the moral interior of the logocentric reason; hence there is no proper reason to question the validity and legitimacy of instrumental rationality. Simultaneously and significantly, the logocentric subject provides the hidden place and source of colonialism and exploitation. Finally, this chapter considers non-Western perspectives on curriculum in China.

History demonstrates that the relationship between curriculum studies and educational leadership is mediated by the conceptualization of curriculum adopted within specific community contexts. To this end, we identify four conceptualizations of curriculum that have been effected in the USA and explore the varied relationship between our two fields that each context portends. Our analysis demonstrates that only when both fields of study have come together for the benefit of society, the common good, will the emergent leadership and curriculum result in progressive attempts at multiculturalism, democracy and social justice. Towards that end, we offer a developmental dialogical framework transitioning from relations grounded in stratification, homogenization, transformation, and the stage we call leadership for social justice. This progressive dialogue is ever more problematic, as it has to navigate multiple obstacles of temporal policies and politics as well as ideological divides. Thus, the complicated conversations are among those who seek to maintain old values and norms (e.g., stratification and homogenization) with those who take a counterview (transformation), or critical perspective (social justice).

This chapter looks at the role of school leadership vis a vis the curriculum. First, it offers a brief overview of school leadership in Germany, acknowledging the multitude of systems within the system as each German federal state has autonomy over educational matters. Next, curriculum development and research in Germany is briefly recapped, including historical aspects, and the curriculum work of school leaders on the school level is discussed. Then the discussion is linked to the international discourse on instructional leadership. Next, we conclude with the concept of organizational education (“Organisationspädagogik”) as a perspective for viewing school leadership in conjunction with the curriculum. Finally, based on the material presented before, we take a reflective look ahead and ponder possibilities and desiderata of school leadership in the context of curriculum. The chapter shows that school leaders in Germany regard themselves as education professionals deriving from the teaching profession. Instruction and pedagogical tasks and developing a collaborative school improvement culture is what they prefer. Administrative tasks and certain controlling aspects of management are perceived as strain. It is argued that the concept of “educational leadership” is strongly – even if even implicitly – aligned with the knowledge base of instructional leadership as well as of the curriculum discussion in Germany.

The heightened level of attention being afforded to “teacher leadership” is palpable in the United States. At a national level, proprietary organizations are receiving funds from large philanthropic organizations (e.g., the Gates and the Wallace Foundations) to promote the development of teacher leaders. State departments of education are accommodating the federal push finding various ways to incentivize the efforts of teachers to lead from the classroom. Our institutions of higher education are also adjusting and accommodating by taking up the charge of preparing teacher leaders, theorizing, and researching the potential of teacher leadership through academic study. As professors of education in the United States, we are mindful of the contextualizing neoliberalism infused throughout our policy environment and are deeply concerned about the habits of competition, rigidness, bureaucratization, and overspecialization. Not surprisingly, such ways of thinking, acting, and being infiltrate our educational institutions and can have a dehumanizing effect on local teachers, their pedagogies, and their students (Noddings ; Nussbaum ). Such habits of mind and body can additionally reinforce a sense of isolation between teachers and their profession (Eisner ), perhaps even a loss of vocational calling (Hansen ; Palmer ). Along with this can come a sense of alienation from colleagues and administrators (Macdonald and Shirley ) as well as a loss of individual and collective voice and autonomy (Apple ; Ayers ; Miller ). This chapter reports on an action research project designed focused on teacher leadership and reconceptualist curriculum theorizing as an alternative to the Tyler Rationale.