Present company excepted or accepted? Recognizing each other's faces in educational leadership's scholarship and practice

Abstract

Purpose

The persisting tension over the relative importance of theory and practice creates a crevasse between scholars and practitioners. The purpose here is to problematize divisions between cultural norms found among scholars and practitioners.

Design/methodology/approach

Both authors, higher education scholars, experienced temporary assignments as public school leaders and reflect on their experiences moving back and forth between school leadership practice and academia. This qualitative and autobiographical work draws on a combination of hermeneutics in the dominant educational leadership literature and the co‐authors' experiences recorded in journals, saved memos and other school data records. These data sets and continuing access to their professional and scholarly colleagues provided the basis for analyses.

Findings

Draws on three main points: curricular balance; faculty composition; and research, and, while it strongly encourages faculty to seek ways to connect or reconnect with the field, opines that, if the field's curriculum for development and preparation with research is balanced, then faculty will connect with practice.

Originality/value

Research carried out in the program is of high quality, driven by practice, and useful to practitioners and/or policy makers.

Citation

Place, A.W. and Clark Lindle, J. (2006), "Present company excepted or accepted? Recognizing each other's faces in educational leadership's scholarship and practice", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 20 No. 3, pp. 195-205. https://doi.org/10.1108/09513540610654164