Leading as a Socially Just Practice

Abstract

In Chap. 5, I examined how trends towards school improvement, redolent of the performance pressure placed on schooling systems from increasingly anxious governments, played out in a case study of practices of major district reform undertaken by a regional Catholic education district and its 'flagship' secondary school. This chapter takes a different, albeit related turn. Employing a practice architectures lens, it analyses the implications for socially just practices of educating and leading as a regional government school grappled to integrate students of refugee background into its monocultural student demographic. The chapter foregrounds a major moral issue for educating in our super-diverse times. It examines how educational practices were orchestrated in site-specific ways that did not 'other' refugee background students as deficit or construct them as the eternally grateful recipients of a host nation's largesse.