Revisioning Educational Leadership Through Love and the Ancillary: A Critical Self-Study

Engaging in a bricolage of critical self-study allowed one school administrator to better understand his roles, responsibilities, and formation of identity within the context of a school system while envisioning the divergent possibilities of a yet-to-be-known future through the lens of love. The primary intention of this paper is to discuss alternative possibilities for educational leadership considered through an ancillary vision of walking alongside enacted through pedagogies of love. Pedagogies of love can be understood as more than the embodiment of romantic notions of the word. Pedagogies of love enact relationality: blending care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. Ever-evolving and situational, these pedagogies are understood as tentative. During the critical self-study process, personal affective experiences were reflexively interrogated to draw out and unpack themes regarding one lived teaching life. Personal positionings, over time, emerged as a crucial part of studying one’s self as a means to explicate previously misunderstood privileges. The criticality of this self-study can be found in the ways that the relationships between power, authority, knowledge production, and contextual social relations are illuminated and mediated.