There is so much happening right now. There is so much to do. We are all overwhelmed by the enormity and implications of world events, and by the sheer quantity of media and information available to us—so many videos to watch, so many articles and blogs, and so many books to read. In a world of surveillance capitalism and social media, our attention has become our most valuable resource and commodity, and what we attend to is both an expression of what we value and a factor that influences our future thoughts, beliefs, and behavior. The fact that you are holding this book in your hands is an expression of care, interest, and value—for me, for the ideas that this book presents, and/or for the importance of education—and that is incredibly meaningful. Everything matters, everything counts, every moment is precious, and I appreciate you taking time to read this book.
The research for this project was done in conjunction with the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, where I completed my doctoral work. My intention for shaping this research into a book is to offer an accessible exploration of the problems and insights of educational research, practice, and policy, along with an introduction to the frameworks of complexity theory and Integral Theory that is grounded in the real and meaningful stories of urban schools. In addition to that, an even deeper impetus for this text is to model a process of reflection, and to broaden the context in which we interpret education, beyond what is typically included in academic discourse. I do not want only to share my research and conclusions—I want to share my reflections on them. I do not want only to explain what happened in these schools—I want to point toward what we would have to understand and account for to begin to be able to explain what is happening in schools. Not just analysis, but meta-analysis; not just theory, but meta-theory; not just practice, but social praxis.
The purposes of the book are therefore manifold: to share concrete examples of the very real challenges facing educators and leaders in urban schools; to connect those challenges to the deeply flawed and short sighted policies associated with education reform; to show how we can use the interpretive frameworks of complexity theory and distributed leadership to make sense of some aspects of life in schools; to offer important reflections on the limits of educational research, and on the frames of complexity and educational leadership; and to point educators, researchers, and all readers toward the vast, interdependent, dynamic, emergent context of human life that envelops and constitutes our processes and interpretations of schooling, education, and research. I wrote this book not to demonstrate or embody the norms of educational research, but to point beyond them; not to argue for the use of complexity theory or Integral Theory as the answer to interpretive questions, but to point toward the ultimate necessity for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary sense making and meaning making. This book exists in service of the movement toward inhabiting and understanding process-oriented views of what is happening in schools and in society, and toward views that self-consciously and metacognitively account for the ongoing development and growth of everything: students, teachers, leaders, researchers, schools, cultures, and societies. We are experiencing the process of evolution, in medias res. Our education systems should embody and facilitate this process of development, and educational theory and research should help to orient us toward how to do that as best we can, as consciously as possible.
That is our context—now to the content. The structure of the book is such that the insights I hope to convey build cumulatively, from theory (Chapters 1 and 2), to practice (as revealed in two case studies, Chapters 3 and 4), to broader reflections and meta-analysis (Chapters 5 and 6). While I believe every word in this book is worth reading, if at any time a reader feels that they may not read the entire book, I implore them to focus on Chapters 1, 5, and 6. Chapter 2 offers a short and selective summary of leadership and complexity research, which can be skimmed for general ideas (especially if one is already familiar with notions of complexity). Chapters 3 and 4 offer meaningful summaries of life in two schools, which for some may be the most compelling aspect of the text. But if you are primarily interested in big ideas and insights, you can find my summative analysis of both cases at the end of Chapter 4. Chapters 5 and 6 present the main ideas that I want the reader to consider, and represent the raison d’être of this book.
Again, thank you. We are all on this journey of life and learning together, and I appreciate your interest in learning from this part of my journey, as I continue to learn from so many others.