Abstract
Support of 'authorship' is an important dimension of education. A viable democratic society needs citizens who can contribute to improvements and innovations. One of the tasks of education is, therefore, to support in students the ability to act as 'author' of interesting variations of and additions to cultural heritage. 'Pedagogical
... read more
leadership' in this study means taking one-sided responsibility, whereby educators support young people’s authorship without expecting a similar support in return. Teachers and school leaders are in schools first and foremost the ones who can perform pedagogical leadership. The objective of this study is, therefore, to contribute to improvements of school leader training as well as teacher training, while those improvements are focused on the development of pedagogical leadership. Within the range of opportunities that school life can offer for supporting authorship development, this study confines itself to the support that education in mathematics and physical science has to offer. The central research question reads (in short): how can one envision that training of school leaders, or mathematics and science teachers, has such an impact that they will improve in pedagogical leadership? An important reason to focus on 'envision' in this research question, is the wish to make testing by research possible. This intention raises challenging problems, due to the nature of the relationship between 'support' and 'authorship'. In this relationship another mode of 'entailment' is in operation than the better-known causality. The particular nature of this entailment raises questions, which must be answered to determine if, and how, testing is at all feasible for this relationship. These questions are named as 'entailment problem' and read as follows: - Can the connection between 'support' and 'authorship' be regarded as a mode of entailment that is open to testing; - can this mode of entailment be positioned among other modes of testable entailment; - does this mode of entailment set specific requirements to testing procedures? The exploratory and design-oriented research which follows from the central question and the additional questions, is composed of different parts: - Philosophical investigation into the concept of 'authorship' suggests that authorship originates from 'dialogical interplay' between receiving and giving of meaning; this 'dialogical interplay' is then shortly named as 'inspiration'; - examination of the exact sciences reveals several aspects which are inspiring (in the above sense) to practitioners, and to which students can also be introduced; - examination of exact sciences also reveals aspects, which may bring about negative experiences, which nevertheless can be transformed into inspiration; dealing with such aspects turns out to be relevant for education as well; - a more comprehensive philosophical investigation results in distinguishing three 'dimensions' of learning meaningful authorship: + learning from inspiring play and enjoyment, + learning from inspiring responsibility, + learning from inspiring gratitude; finally, an exemplary design of 'authorship research' is developed as a solution to the 'entailment problem' and also as a suggestion for improving training of school leaders and teachers.
show less