Routledge Leading Beautifully: Educational Leadership as Connoisseurship

Leading Beautifully provides a new dimension to understanding effective leadership. Drawing from lessons in the arts and the humanities, English and Ehrich explore how educational decision-making in schools can be informed by identity, personal competence, and an understanding of the field’s intellectual foundations. Based on in-depth interviews of artists and educational leaders, this book provides insight into the inner world of successful leaders who have developed competencies and understandings that extend beyond the standard leadership tool box. This exciting new book explores the theory and practice of leadership connoisseurship as a human-centered endeavor and as an antidote to mechanistic, business-oriented practices. The authors’ well-grounded reconsideration of educational leadership will enliven and enhance any educational leader’s practice. Review If Zarathûshtrá teaches the power of inquiry and discovery, then English and Ehrich, two highly respected connoisseurs of leadership themselves, have masterfully met this challenge. Leading Beautifully is more than a study about leadership; it’s a quixotic journey in search of leadership possibilities through connoisseurship. It will restore your faith that managerialism is not the last stage in leadership development, but rather a wrong turn on the quest for seeking new understandings of the ineffable qualities of leadership. If art provides the world with beauty, then education allows us to use art to live life beautifully. What more could we ask from our leaders?" --Ira Bogotch, Professor of Educational Leadership, Florida Atlantic University "English and Ehrich set out to cast a new set of eyes on educational leadership, and they achieve this beautifully. The book is for anyone who has sensed that uneasy feeling of ‘surely there must be more’ while traversing our current knowledge base." --Allan Walker, Joseph Lau Chair Professor of International Educational Leadership, Dean of Education and Human Development, Hong Kong Institute of Education About the Author Fenwick W. English is the R. Wendell Eaves Senior Distinguished Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Lisa Catherine Ehrich is Associate Professor of Education at Queensland University of Technology, Australia.