Responsible leadership for learning in an international Master's degree program

Abstract

This presentation is based on a qualitative research conducted on an international two-year Master's degree program of Educational Leadership launched in Finland in 2007 as the first Master's degree level program of educational leadership, management or administration in the country. This novelty led to the decision of conducting a research into the program. The program was launched in the separate Institute of Educational Leadership of the Faculty of Education of the University of Jyväskylä as a ministry funded experiment, and was accepted as part of the Faculty's regular teaching program in 2009. The research problem was to find out what kind of learning would take place in a program with international students run in the rather monocultural context of Finland. The research method was mainly ethnography, consisting of the researcher's observation, participation and interaction with the students and staffs of the program as well as the university administration, as the researcher's job description varied in the roles of researcher, academic advisor, lecturer and program director. The ethnographic approach was amended by initial surveys and semi-structured interviews conducted with the first two cohorts. The first stage of the research covered the years 2007- 2009, and the second stage the years 2010-2014, when the research approach was purely ethnographic. The results of this presentation come from the first two years of the research and are a sample of findings from the ethnographic data. The theoretical approach is from the areas of ethical and collaborative learning and leadership as well as learning communities’ theory, derived from the foundations of the program curriculum. The way to run the program in our vision of the curriculum was responsible leadership with an ethic of care and caring, meaning that we believed in the focus having to be responsiveness to a student's needs in both study and life far away from home. We set the objective to be learning to learn in interaction between teachers and students, students with their peers, teachers with their peers. We wrote the concept of the human being, knowledge and learning that we believed inand wanted to exercise it with a humanistic-socio-constructivist approach. These are the premises we had developed in our democratic society with human rights, rule of law, equity and equality (also in education), and they were the foundation of our pedagogy in conveying the curriculum content. Little did we know or understand that 80% of our students would come from autocratic or dictatorial societies, in 2007-2009 from 10 countries, by 2014 from over 30 countries across the globe, where our attributes had not been experienced by our students. On top of this difference came the inter-culturally diverse behaviors.The students came with an extremely high motivation level to complete the programme and belief in their study skills. The challenges that had to be solved comprised the students' expectation of top down managerial approach to leadership, their pedagogic experience of learning behavioristically through order - response and rote learning, or simply copying and repeating as well as writing book exams, intercultural behavior codes found unacceptable and leading to interpersonal conflicts, general study skills, academic writing and presentation skills, learning about oneself in relation to diverse peer students and the ensuing emotional turmoil, and how to cope in home context with one's belief in the new learning concepts and contents. Similarly, each point was a learning challenge to the teachers. What held this moving train on track was the responsible leadership approach where every student's needs are attended to in a timely manner in a mutually accepted mode of interaction. Such interaction succeeded to be sustainably available, caring and respectful on both sides.