The Why, Where, How and What of Curriculum Leadership: A Non-affirmative Approach.

The movement from a social-democratic welfare state towards a neoliberal competition state since the 1990s in Europe required a multi-level perspective to understand the dynamics within and relations between macro-level educational governance and micro-level educational leadership. The chapter starts with critiquing initiatives to handle this multi-level nature of leadership. First, the limit of universalist multi-level models is that they are educationally unarticulated, while particularist approaches are typically specialised on either curriculum or leadership of teaching. Second, instrumental and normative approaches in turn are problematic in education for a political democracy. To overcome these dilemmas, the chapter argues that curriculum leadership theory needs to explain (a) the societal task of education (the why and where of educational leadership), (b) the pedagogical nature of leadership interactions (the how of educational leadership) and (c) the object led or the teaching-studying-learning process (the what of educational leadership). To this end, this chapter outlines how Bildung-centred non-affirmative education theory (NAT) offers fruitful concepts for approaching the pedagogical dimensions of educational leaders’ curriculum work.