Morals, Ethics and Transformative Leadership: A Hermeneutic View on School and System Leading

Abstract

ABSTRACT Educational leadership is a complex dynamic influenced by social, cultural, political, and economic impacts of the local community and the wider globe. The ways that educational leaders understand and develop moral purpose and transformative ways of practicing within their current contexts and uncertainty are exemplified in personal and professional understandings of morals and ethics. While there is considerable research exploring moral and ethical dimensions in leadership, there is limited study examining individual inner dynamics and consciousness of leaders as they navigate and reflect on their practice. Furthermore, the relationship between morals, ethics and transformative leadership perspectives requires deeper inquiry. The dual purposes of this study were to examine system and school leaders’ understandings and interpretations of morals and ethics in their leadership practice and how these understandings and interpretations related to a transformative leadership perspective. This study adopted a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, with interviews, personal journaling, and document analysis for data collection involving multi-level K-12 Ontario school and system leaders. The study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the virtuous relational expressions of human-life-centered, critically conscious ways of leading nested in presence, authentic relationships and deeper understanding of growth and reciprocity in personal and professional leading and learning. This study contributes to an understanding of the critical interdependence of morals, ethics, and transformative leadership as an emerging and cyclic process of developing and deepening self-knowing, widened critical perspectives, conscious contemplating and imagining. It provides implications for leadership formation and engagement. The intersections of morals, ethics, and transformative leading point to the meaning of accompaniment and growth in personal being and reflexive praxis (re)centering human-life wholeness and betterment for all in an ethic of hope and promise.