"We are equal, but I am the leader": leadership enactment in early childhood education in Norway

Abstract

The research on Early Childhood Education and Care leadership has mainly focused on the kindergarten manager’s perspectives. However, to fully understand leadership in ECEC settings, the middle-management level of pedagogical leaders must be included. The distributed framework is applied to investigate how the pedagogical leaders at the middle-management level enact and understand their leadership role. This study demonstrates that pedagogical leaders’ enactments emerge differently and manifest as three distinctive leadership types categorized as the administrative-, equality-, and reflective leader. This paper builds on data collected using the qualitative methodological framework of semi-structured group interviews, participatory observation, and a stepwise thematic analysis. It discusses how contextual factors impact the development of different leadership enactments. Findings challenge the notion of leadership in ECEC as highly democratic, flat in structure, weak, and demonstrate variations in leadership enactments. The conclusions drawn from the results suggest that a deeper insight into contextual factors is needed to understand the leadership’s complexity fully.