Olhar a cultura organizacional e a liderança na escola pública sob o ethos da inovação

Abstract

Innovation is the buzzword of the globalised society of the twenty-first century, where multiple geopolitical agendas proliferate to seek solutions to the most pressing social, environmental, and economic challenges. In the 90s, innovation granted the character of a strategic force for progress, human development, and quality of life improvement, challenging education and demanding a new order to fulfil a more equitable society. The innovation agendas for education focused on transforming the schooling processes arose and faced the system's complexity and its modus operandi marked by presentism, conservatism, and individualism. Indeed, the school has changed little in the last century despite the impetuses for transformation that are mainly discursive. Under this conjecture of a desirable and profound transformation needed for the school, we developed a study on innovation - the central element of a triangle of intersecting forces that imply the school leaders and cultures, autonomy and processes of regulation, practices and the professional capital of teachers. Hence, we intended to understand the impulses and obstacles that entangle innovation in schools. Assuming a multi-methodological plan that combined qualitative and quantitative methods, we developed a comprehensive study involving a subpopulation of Portuguese schools and school clusters evaluated in the 3rd evaluation cycle of the Inspection from 2018 to 2021. The study mobilised principals, headteachers, teachers, and the members of the schools’ self-evaluation teams, as well as the external evaluation reports and the schools’ structuring documents. The evidence gathered indicates the existence of organisations that operate as feebly articulated systems, marked by fragile spontaneous orders and pseudomorphic existences, where innovation takes on a marginal role. The documental corpus points to an educational system that echoes a fragile interdependence, with problems of collective mobilisation, cultures of evaluation that serve the purpose of legitimation, a functional distance between leaders and those led and between the power and action centres, troubles regarding the complexity of generating articulation in the realities of the schools’ mega-clusters, and the difficulty of developing fruitful innovation climates and a decision-making capital that support the school transformation. It is urgent to generate another school organisation, another leadership, another mode of accountability, and another professional teaching identity. Hence, we present a path for a school based on interdependent functioning activated by distributed, empowering, and transforming leaderships that operate in an interdependent way. They are the forces to generate involvement for the (re)construction of meanings, leverage individual and collective wills, and manage organisational 'flow states' favourable to change. They can nurture a professional culture of freedom, commitment, and responsibility. In this alignment, we enunciate an analytical framework of the innovation capital initiative for education that aims to foster the design of a generative and transformational grammar of the school and, thus, the construction of another school.

Date of Award	20 May 2024
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	José Matias Alves (Supervisor) & Diana Soares (Co-Supervisor)