Framing educational leadership as a multilevel distributed practice: a systemwide perspective

Building on and extending work in the distributed leadership tradition, we sketch and argue for a multilevel distributed perspective on educational leadership. A multilevel distributed framework depicts educational leadership systemically by focusing on how actors and artifacts at multiple levels of an education system interact to constitute the practice of educational leadership on the ground. Our framing goes beyond any one potential source of leadership such as the school, Local Educational Authority, Provincial government, or ministry and also eschews frameworks that simply aggregate different sources of leadership in an educational system. Instead, our multilevel distributed framework centers on how actors and artifacts at different levels of an educational system interact not only within but across levels of the system to constitute leadership practice. In this way, it is more about multiplication than addition. Our framing allows for actors and artifacts interacting differently depending on the educational system and on the particular “national” educational sector in which that system operates and depends on for resources.