Critical leadership for education in a postmodern world: emancipation, resistance and communal action

This article explores possibilities for critical approaches to leadership in contemporary schools. Focusing on recent critiques of so‐called traditional critical approaches by ‘postmodern’ scholars, I contrast their preferences for resistant over emancipatory (revolutionary) action with the former. In doing so I compare Marx's, Habermas’, Baudrillard's and Foucault's views of human regulation, the roles of the individual self or subject and the constitution and function of groups in their respective theories and assess their utility for critical leadership in education. I conclude that the key for a politics that will enable individuals to resist oppressive school practices rests with the ability of subjects to recognize and seek out forms of community they share with others. I conclude the article with an example of how one school employed these kinds of strategies.