The insecurity of educational leadership research(ers): a response to Bogotch

Ira Bogotch has provided an invitation to think about why critique is not more prominent in the journals of educational leadership. In this paper, I take up this invitation and focus on the insecurity of what Educational Leadership, Management and Administration studies research, the benign neglect to alternatives leading to parallel monologues, and the redundancy of critique when scholarship hides its underlying assumptions. Rather than look at the toll on individuals who engage in critique, I seek to explain why critique is absent from the field’s journals and the cascading consequences. Specifically, I advocate for the centrality of justification and critique if the field is going to advance its quality profile and the robustness of knowledge claims. This requires researchers to engage with what exactly they are studying, articulating and justifying their choices, justifications being made in anticipation of potential criticisms, and critiques focused on the work, not the author.