Page 25 - Educational Leadership in a Changing World

Current Challenges of Educational Leadership

of positive influence on others. Thus, a critical synthesis is provided of
some of the most significant contributions of recent years on the three
themes addressed, in dialogue with established voices in educational
research.
The first conclusion to be drawn from the review conducted, indicates
that educational leadership entails great responsibilities that largely co-
incide with some of the most important social and cultural challenges
of our time, which places it at the forefront of society. This is good news
insofar as education, in general, and the school, in particular, is not iso-
lated from the society in which it operates, but is directly linked to it, as
Dewey (1899) pointed out, and can respond to the social challenges it
poses. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American pedagogue
argued that the radical change taking place in education at that time
required a radical change in education itself, such that schools would
become the natural social unit they should aspire to be. More specifi-
cally, he warned that ‘Travel has been rendered easy; freedom of move-
ment, with its accompanying exchange of ideas, indefinitely facilitated.
The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put
into circulation’ (p. 40). These words seem to accurately define some of
the most characteristic features of recent decades, where learning as a
capacity for adaptation has become an essential activity where the in-
tellectual has adopted a renewed vision in the complex interpretation
of reality in continuous relationship with the emotional.
However, this intellectual revolution cannot be supported solely by
schools; rather, it must, in a certain sense, be led by education. In other
words, between the social isolation of schools and complete subordi-
nation to social trends, there is a place where it is possible to balance
educational autonomy with an eye toward the emerging demands of so-
ciety. Indeed, educational leadership cannot uncritically subject schools
to passing trends and dominant fads (Esteban & Fuentes, 2020). Unlike
other occupations, the task of education entails a high level of auton-
omy in decision-making and personal initiative (Carr, 2002), which goes
beyond the mere application of a series of teaching techniques, or the
reproduction of procedures designed by agents outside the school en-
vironment. This has direct consequences for the training of future ed-
ucators and gives meaning to their development in higher education
institutions, where intellectual demands and autonomy are prominent
signs of identity.
A recent example of this can be found in the processes of integrat-

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