Holistic leadership in education: refocusing society through our educative institutions and structures

Abstract

All over the world there are individual and loose coalitions of educators trying to facilitate deep learning opportunities for their students. Progressive, innovative, ecopedagogical, holistic, mindful, balanced, wholeness and transformative are just some of the terms which are used to try and define, for the mainstream, what these educators are attempting. These educators tend to be working in diverse situations but each are trying to build learning communities rooted in the perennial worldview of wholeness. What is common for these educators is the experience they have when they step outside their own environment and engage with other educators, administrators and mainstream policy makers. They invariably encounter a similar sentiment; that is, that while a laudable goal, wholesale adoption of this new educative paradigm is unrealistic and unattainable in the modern world. In this paper I intend to explore the notion of holistic leadership. I will do this through defining and exploring its nature. Finally I will discuss how the development of holistic leadership within the educative environment can facilitate the transition to an educative paradigm, which will ultimately redefine the structures and institutions of our society.