Abstract:

This empirical study strives for adding knowledge about educational leadership with special focus on educational leaders´ work and tasks in the landscape of liberal adult education. The topic is relevant while great changes are taking place in the educational, societal, and technological environment bringing along new challenges for school leaders. This study aims also at filling research gaps found in the field of educational leadership, in general, and in the school leadership in the context of the liberal adult education in Finland, in particular. The study is grounded on previous research on the areas of educational leadership and liberal adult education, and on theoretical frameworks in the respective research fields. The theoretical approach is Hermeneutics. The empirical research is based on qualitative personal interview and qualitative text analysis method. Such methods were chosen as the objective of is to gain qualitative, deep knowledge about school leaders´ conception of their work in the current liberal adult education in Finland. The research question is: How do school leaders understand their work from the educational perspective in the context of Finnish liberal adult education? The empirical data were systematically coded and categorized in accordance with central themes arising from the interviewers in order to generate reliable and valid results about school leaders experience, perception and understanding about educational leadership in their respective schools. The results indicate that while school leaders understand educational leadership in different ways on the personal level, the overall conception is that educational leadership includes direct as well as indirect educational leadership. Direct educational leadership implies supervising and supporting teachers in their personal and professional development with the aim of improving pupils´ learning. Indirect educational leadership includes administrative work such as economic and human resource management which is seen as essential requirement for conducting direct educational leadership, the main objective of the school leaders. The results also show that school leaders in liberal adult education face challenges because they are responsible of the entire school organization requiring competence and skills on diverse areas, and because they compete within the Finnish educational system. The school leaders face also challenges accruing form the special character of the liberal adult education. Undoubtedly, meeting such challenges requires new knowledge and resources. The knowledge this study generates is hoped to help the school leaders to meet their challenges, face new educational requirements, and contribute to the development of educational leadership.

Keywords:

School leadership, educational leadership, liberal adult education, Finland.