Imagining Practice Otherwise: The Role of Epistemic Objects and Collective Creativity in Changing Professional Participation

In Chapter 4 we expanded on one of the core claims of our new theory of learning-rich leadership: that educational leaders need to know how to construct and mobilize local accounts of practice change and consistently promote these accounts with colleagues in the interests of improved quality. This claim responds to a central finding of our research: that a significant challenge for leaders in early childhood education settings is to learn how to focus the creative efforts of their colleagues on shared problems of practice. In this chapter we turn to the nature of these practice problems and explain how our theory conceptualizes leaders’ role in articulating and responding to these practice problems by mobilizing the knowledge within their teams.