Beyond Epistemic Boundaries: International Students and Educational Leadership in Its Cultural Complexity

The chapter discusses the thinking that underpins a reconceptualisation of teaching educational leadership within an Australian Master of Education program to a diverse group of international students. Few international students seemed to question the transferability of Western knowledge to other cultures, yet it may be of limited value to their real concerns and issues. This chapter examines possibilities for supporting students to question assumptions of the universalism of Western leadership scholarship and the dominance of the overall northern-centric pattern of global knowledge production (Connell, 2014) as well as how culture and leadership are interwoven. Rather than subscribing to a single, universal and abstract hierarchy among knowledges, which privileges Western theories, thinking through leadership in its cultural complexities increases the understanding of both the colonising legacies of education leadership (Khalifa et al., 2019) and how decolonising leadership (Cranston & Jean-Paul, 2021) might be achieved through re-examining leadership as a social and political practice (Wilkinson, 2021). Recognising leadership as a culturally bounded and contextually significant process rejects the dominance of leadership models framed on individualistic assumptions portraying a ‘false universalism’ (Wilkinson & Bristol, 2018, p. 13).