3D Visualization of Engendering Collaborative Leadership in the Space

Abstract

The paper focuses on collaborative leadership in education and how to illustrate its engendering process in a three-dimensional space. This complex and fluid process is examined as distributed and pedagogical within a large Finnish vocational upper secondary educational organization. As a consequence, the notion of distributed pedagogical leadership is used when collaborative leadership in education is studied. Collaborative leadership is argued to consist of the innermost substance of a professional learning community, as characteristics or qualities of a group of people working together for specific purposes. Therefore, collaborative leadership naturally involves actors, activities, and context. However, the innermost substance of the community is the crux of leadership. It is here presented in the form of ten “keys” and their operational sub-concepts. The keys are highly interdependent and a movement in one of them has an effect both on every other key and the whole. Within this framework, the paper provides a presentation of selected study results by means of the 3D program Strata. The visualizations illustrate concrete examples of the keys and how they relate to the reality in the vocational education organization in question. For this, a novel analysis is used, based on natural laws and rules of physics.