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TRANSCRIPT

[Upbeat music playing. After a while, a male voiceover starts.] 

Welcome to the Educational Leadership Series proudly brought to you by the Global Innovation Network for Teaching and Learning. 

[Upbeat music continues for a bit.]

[Podcast host Sam – male voice]

Hello and welcome to the first episode of the podcast series on Educational Leadership. I am Sam and I have been developing a collaboration in educational leadership between the Institute of Educational Leadership at the Ģ��ֱ�� in Finland and CreatNet education in Delhi in India. The collaboration was funded by the Global Innovation Network for Teaching and Learning, in which CreatNet members, particularly Darshan Bhat and Mohita Jaiswal, participated voluntarily and wholeheartedly. We brought together 34 educational leaders from India and Finland, including scholars, teachers, teacher, educators, school leaders, education administrators, educational entrepreneurs and NGO leaders. They participated together in an experimental international professional learning community. The podcast series comprises 4 episodes – educational leadership, pedagogical leadership, the role of coaching, and the professional development of educators and sustainability. These were also the key themes explored by the professional learning community. In the first episode, I'll be in conversation with Mika Risku and Darshan Bhat. Mika is the head of the Institute of Educational Leadership, and Darshan the founder of CreatNet Education. They discuss the constructs of educational leadership, the power of learning communities, and the role of educational leadership in enabling such communities.

Welcome Darshan and Mika to the first episode of the podcast series. I thought this would be a great way for me to have a catharsis of the discussions that we've had, and a good way for me to synthesize the discussions that we've been having through inquiry into your experiences and expertise. Thank you for accepting this invitation to join in the inquiry.

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

Thank you for inviting Sam and Mika. It’s wonderful to be here.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

I would like to thank you, Sam, for the invitation, too. And Darshan, thank you to you too. 

[Podcast host Sam]

I would love for people wherever they are and however they can, to also join in the inquiry actively because this is special. Having the two of you in a conversation and getting the opportunity to pick your brains together on educational leadership and learning communities is a privilege. So thank you once again for joining in. 

I would like to start with the basics. We are exploring the concepts of educational leadership and learning communities, which are both dear to our professional journeys, our personal aspirations, and our vision for education – as well as for the collaboration that we've been a part of for the last year. So let's begin with the definitions. Mika, why is educational leadership its own form of leadership and what do you mean by it?

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Thank you, Sam. It’s a very wonderful question and something that we've been working with since 1993. Although I don't think we were really talking about educational leadership to start with – educational administration maybe then through different positions of leadership, like the principal, or principal director of education, or a daycare center director, etc.

And then, through research, increasingly coming closer to understanding that leadership in the field of education is something of its own. Anduena Ballo – when she was working with her master thesis in educational leadership, interviewing our students who had graduated in our International Masters’ degree program said that “Mika, they never really talk about educational leadership, they talk about leadership.” And we thought that, hey, what is that makes us distinctive or or are we distinctive or can we think that leadership is something universal, general? And when starting to do that kind of inquiry really coming with the definition of educational leadership that it's about the phenomenon of leadership in the field of education, and because the field of education has its own mission that is different from the missions of the other fields of life, we must study whether this applies to educational leadership too. And this is what we think like today and this is why we also think that educational leadership is so vital because it's ensuring that the field of education fulfils its mission.

[Podcast host Sam]

And what would you say that mission is? And Darshan, you could maybe respond to what Mika says.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

We've been thinking for years now that it is future-creation. It's making the world a better place by supporting peoples’  well being, learning and development. How? How would that resonate with you? Darshan? 

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

Beautifully. 

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Thank you. Anything else on that? Do you see educational leadership in the same way?

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

You can only add on at this point of time. The field of education itself is a phenomena that requires to be examined because the whole life is a field of education in its broadest sense. Education is whole life, it is the whole life and in its deepest sense, education is also drawing out from within. So if you see the widest and the deepest sense. To me it is about what, what is not education? But I appreciate you know, when we look at definitions, it's important to qualify and to that extent, I assume when you mean the field of education, it is in the formal institutions that have a a mission connected with education, could be schools or colleges, universities. Or vocational institutions, I assume that is what you mean by the field of education.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Thank you, Darsh, and I'm siloing the phenomenon and I'm doing it intentionally because in Finland, for example, we've been challenged whether there is a separate educational leadership or even the need for it. And what we've been trying to do and research is whether there is this separate leadership of its own and – or could we just be looking at research and education and experiences in other fields of life? And what we are coming up as results is that there are similarities. But there are also differences and one fundamental aspect that makes this difference is the mission of education. But I have problems with the siloing and also totally agree with you again that all fields of life need well-being, learning and development, so we cannot remove these things from other fields of life too. But maybe I think that how they develop the world is is then different from that of the field of education, because the mission of the other fields of life is then focused a bit different. Did that make any sense?

[Podcast host Sam]

Yes. And you have, Mika, been researching educational leadership as a subject, as a field of leadership in the world of education. And I know you've also been preparing and so have I – together we've been preparing for the summer conference in which one question is what would good educational leadership look like in the year 2040, or I could say in the future. I was wondering if this podcast could be your attempt at answering that.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Again, I would say that we have commonalities with leadership in other fields of life. I do believe that in all communities, in all organizations, in all fields of life, leadership is to ensure that field of life is fulfilling its mission. Then I would turn to pedagogical leadership research, which would be really focusing on leading the well-being learning and development of communities and their members. And when we based on research they talk about good pedagogical leaders. It is to know and take very good care of one 's community members and then to establish, maintain, develop that kind of structures and processes that these community members can learn together and work together, not just within the community, but with other communities too. And when it's the field of education again to do this so that the field of education is fulfilling its mission.

[Podcast host Sam]

And the follow-up question to that in for the summer conference was what would the new government need to do to enable educational leadership or to bring the vision of education alive? And how I'd like to rephrase that is what conditions enable educational leadership to to flourish and thrive in the way that you envision it? That could frame the outer, the external conditions, and Darshan, you could join in with who is an educational leader, and that would be bringing in the inner aspects of educational leadership. So what are the conditions and external conditions that Mika could talk about and what are the internal conditions? And that is what I mean by who is an educational leader. So Mika, external and then darshan internal.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Thank you, Sam. Let's try to do this. We think that educational leadership is very contextual. First of all, it's contextual at the International, national, regional, local level, so there's no one universal solution we think. As for Finland, in the legislation we are still in a situation where you have to have rigorous academic education to work as a teacher and as a teacher of different subjects or approaches to education. At the same time, our legislation is such that you don't really require any academic education to qualify to lead educational organizations and communities. The legislation has options for these. The least option is that it's enough if you can show experience in educational administration. When it is like this, our government is not funding academic education for for educational leaders. So for us, we do have good educational leadership in Finland and wonderful educational leaders, but they are not getting the support through education, as we would like them to get. If they want to get it, they more or less have to buy it themselves – in a country where all education is free of charge. So we do want the new government especially to change this.

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

Should I segue into it?

[Podcast host Sam]

Absolutely.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

I do. If you do so.

[Darshan Bhatt / CreatNet]

Yes, it's interesting that we are looking at policy and government and we're looking at expectations. To me, it appears that leadership is about taking responsibility and taking responsibility to influence what's required to be done in the society. It's about building trust. So the phenomena of leadership in your language could be seen at various levels. One is to look at it in the form of a where its impact is most visibly experienced. Right, which is in small groups. As human beings we operate and we are authentic and vulnerable and small groups when there is trust. I would say that at the most fundamental unit of educational small group, whether it's the school or the college, it's the actual, you know, set of peers being facilitated by an educational leader. That's the crux. Here educational leadership is about connecting. It's about enabling the place of discovery and that should not be forgotten when we look at the organizations that we build. So to me, one of the first requirements from any governance would be an autonomy for the educator, yeah. And the educator to also form a community amongst themselves where they're they're able to exchange and solve their own challenges and take any ships. But there's another perspective. I think there's nothing which stops educational leaders from, as long as they're not stopped, they should be able to form communities and take care of their own learning. I think leadership is about that. At another level, educational leadership is when you are looking at teams of teams. So this is where the where there's more need to collaborate. There's more need to build relationships here. Again, I would say a different type of level of leadership is required. And perhaps a 3rd level of leadership is where you see things in a larger systemic context. That doesn't mean that in the other 2 levels there's you're not seeing it, but here the frame becomes even wider where you you look at a wider span in time and space. So I would say that there are levels of leadership and ideally if you could at some point of time in the future, we could look at what I have been contemplating and researching on for probably 15 years or 20 years is that to me it appears that there is a correlation between the level of awareness or consciousness and how leadership actually gets played out. And I really really required to have a way that higher levels of leadership. And definitely positional leadership are with people who have greater level of self-awareness, but I understand that I am on very unobjective. This phenomena is not fully explored. It's a subjective phenomenon. Self-awareness is by its very nature is very nuanced. So what I look at as the future of education of 2020 – a  good leadership, someone who's definitely having self-awareness, leading to an awareness of others, leading to an awareness of systems. It fundamentally shifts the way one thinks, one takes decisions, one looks at relationships and one looks at interconnects. So so that that's where I see the inner. To me it is integrated. The inner and outer are not two separate, but two sides of the same. I see that education has looked at things only objectively. It has not looked at things subjectively. And it is integration of subjective and objective that is the past and the future of.

[Podcast host Sam]

Darshan, what then becomes the significance of communities in enabling learning, in enabling leadership? And why would it be a good bet for policy, for administration, for educational leadership to enable and sustain and foster communities of learning? Where learning happens with a sense of togetherness, either in a classroom or in formal settings of formal professional development. What is the significance of communities and what has your experience been with CreatNet in in building comma?

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

So to me, the idea of a community is is the idea of communion, where you are actually having a sense of connection with each other. There's a sense of belonging. There's a sense of, support, mutual support. There is a certain presence of awareness. To me, I see communities in this way. For us, the experience of CreatNet has been to build on what I talked about earlier. As said, there is a basic social unit and I'm proposing that the basic social unit in which the community is actually experienced is actually less than 10 people. It's in groups of 10, less than 10, maybe it's 8 or maybe 12. That it is possible to pay attention to each person, everyone to really pay attention to each other, and my repeated experience came with adults in particularly peer learning has been that if it's laid well and we use the word facilitating for that, and leaders are facilitators. The second big idea is that leadership is facilitating at one level. There is trust in this connection. Facilitating leadership is its own nuanced competence. It is about working on oneself, experience in seeing, having an awareness of others and holding the same together. It's really having a very deep listening. In that space of deep listening and connect, one is able to access the relevant questions. One is is able to tap into multiple perspectives. And it is very experiential. This allows for different ways of construction of knowledge to emerge. I've seen this repeatedly happen and this is one of the most significant ways of developing leadership educational leaders. So I would say communities are not restricted by organizational boundaries. They're not restricted by positions. They are self-directed. They allow for leadership to be experienced as responsibility, trust, and influence. It's a very rich playing field. So I would say that it has the necessary ingredients. For what is required in education for the future. Having said that, it would be a little risky to talk about structure and policy in the same breath as community. I believe that communities are spaces which have to be non-hierarchical. They have to be non-positional. In that space, good policy will emerge, good structures would emerge. There would be feedback loops which would emerge. So there's definitely a whole hierarchy of sorts, but there's definitely an absence of hierarchy.

[Podcast host Sam]

And what about Mika? In organizations where there is hierarchy, where there are positions where there is an environment of positional leadership being enacted and enforced by policy and systems and structures, how how does one build a sense, or where does a sense of community come into organizations? And what enables communities to to be built within organizations or for organizations to be like a community? And if that's even important?

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Thank you, Sam and thank you, Darshan. Answering your question, first of all, all would like to say that I totally agree with everything Darshan has been saying, It's fascinating if I think that our institute we are part of a very organizational structure that of our university with all the hierarchy Sam wanted me to reflect on. And then the path of CreatNet it in maybe in this sense, having been very different and still we tend to emphasize exactly the same views and issues with Darshan as important. We've been looking at educational leadership starting from the societal level. That would be the external perspective and what kind of a world we want and what is the role of education in preparing that kind of world that we want. And then what kind of educational organizations or communities we need for this purpose. And then what kind of people we need in these educational organizations and communities? Of Finland, it appears that we need the structures that would be the organizations. To me, to the core is that of the community and the core teams, let's say. So in the communities, I too think that they cannot be too large, so that people they know. Each other and and the one leading the team knows team members. And I totally agree with Darshan there too that one must know oneself too. And when there are not too many people there is the space and time better for collaborative learning and dialogue and interaction. Of Finland, again, we've had functional organizations that has been thinking about education from the perspective of the organization. That's about hierarchy and positions and all those, and we are transforming this kind of thinking into the process and network thinking. This is a dramatic change of thinking – then you are thinking from the perspective of the client for whom you are providing the education. As to the communities that we then need to have, we are finding out a major transformation in the functional organizations. Thinking from the perspective of the organization, we group very similar people together and silo whatever we are providing in a sense in the process and network organizations should in fact group together very different kinds of people so that they have a holistic and multiprofessional view on education. The dynamics of these different kinds of communities what we've experienced are often very different. And on the organizational level, it may be that community or team members here do not come any longer from the one and similar organization, but different organizations. And how you then create and maintain and develop communality in the whole – maybe I use here the word system here – becomes very, very different. I think that's something that we are doing with our wonderful collaboration between our institute and CreatNet too, that very different context that we have first of all. Maybe what is needed in the two different nations is different too and we are trying to learn from each other. It's wonderful how we become friends. I would like to hear what Darshan thinks about how we've been working, how we be doing to create the friendship that we now have and and why does it resonate so well with us?

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

It completely resonates, and if you look at the last year and a half. It's intentional as well as emergent. It is between us. There are some meta processes that we have adopted. First and foremost is that we have, we learned about each other, understood each other, created a common language. So built trust amongst each other. Then we created a common project between us and that project itself has its own processes. That project itself required its own planning. It required its own community building. It required its own connections. So our work together required us to conceptualize the curriculum, conceptualize the objectives, conceptualize the vision together, you know, to try things out by let it out. And it is through the these processes that we actually, and through solving many of the challenges, that came along the way that we actually built on the trust. And so when we built on it and then we also met face to face. Of course, all this community was happening remotely. Then we came face to face. That was again a part of a process where there's a deeper and, you know, understanding. And then what we are having now is a continuity of that. And we are able to envisage the next research and the next milestone. I think there is a progressive build-up. And I think each one of us have played a leadership role in this. We are clearly seeing the distributed leadership being present in Sam and Yumika and me and Mohita. And now as we see it, it's already on as a continuing learning group is already expanded to 8 people looking at the future. Of education, exploring and researching and cross pollinating the the topic of today. So I would say that that's been my reflection.

I would like to share the CreatNetexperience of enabling building of communities within organization. So Sam that was referring to your previous question. And I would say that it's a phenomena what started off, and there are some principles that we could derive from that. So right now the work of CreatNet is happening within organizational systems. It is actually building communities within a large educational system of over 2000 schools. Now the operating principle is what I shared with you. First is that people have to volunteer and come forward on their own. The second is that you grow leadership from within themselves, so you're enabling that. So in the very design of it is the enabling of the next evolution of the the minute. So what started off is with one small group of 10 people, 10 principals, government school heads of schools and voluntarily facilitating them – that has expanded to many of them, taking up facilitation. It first went to 100 schools, 150 schools. Now it's running in over 2000 schools, so there are actually about almost 200 communities. It is happening within systems when it is led from by the educational leaders themselves. And the pedagogy here is is essentially about the like, asking questions, enabling sharing. It's about listening, asking questions, enabling a certain synthesis to happen, enabling follow through. Paying attention to what's important and emerging, actively engaging with it, enabling the feedback loop. So there's definitely a certain pattern here. To me, the pattern is small groups. To me, the pattern is a leader as a facilitator, it’s about connect. It is about being contextual. I believe that we have to look at the principles and then the frameworks, the curriculums or the pedagogies at the the next level. Yeah. And then you have to look at even more contextual design. So I would say that there's as we go along with discovering many new axis of.

[Podcast host Sam]

Thank you for choosing to talk about our collaboration itself, because something that we are doing is trying to make a case for such collaborations to happen more often and to happen more widely and be supported. And the last question comes from the perspective of, or from the point of view of someone who is trying to hit the sweet spot. Because here we have Mika, who has a lot of research experience and background in organizations and in educational leadership. And then we have darshan with a lot of experience and inclination towards reflection and self awareness and inner transformation and community building. And we also see a difference in the foresi in in the two contexts. In Finland there is more conversation about organizations about expertise, about agency, about identity, and in India we hear more words to do with collective consciousness and awareness and realizations, and community and togetherness. There's the outer that Mika has researched in depth – the outer conditions, the policies, the structures, the operational environments that enable leadership. And then Darshan you often talk about the inner conditions that nurture effective leadership. So how would one hit the sweet spot, or what has that process been like for you? Of merging your perspectives together to learn together and how has that evolved? Your understanding of leadership of communities of organizations? How would you sell the value of such a collaboration of such worlds coming together?

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

I think it is self evident. There is no requirement of sales. It's very self-evident, it is very aligned to nature and perhaps I won't choose the same words that you've chosen. To me, there is no binary. It is integrated. The inner and outer have to be integrated and to say that India represents in you know inner, and you know – no no. I am not saying that. I see that they're very much present in the interaction I have with Mika. And if Mika is any representative of the Finland, then there's definitely inner too. I think that integration happens beautifully, independent through nature and nature is integrating. So I think if I was to use the language of Finland, it would be the language of nature. And seeing the interconnectedness through nature. And seeing the inner and outer, you go out into the woods and you experience that silence within you. So the methods may be different, but I think you as humanity, we understand that very well, even well-being. It's an inner, inner and outer integration. Yeah. So I think this dichotomies have to go. This idea of India and Finland. You have to look at what is similar. The context may be different. Yes, we have a more populous nation. I think these are universal principles. We have to look at what brings it all together. I mean, you have to look at one humanity. And not just one humanity. I think you have to look at one universal ecosystem that you're a part of. So to that extent, there's been absolutely ease in this collaboration. I mean, what I have learned is a certain language. And I've seen that language. I tried to use that language and I think Mika has learned a certain language to our association and they're both deeply trying to use each other 's language and through that process we are becoming more integrated of our inner and outer, you know, looking at context, our ability to understand context and create new things, yeah. Have I answered?

[Podcast host Sam]

Yes, thank you. And we could move for the close of the podcast episode with with Mika. Your thoughts on what Darshan shared.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Not unsurprisingly, I again think exactly in the same way as Darshan and just said. Maybe we tend to come or start with the outer, but it is to serve the inner. And what the outer is like to me has to be thought from the perspective of the inner. So exactly as Darshan said, they go together and we cannot have one without the other. It's it's been a lot of confirmation to me – our collaboration and the integration and the inner and outer. And yes, I would not have used the concepts of inner and outer. That's also something that I've learned as concepts, but I I do love the concepts. And then again, I'm a Finn, so it would be Finnish or Swedish for me. Asmother tongue and for Darshan it would not be English. In fact, I don't know. Would  it be Hindi for you? 

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

Interestingly, for me, I probably think more in English.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Yeah. OK. I may do that too professionally at least. But what I'm trying to pinpoint is that different languages have different terms or the different. That's where you see the word concepts or phenomena and they always have their own side meanings as well, and then how this communication works. It's interesting.

[Darshan Bhat / CreatNet]

So I would say then it's some of these concepts would be. From the root language of Sanskrit, that would relate to more Sanskrit.

[Mika Risku / JYU]

Yeah. If that says like that, yes. Ecosystem is one of the fashion worlds today. That would be like referring to that everything is interrelated, everything is interconnected and interconnection I think is also a term that I added in my own vocabulary. Thanks to our collaboration. There's a lot that we share, really a lot and it's a very wonderful learning experience to learn this too.

[Podcast host Sam]

Thank you for joining in on this first episode of the series. We hope that it would be useful for people exploring educational leadership or the phenomena of leadership in education. We hope that it offers useful insights and tips for people looking to engage in building communities and bringing diverse contexts together to enable elective learning and to to further collective wisdom, awareness and consciousness. So thank you once again, Gyan Darshan.

With that, we come to the end of the first episode of the podcast series on Educational Leadership. I hope you found the conversation insightful. The series continues with the next episode on pedagogical leadership. Thank you for listening and wish you the best.

[Upbeat music starts playing. Male voiceover speaks]

This was an episode in the educational leadership podcast series – proudly brought to you by the Global Innovation Network for Teaching and Learning. To listen to the other three episodes, and to find out more about the GINTL network, kindly visit