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School Leadership: Balancing Power With Caring
Kathleen Sernak Foreword by Nel Noddings Pub Date: 1998, 192 pages
Paperback: $22.95, ISBN: 0807737615

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"Sernak has made a major contribution to our understanding of care as a virtue by describing both its uses and abuses. In her discussion of caring power, she has underscored the reason for studying care as a relational attribute, not a virtue. More than personal vision and assertiveness, educational leaders need qualities that will enable them to model caring relations and to establish the conditions under which caring relations will thrive."
From the Foreword by Nel Noddings
In School Leadership, you will experience in vivid detail how one school struggled to create a caring school community within a traditional, bureaucratic hierarchy. The text begins with the schools historical background of having a high student drop-out rate and a reputation for crime, violence, and drug dealing. The author then examines: caring in the context of the principals leadership as an African American woman attempting to create a nurturing atmosphere the ways in which faculty and staff perceive the intents and actions of the principal how teachers nurture themselves and each other the notion of a connection between caring and power, and the potential impacts of caring power on leadership and organization of schools, particularly as educators weigh the options of various cultural and educational needs involved in school reform initiatives. Sernak makes dynamic new connections between caring, power, and leadership that will be of interest to policymakers, administrators, and all educators concerned with creating a caring school environment.
Kathleen Sernak is an Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at Rowan University.
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