Serving Multiple Gods: A Narrative Inquiry Of The Culture Of Distributed Instructional Leadership In An IB MYP School

The purpose of this study was to explore heroes’ journeys through distributed instructional leadership experiences to highlight a reliance on pedagogical intelligence. The study’s conceptual framework incorporated Clandinin and Connelly’s (2006) commonplaces of narrative inquiry that consider temporality, sociality, and place to answer this primary research question: how do pedagogical leaders in a North Carolinian public middle school with an IB Middle Years Programme construct and describe the culture of distributed instructional leadership through the lens of the hero’s journey? The objective of this study was to analyze instructional leadership stories to understand leaders’ pedagogical intelligence in an IB public school context. This qualitative study incorporated the methodology of narrative inquiry through open-ended interviews of three participants from one school setting. Using Joseph Campbell’s (2004) phases of the hero’s journey, the researcher restoried instructional leadership experiences that follow the archetypal paths of three group-oriented heroes: the traditional hero, the catalyst hero, and the sacrificial hero. This study found that formal and informal school leaders experience the push-pull of IB programming requirements along with other priorities within the power structure of the public IB school setting. As a result of this conflict, each participant-hero experienced growth and gained pedagogical intelligence.