Navigating culture and context: The principalship in East and South-East Asia

A dominant aspect of the current educational environment in East Asia is the multiple education reforms which have assailed schools since the early 1990s. Another is the long-held cultural values that principals embrace as part of a broader social group and which underpin the construction of personal, societal, relational, and organisational norms and behaviours. Reform demands and cultural values converge at the school level to shape a constantly shifting environment. The associated fluidity of this environment, in effect, expresses principals' lives and work to form and transform what they do. As this process unfolds, principals find themselves navigating an unpredictable path to school improvement and the very meaning of leadership becomes confused (Bottery, 2004). This context challenges principals to construct a new role that is personally authentic and which attends to the core values of stakeholders, community needs, and system requirements.