Reconceptualizing Time to Understand How to Lead Digitalization in Education

Abstract

This study investigates how preschool principals learn how to understand and lead the digitalisation process in their preschool organisations collaboratively within an action research initiative. It specifically investigates how perspectives on time affect their understanding of leading digitalisation by exploring time as a discursive arrangement in a principal’s professional learning. The question is what happens when principals and researchers theorise time as a way to understand how to lead digitalisation in education. The study is based on data collected during the first year of action research. It takes its point of departure from the field of practice theory and uses the theory of practice architectures to analyse what happens in conversations when the participating princpals were challenged to shift from an objective time perspective to viewing time in terms of practice processes. The findings describe how a reconceptualisation of time affected the principals’ understandings of digitalisation in educational practice. Furthermore, it affected how the principals related to the teachers and how the principals organised educational change at their local schools.