Secretary Paulo Freire and the Democratization of Power: Toward a Theory of Transformative Leadership

Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony--not so much a theory of domination as a theory of the manufacturing of commonsense--offers a way to break into the myth of leadership as always already tied to practices of domination. His complex accounting of leadership's "necessary" relationship to the pedagogic and hegemonic constitute an important contribution to a theory of leadership by understanding that leadership is not only an element in the pedagogical project of forming a consensus of commonsense, but also is an important dimension of oppositional work. That is, leadership can provide a productive force for breaking into dominant formations of commonsense. His ideas concerning the link between leadership and hegemony provide an important theoretical referent for developing a theory of transformative leadership. Transformative leadership is an exercise of power and authority that begins with questions of justice, democracy, and the dialectic between individual accountability and social responsibility. Paulo Freire's educational administration in Sao Paulo, Brazil from 1989 until 1991 offers a concrete example of the risks and possibilities in adopting transformative strategies of leadership. The author discusses the responsibility of transformative leadership to instigate structural transformations at the material level that reflect a new hegemony, in addition to the ideological work that is done at a pedagogical level. He concludes by discussing the social, pedagogical, and political strategies of transformative pedagogical leadership, working loosely within Henry Giroux's critical theory of pedagogy and politics, summarized as the intersection of culture, pedagogy, and power on one hand, with civic responsibility and radical democratic struggle on the other. (Contains 11 notes.)