This article reports on the challenges facing public school leadership in southern Thailand, a region destabilized by renewal of a longstanding insurgency. Seeking to implement national educational reforms on shifting social, political and cultural terrain, educators in this region face extraordinary challenges as they reconsider and renegotiate an institutional position once perceived as secure. Focusing on two schools in one province, this article offers an account of the variety of challenges reported by principals working in this difficult environment. We find the principals employing number of bridging and buffering strategies as improvisational efforts to re-organize, re-establish and re-position the schools in their respective communities. In the concluding discussion, we surface concerns regarding the nature and naturalness, reason and reasonableness of these strategies within local administrative hegemony premised on market and colonial ideologies that may obscure impending legitimation issues.
This qualitative study aimed to identify challenges of educators faced with education reform and violent unrest that has taken place in five Southern provinces of Thailand, as well as leadership characteristics that emerged in this context. Participants were 21 educators from primary schools in Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat, Songkhla and Satun provinces. A purposeful selection was employed for participant recruitment of the study. Data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and related official document analysis. The study revealed that challenges of educators related to education reform were managing curriculum, increasing students' reading competency, coping with work overloads, and managing limited budgets. Challenges related to social unrest were dealing with instructional management, coping with feelings, and ensuring safety. Leadership characteristics that emerged in response to these challenges were becoming patient, dedicated, and adaptive; guiding changes in instructional methods; and building collaborations with related stakeholders.
Mounting religious-ethnic tensions and broad-scale reform have precipitated reconsideration of the mission, traditions, operations and institutional positions of government schools in southern Thailand. The authors report on a study of a dozen schools located in four border provinces adapting to national reforms and regional unrest. The authors find emergent strategies conditioned by reform policies whereby school leaders seek to reorganize, reestablish, and reposition schools in their respective communities. Through a critical analysis of leadership, the authors explore the interplay of local strategies and broader neoliberal reform logics oriented to relegitimate the Thai state. Drawing on work by Robertson and Dale, and James Conroy, we discuss near-term displacement of legitimation crises through neoliberal localization that may prove problematic over the long haul.
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