School leadership and socioeducational conflicts. An exploratory study in chilean public high schools

Abstract

The research seeks to study the processes of educational conflict, giving an account of the strategies and frameworks of action implemented by school administrators in public secondary schools in Chile. In order to achieve this, a case study was carried out in eight public high schools, using several qualitative techniques. Three results are obtained. First, the conflicts that involve students as central actors mainly arise from their social, economic and cultural context. In contrast, conflicts involving adults are related to problems of micro-politics (school level) and macro-politics (field of education). The second result is related with the dynamics adopted by conflicts, where it is observed that, in most cases, conflicts tend to transition from cognitive conflicts to affective conflicts, which means that become personalized and viewed as unproductive processes for schools. Finally, and in relation to the strategies that school leaders use to handle the conflicts, it is verified that these differ depending on the actor involved. When they involve students, there are regulations and action protocols ; whereas when teachers are involved, there are generally no regular channels to proceed, and conflicts tend to be avoided or not recognized.