Principal Experiments on the Global Stage

We concentrate on school principals in this chapter and on the various ways they seek to position their schools, staff and students on the global stage while, at the same time, trying to remain faithful to the schools’ and the nations’ roots. Their own biographies prove central to the manner in which, and how successfully, they navigate the tensions involved in practicing their global experiments. In tracing the cultural labour of class choreography, we consider their strategies as well as the pressures and constraints on them, nuanced by their specific national and local historical contexts and their own social and political positions and subjectivities in relation to their class work as principals. We pay particular attention to the articulations of gender, class, race, nation and (post-)coloniality, showing how the various principals respond differently to the demands of and for globalization in their aspirations to perform on the global stage while responding to local/national conditions—both political and economic.