Introductory Essay: Global Perspectives on Educational Leadership in the Middle East and North Africa, The View from Palestine

Abstract

This special issue on educational leadership in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region did not set out to focus exclusively on Palestine. That it did was by necessity, not by design. Despite our best efforts through several deadline extensions for submissions, we received no papers on educational leadership from researchers outside of Palestine. This fact speaks volumes to the problem that motivated us originally to produce this volume—the scarcity of scholarly discourse and research in the MENA region on leadership theory and leadership practice in education contexts. With some rare exceptions, there is little evidence of serious theoretical or empirical research on how administrators or teachers enact leadership in the contexts of basic, secondary, or higher education, or of what distinguishes leadership in educational change from, say, leadership