Adam Bongers
Education Researcher and Lecturer
I lecture and research in education at UNSW Sydney. I draw on over two decades of experience in Australia and Japan, of teaching, training teachers, and managing language and vocational colleges.
Educational Administration Theory
My work sits in the tradition of educational administration theory. This tradition aims at a coherent understanding of (1) leadership: how we act, (2) organisation: where we act, and (3) knowledge: what informs the way we act.
My evolving view is that educational administration has concentrated on leadership, while leaving questions about organisation and especially knowledge underexplored.
Theory’s main task is not to provide a model of ‘what we know,’
Rather, theory’s main task is to outline ‘how we come to know’ what we do.
Reconstructive Epistemology
My project has been to reconstruct the theory of organisation and, particularly, theory of knowledge that goes unsaid in educational leadership. But theories of organisation and knowledge don’t go away just because we don’t talk about them.
My main contention is that today’s form of educational leadership (‘leader influence’) is informed by a different theory of knowledge compared to past educational administration research. If we don’t appreciate this, both researchers and critics will be blind to how contemporary educational leadership really operates.
To figure out what kind of theory of knowledge is active today, I take an approach that I call reconstructive epistemology. It’s rooted in traditions of comparative epistemology (Fleck, 1979) and historical epistemology (Foucault in Canguilhem, 1978).
I examine research, policy, and practical texts to reconstruct the objects (Daston, 2000; Rheinberger, 1997) and styles of inquiry (Crombie,1994; Hacking, 2009; Lloyd, 2004).
I describe my approach as figuring out what people were looking for, judging by the way they went about it. It’s important that I say ‘looking for,’ not ‘looking at:’
Styles of inquiry are not different ways of looking at the same thing.
Rather, styles of inquiry look for different things.
I’ve been using this approach to make sense of past research, but it also promises to make sense of live educational settings. The approach suggests a single educational challenge can be diagnosed in terms of different types of problems; and this in turn calls for different kinds of prescriptions, and invokes different sorts of evidence.
Questions and Answers (so far)
Here are some of the questions that I’ve been working on, and some of the answers I’ve arrived at:
- How can we know the philosophy that underpins educational leadership research?
Even if mainstream researchers don’t spell out their object and style of inquiry, we can still reconstruct them from the traces they leave behind, even if that means continually revising as we go along.
Bongers, A. (2026). Feeling the way in the dark: Archaeological research in educational leadership. In R. Niesche & D. Mifsud (Eds.), Thinking with Michel Foucault in educational leadership (pp. 47–74). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350471917.ch-2
Themes: what people were looking for, judging by the way they went about it;
an object of inquiry as marking out the unknown as something knowable (worth knowing but not-yet known).
[PDF]
- Why has educational administration narrowed inquiry to leader influence?
A clue lies in the relationship between the object that inquiry is looking for, and the style of looking for it. If we have relied on survey questionnaires of staff perceptions and attitudes, it is little wonder that we have concentrated on influence over staff perceptions and attitudes.
Bongers, A. (2025). The leaderisation of schools: how did schooling come to be about leadership? [Commentary]. Leading & Managing, 31(3), 135-139. https://journals.flvc.org/leading-and-managing/issue/view/6569
Themes: leadership influence as tilting staff perceptions and attitudes to build commitment to a vision or mission of change;
better leadership theory, or something better than leadership theory.
[PDF]
- What is the style of inquiry in today’s educational leadership research?
We choose evidence that is consistent with what (we think) we know, based on past survey questionnaire studies. But consistency cannot be our only criterion. We need to consider other bodies of evidence, and other criteria for choosing between explanations.
Bongers, A. (2026). Bringing back theory choice: comparative epistemology in educational administration and leadership research. Journal of Educational Administration and History. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2026.2732910
Themes: what questions get posed and what counts as a valid answer.
[PDF]
- How does this style of inquiry play out? What is the mechanism?
These days, what (we think) we know is consolidated through overviews of existing research. But the way we construct those overviews introduces its own issues. I examine a prominent paper making ‘seven strong claims’ about leadership and identify seven methodological pressure points.
Bongers, A. (2026). Overviews and intellectual authority in educational leadership research: How we know ‘what we know.’ Educational Management Administration & Leadership. https://doi.org/10.1177/17411432261495221
Themes: not just what we know, but how we came to know it;
the evidence that goes into evidence-informed practice.
References
Crombie, A. C. (1994). Styles of scientific thinking in the European tradition: The history of argument and explanation especially in the mathematical and biomedical sciences and arts (Vols. 1–3). Duckworth.
Daston, L. (Ed.). (2000). Biographies of scientific objects. University of Chicago Press.
Fleck, L. (1979). Genesis and development of a scientific fact. University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). Introduction by Michel Foucault. In G. Canguilhem, On the normal and the pathological (p. ix-xx). D. Reidel Publishing.
Hacking, I. (2009). Scientific reason. National Taiwan University.
Lloyd, G. E. R. (2004). Ancient worlds, modern reflections: Philosophical perspectives on Greek and Chinese science and culture. Clarendon Press.
Rheinberger, H.-J. (1997). Toward a history of epistemic things: Synthesizing proteins in the test tube. Stanford University Press.
