Educational Leadership in Ecuador: Professional Identity, Leadership Practices and Professional Development
(2026)
Files
Thesis dissertation - Oscar Moreno.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 4.4 MB
Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
; - Abstract
- Educational leadership research has been developed predominantly in Anglo-Saxon and high-income contexts, leaving Latin American education systems comparatively underrepresented in the field. This dissertation addresses that theoretical and empirical gap by investigating how educational leadership is constructed, enacted, and developed in Ecuadorian technical schools. It focuses specifically on how principals and vice-principals construct their professional identities, enact leadership practices, and experience leadership learning and development through participation in Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), examined here as collaborative spaces for professional development. Guided by a constructivist–interpretivist stance, the dissertation adopts a qualitative, cumulative, and partly longitudinal design. It is structured around four empirical studies: the first examines leadership identity, the second explores leadership practices, the third investigates leadership learning and development through participation in PLCs, and the fourth analyses PLC functioning and leadership development over time through an observation-led multiple-case design. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, day-long PLC observations, and systematic analysis of ministerial, institutional, and field-based documents. The findings show that leadership in Ecuadorian technical schools is shaped by policy volatility, positional instability, and limited professional support. Leadership identity emerged as dynamic and often ambiguous, particularly under conditions marked by acting appointments, weak preparation pathways, and blurred role expectations. Leadership practices appeared as hybrid, combining instructional, transformational, and distributed moves in response to demanding organisational and pedagogical realities. PLCs functioned as meaningful spaces for collective sense-making, peer exchange, and professional learning, but their developmental potential depended on continuity, facilitation, and institutional support. Across the dissertation, leadership development is understood not as a linear accumulation of competencies, but as a recursive and contextually mediated process linking identity, practice, and collaborative learning. The dissertation contributes a context-sensitive understanding of educational leadership and leadership development in Ecuadorian technical schools, challenging the uncritical transfer of Anglo-Saxon models to Latin American settings. It argues that sustained and wellscaffolded PLCs can support leadership development even in constrained systems, while also showing that meaningful professionalisation requires broader and more coherent development pathways grounded in local realities.
- Affiliations
Citations
Moreno, O. (2026). Educational Leadership in Ecuador: Professional Identity, Leadership Practices and Professional Development. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/278256