CERC Symposium: The Next Horizon of Educational Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from East Asia

CERC symposium: The Next Horizon of Educational Leadership: Multidisciplinary Perspectives from East Asia

Date: September 22, 2026 (Tuesday)

Time: 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm 

Venue: MWC531, Meng Wah Complex, HKU / Online via Zoom

Language: English

Registration: https://hku.zoom.us/meeting/register/4UvLlpYLRpi-HKbZuBudjg

This symposium brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars working across education, policy, sociology, philosophy, and related fields to explore emerging horizons in educational leadership through perspectives from East Asia. Through focused presentations and interactive dialogue, contributors will examine how leadership is conceptualised, practised, and transformed across diverse education communities in the region.

Drawing on scholarship across disciplines and education sectors spanning early years, primary, secondary, and higher education, the symposium examines educational leadership research and the theoretical core of the field alongside locally grounded intellectual traditions, histories, and ways of knowing. In examining a range of scholarship, practice, and thinking from across East Asia, the symposium and its related dialogue offer an opportunity to consider how scholarship from the region can expand, complicate, and reimagine the conceptual foundations of educational leadership, and what an emerging agenda for educational leadership in East Asia might look like, particularly in relation to how issues of equity, inclusion, wellbeing, and community are understood and enacted by educational leaders.

Talk 1: Leadership-in-Community: Starting from Asian Ways of Knowing

Speaker:

Professor Priya Goel

Associate Professor

California State University, Dominguez Hills

Abstract: 

What conception of leadership-in-community begins to emerge when we start from Asian ways of knowing? This presentation explores this question through three traditions—Confucian empathy, karuṇā (Buddhist compassion), and Southeast Asian Buddhist Chronicle literature—bringing them into conversation with contemporary educational leadership policy and practice priorities in Singapore and Hong Kong as case examples. Through these conversations, the presentation considers how Asian ways of knowing might inform a leadership-in-community mindset and moves that foreground relationality, interdependence, care, and community.

Talk 2: The road less travelled: Leadership, values, and systems in the Singapore educational story

Speaker:

Professor Cheng Yong Tan

Associate Professor

The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

Singapore's education system consistently ranks among the world's top performers, yet its success defies conventional reform narratives centered on decentralization and school autonomy. This presentation examines how educational leadership, cultural values, and systems-level design interact to produce this high-performing model. Drawing on Singapore's centralized human resource architecture—including structured career tracks, unified leadership training, and principal rotation—the analysis reveals a system of "bounded autonomy," where professionalized educators operate within tightly defined policy parameters. Underpinning this structure is a Confucian-paternalist leadership culture that fosters vertical cohesion through reciprocal moral obligation between leaders and teachers. The presentation further explores how meritocratic and pragmatic national values shape resource allocation and reform priorities, while considering emerging tensions around equity, innovation, and sustainability. Singapore's case offers valuable insights for understanding alternative pathways to educational excellence in culturally distinct, tightly coupled systems.

Talk 3: From the Margins to the Theoretical Core: Theorising Educational Leadership from Hong Kong

Speaker:

Professor Paul Campbell

Assistant Professor (Educational Administration and Leadership)

The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:

What might educational leadership theory become if contexts typically positioned at the margins were treated as sites of conceptual production? This presentation considers how leading, leaders and leadership can be theorised from Hong Kong, a context shaped by intersecting linguistic traditions, sociocultural norms and shifting sociopolitical conditions. Drawing on the experiences of Hong Kong school leaders, it examines leadership as the contextual negotiation of meaning, authority and possibility. Leaders are neither simply occupants of formal roles nor autonomous agents applying transferable models. They negotiate how situations are understood, whose knowledge is recognised, how authority is exercised, and which forms of action become possible within prevailing conditions. Leadership is produced through the interplay of language, history, power and professional judgement. This challenges the assumption that leadership theories can travel without being linguistically, culturally and politically reconstituted. The presentation argues that, rather than being an empirical testing ground for theories developed elsewhere, the contextually grounded knowledge of Hong Kong school leaders can extend the field’s theoretical core and support more plural understandings of leading and being a leader.

All are welcome!

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