Reimaging Educational Management and Leadership: Trajectories From The Prison Environment

Abstract

The article makes a claim that educational management and leadership in the musical arts discipline generally extend beyond the boundaries of formal education institutions to include and embrace other music education endeavours in other settings of both the young and old, even offenders. Within this space I present some of the encounters with the participants of the music participatory action research (MPAR) in one of the prisons in the Mthatha Medium Correctional Centre (MMCC) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. I draw from Michel Foucault’s philosophical theory of governing or governmentality to gain a better understanding of the potential of Foucauldian ideas in analysing educational practices and processes and the wider strategies and techniques of panopticism in the prison environment of how offenders in constructing their new identities as lifelong learners, leaders and managers committed to reconstructing their identities as rehabilitated citizens and artists. I further look at the nature of the collaboration between the community groups to argue for the significance of dialogical interactions among participants for effective reconceptualisation and construction of new identities of offenders as artistic leaders and managers ready for integration into the society. Findings revealed that offenders involved in music activities in prison, although they are not completely panoptic-free, are nevertheless panoptic-conscious, or what I call ‘panoptic-wise’. They are free to participate in music activities and perform to the very people they are subjected to, thus, subverting the authoritarian, panoptic gaze into the gaze of an audience.