چكيده لاتين :
Since 1950 some international organizations decided to establish a unanimous method and standard in defining the aspects of literacy. According to UNESCO “Literacy” is the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute, using printed and written (and visual) materials associated with varying contexts. Literacy involves a continuum of learning to enable an individual to achieve his or her goals, to develop his or her knowledge and potential and to participate fully in the wider society. However Literacy is a multilateral and dynamic concept and is impossible to be limited to this definition or any other interpretation.
On the one hand, the school institution is the main platform in realizing the educational goals of each nation. The majority of the experts believe, the school administration plays a fundamental role in both schools’ function in general and teacher-pupil function in particular, that develops the demands, needs and the expectations of the society from the schools’ outcome. In recent decades, the responsibilities of the school principals have transformed and become more expanded, complicated, challenging and undetermined with lack of transparency. A school principal have to be an effective organizer, supervisor, planner, decision maker, financial manager, and the most important of all, educational leader, that is in constant transformation. Thus, one of the strategies of management based on the contingency theory, is to delegate some levels of the authority and the power to the educational administration and leadership.
On the other hand, there have been several approaches to the educational leadership defined and discussed. Despite the numerous expressions used in different schools, the structures and characteristics of the educational leadership are the same. Educational leadership, mostly includes certain functions as: supervising the education in class, developing the curriculum and the staff, enabling and empowering the staff and the educators, the proficiency in the school management and preparing a curriculum in the school, all the responsibilities that the leaders take to improve the teaching and learning process in the schools, the concentration of the principal on the teaching and learning process and the interaction between the teachers and the pupils, and etc. These definitions and expressions depict the deep concerns about the role of the principals in the teaching and learning process. However, according to the researchers, educational leadership is one of the aspects of the school principal which aims to an effective teaching and learning in schools.
Therefore, several researches have been conducted in order to evaluate the principals both inside the country and abroad. In spite of the researches on the evaluation of the leaders and the principals of the schools, and the emphasis of the fundamental document on the development of education on the role of the educational leadership, there has been no researches conducted specifically on the role of the educational leadership literacy of the school principals that clearly establishes a platform for the evaluation of the principals particularly in this field of study.
In other words, it is not determined what knowledge, skills, attitudes and responsibilities meet the requirements of the fundamental document on the development of education in order to transform the role of the school principals from the management to the educational leadership position. Considering the fact that there are deferent perspectives revolving around educational leadership inside the country and abroad, it can be concluded that some cognitive skills as: planning, intelligence, creativity, critical thinking, rationality and etc. are the abilities that an educational leader must retain. The major question that is raised here, is what kind of literacy, a principal is required to have, as an educational leader? Based on this question, this research is done with the aim of establishing a framework of educational leadership literacy of the school principals in the Iranian Education System.
Considering that the purpose of this study is to provide a framework of the educational leadership literacy in the school principals of the Iranian Education System, the qualitative research design and The Meta-Synthesis Method is used and includes 6 steps: 1- taking a philosophical stance and establishing the question. 2- Resources research. 3- Qualitative evaluation 4- Analyzing the researches. 5- Combining the findings. 6- Validating the finding. In the first step, and after providing the questionnaire, the members of the meta-synthesis team were determined. The meta-synthesis team members included 2 curriculum planning experts, 1 expert in the field of education and the meta-synthesis method accompanied by an expert in data bases from Mirzaye Shirazi Library with Master’s degree in the field of Information science and knowledge management. The association of the data bases expert, is due to reliability and validity of the brute-force search and systematic review of the literatures related to the subject and finding the needed resources. In the second and third step, research data from reliable sources, including Latin data banks of Scopus and Springer (2005 to 2019), and Persian data banks of Magiran and Noormags and etc. (1378 to 1398 Solar Hijri Calendar) were determined based on the Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria. By using Systematic Review Method and the following keywords of: literacy, educational leader’s literacy, framework of the educational leader’s literacy, were searched with the word of “qualitative” in the study field of educational science, then the search was limited and the word of “educational leadership competency” was searched and 600 qualitative and mixed articles were analyzed (only the qualitative part of the mixed researches were analyzed) and categorized in 3 groups: a:related b:somehow related and c:unrelated. Finally, 42 articles were chosen. . In the fourth step, with the data analysis, first, 331 Educational Leadership content-bases were extracted. Then using introduction-writing and classifying method, this 331 content-bases, were classified into 20 organizing components of Information Literacy, Communication Literacy, Leadership Literacy, Ethic Literacy, Personality Literacy, Religious Literacy, Vocational Literacy, Economic Literacy, Digital Literacy, Health Literacy, Social Literacy, International Literacy, Organizational Literacy, Thought Literacy, Cultural Literacy, Academic Literacy, Attitude and Perspective Literacy, Legal Literacy, Research Literacy and Aesthetic Literacy, and formed the framework of The Educational Leaders’ Literacy in the school principal’s. The designed framework can be used as a standard for choosing or planning a curriculum for in-service training courses of the school principals in the educational system, or be used as a required syllabus of The Educational Leaders’ Literacy in the universities and the higher education institutions.
