Ethics, Innovation, and Educational Leadership: An Autoethnographic Study of Practice in South Asian Contexts to Shape Ethical Literacy

This chapter provides a qualitative exploration of three parallel experiences of leading education in South-Asian contexts, straddling the duality of a practice of ethics and innovation. Innovation, a process requiring a leadership mindset and opportunity for educational change, also brings with it possibilities for norm divergence, while ethics requires norm adherence, coupled with guiding principles and values. Contextualized within the private international school model of India and Bangladesh, we respond to the query: How is ethical literacy for school leadership shaped in the face of challenges to innovate educational practice? Through reflexive collaborative autoethnography (CAE), the authors explore ethical school leadership in the entrepreneurial and market-driven South Asian contexts of India and Bangladesh. Using a framework of ethical leadership as a driver of ethical culture and decision-making, the chapter proposes a model for navigating private schooling as a backdrop to tensions between the potential of profitable innovations and the welfare of students. The model highlights the relational integrity of effective leadership of innovation for student welfare. The chapter concludes with implications for future studies of schools as evolving and responsive organizations engaged in multiple stakeholder consultations simultaneously.