SUPERVISION: A CRITICAL INQUIRY INTO THE MEANING OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TEACHERS AND PRINCIPALS (RATIONALITY, THEORY

Statement of the Problem. This dissertation considers current supervisory practices and examines the appropriateness of solving educational problems by using supervisory models that are based on principles inherent in a technocratic rationality. This dissertation also suggests an alternative supervisory model that establishes the prerequisites for a discursive environment, enabling teachers and principals to work more effectively. The interpretive rationality undergirding this alternative environment has the potential of creating a social, communicative context in which educators can better examine and understand the meaning of supervisory relationships.;Procedures and Methods. This research is based on a participatory methodology. Research participants (teachers and principals) were identified and then interviewed in depth. Written transcripts of the interviews provide texts for interpretation and critical analysis by participants and researcher. Methodology draws upon the work of social philosophers Schutz, Luckmann, Ricoeur, and Geertz in order to examine culturally determined assumptions about the meaning of education in general, and supervision of teaching in particular.;Results. An analysis, informed by the work of Bowers and Habermas on communicative competence and human cognitive interests, reveals that teachers and principals describe the success and purposiveness of supevisory relationships by the degree to which trust, reciprocity, and credibility can be established and sustained.;Conclusion. The conclusion discusses how educators might act to extend their ability to examine taken-for-granted premises about the school life-world. An argument is made for establishing supervisory relationships that are oriented toward negotiating the meaning and purpose of social reality (especially within the school life-world). It is further argued that educators can and must act on the knowledge they generate through critical discourse in order to allow for educational environments that promote self-reflection, and encourage people to ask qualitatively different questions about familiar problems.