Head teachers' spirituality and inclusive education: a perspective from critical realism

Spiritual leadership gains attention amongst researchers for closing the gap between achieving personal and organisational goals. Despite documentations that spirituality undergirds head teacher's actions leading inclusive schools, research still remains thin in understanding how spirituality underpins leadership for inclusive education. This paper draws on the philosophy of critical realism to offer a conceptual tool that identifies head teachers' spiritual actions in their efforts to include ethnic minority students. This is done through multiple qualitative methods collection from an in-depth case study at a multicultural primary school in Cyprus. The critical realist framework helps uncover head teacher's spiritual actions in a more systematic, structured and holistic way. It reveals that head teachers' spirituality supports the goals of inclusion and occurs in at least four interrelated and emergent ontological levels (psychological, social, cultural and policy levels) which are set in four scaler levels from microscopic to macroscopic (sub-individual, micro, meso and macro levels). This framework problematises mono-dimensional and reductionist understandings of spirituality in leadership. The paper concludes by suggesting solutions to enrich leadership programmes for inclusive education with fostering leaders' spirituality at different ontological levels.