Towards a Contextual Understanding of School Principal Agency in Public Schools in Oman: Leading during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The project aims to explore school principals' agency in Omani schools and the initiatives they have taken in leading their institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Crises in general, and this pandemic in particular, re-emphasize the complex role of school principals (Leithwood et al., 2021) which require them to have autonomy in order to enact agency and hence lead their schools in problematic situations (Biesta and Tedder, 2007). Principal agency is considered an under-researched area in the Arab world and more specifically within the Omani context. Such a research gap may be understood within the presence of an implicit assumption that principals, and due to the position they hold, have a certain level of autonomy which will enable them to exercise agency. However, scholars argue that the centralized systems of education jeopardize the autonomy of leaders (Gunter and Ribbins, 2002; Ball, 2003) rendering their agency a challenging task. It is here that the interrelation between context and agency becomes clear. Therefore, the study adopts the ecological model (Priestley et al, 2012) as an overarching framework to understand the agency of principals within their specific contexts. Moreover, and in order to achieve a more critical and contextual understanding of the interplay between the different components of the model, the research will use the conceptual tools of Habermas's lifeworld colonization (Habermas, 1984) and Bourdieu's Theory of Practice (Bourdieu, 1990); in specific his delineation of habitus, capital, and field. The study adopts an exploratory qualitative research methodology, specifically a phenomenological approach, within the interpretive tradition where agency is to be explored as a phenomenon happening within an ecological setting. The study seeks to answer the research questions by capturing testimonies from school principals through in-depth open-ended semi-structured interviews, in addition to content analysis of policy documents pertaining to the work of school principals in Oman. Data will be analysed using thematic analysis which will allow the extraction of common themes and the development of a more critical and contextual understanding of principal agency as a phenomenon in Omani schools