The Role of Rural Educational Leadership in Influencing Societal Behaviour: A Case Study of Goromonzi District: The Community’s Perceptive

Abstract

This study establishes the role of rural educational leadership in influencing societal behaviour, focusing Goromonzi District, Zimbabwe. It was positioned alongside the behavioural theories and the African unhu/ubuntu philosophy, informed by a qualitative case study. It made use of interviews, focus group discussions and observations in the generation of data from a purposive sample of three rural secondary schools. The rural context has its own set of unique community identifiers, making rural schools remarkably different from those found in the urban centres. The rural community is experiencing an influx of urban migration and as a result, the disturbance of an ideal rural setting is posing a challenge to the educational leadership in impacting the societal behaviour in the way it ought to be. The behavioural patterns displayed by Goromonzi community compel one to take a closer look at the current rural educational leadership in an effort to assess possible catalysts of such behavioural trends. Moreover, the educational leadership in the rural community is often characterised by lack of understanding of the rural communities’ traditional beliefs and practices, giving rise to contradictions with what the educational leadership intends to promote and encourage at times. On the other hand, there is also the general notion that most rural communities are uneducated and this could be a hindrance in their attitude towards educational leadership and educational activities. Consequently, a cultural shift and contextual adaptation of distinctive attitudes and behaviours that enhance positive behaviour transformation becomes imperative. Above it all, studying rural behavioural trends as a response to educational leadership was a paradoxical journey. The study thus, concludes that while literature points out that leadership has a direct influence of the behaviour of its community, this cannot go far unless the educational leadership deliberately aligns its own behaviour with the dictates of unhu/ubuntu philosophy which has a place in the African rural context.