فاطمه سلطانی

This text is a re-reading of one of Linda Evans’s important articles on the current state of the field of educational leadership studies. In this article, Evans uses an exploratory-empirical approach to critically and expertly analyze the scholarship on educational leadership and management. The Evers Thought Foundation is based on the premise that the field of educational leadership studies, especially in explaining leadership, is a place of controversy. She believes that the claims of mainstream educational leadership research have been challenged by a wide range of critics. Some of these criticisms focus on the conceptual clarity of educational leadership, such as who and on what basis is classified as a leader; and whether it is useful to refer to the relationships of “leaders” and “followers” ​​to explain this concept. Evans emphasizes that the “new wave” of critical studies of educational leadership has raised controversial questions; Is there such a thing as leadership at all, or is it a constructed myth? The main criticisms of educational leadership challenge three claims of mainstream theoretical knowledge—underlying what Evans calls in his article the belief in causality, the belief in leadership dependency, and the belief in perception—which are the focus of this article. While criticisms of these beliefs have been repeated many times in this field of study, this article analyzes them from the epistemological perspective of Lawrence Bonjour to address the question of whether educational leadership is still worth studying. In this article, Evans attempts to analyze the mainstream belief system of educational leadership knowledge within a framework drawn from the philosophy of science, and therefore uses Bonjour’s “coherentist theory of epistemological justification” to develop a more structured assessment of what has been achieved so far by critical research.