Tears at the Heart of Things: Moral Distress Among Principals of Canadian-Accredited Schools in China

• Author / Creator

  Smith, Lee

• Moral distress arises when a person is aware of a moral problem, acknowledges a moral responsibility to act, yet is constrained from following a course of action congruent with their own moral judgement (Nathaniel, 2006; Jameton, 1984). Being hindered from doing what one believes to be morally right has psychological, affective, and relational implications. In this doctoral study, I interviewed 15 principals of Canadian-accredited schools in China to understand how they navigated morally distressing situations and balanced disparate cultural and political values and expectations when leading their schools.

  I employed Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) as a research methodology because it has the central focus of “understanding people’s lived experiences and the meanings they attach to their experiences” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 2). I derived 14 Personal Experiential Themes, which were the constituent pieces of the principals’ own unique sense-making through the complexities of administering a Canadian school in a context with a sometimes vastly different ideological climate. I sorted these Personal Experiential Themes into four Group Experiential Themes, which I named finding one’s place, finding one’s footing, finding one’s route through, and finding one’s perspective.

  I then created a four-part framework in which to situate the principals as they contended with morally distressing situations within their professional identities. I named this moral fidelity, as the principals’ processes of making meaning of their experiences was indicative of and faithful to the central belief which, in any given moment, anchored their own moral positionality. In their own meaning-making and to assuage the moral distress they experienced, the principals oriented themselves towards an obligation they felt to their adopted home (to context), to the tenets which underlie the Canadian curriculum they administered (to curriculum), to the employment contract they had signed (to contract), or to their own personal and professional growth (to self). Then, I proposed moral fluidity as the mechanism of movement between those four parts, in which I recognized that the principals shifted the locus of their moral reasoning to constantly align their sense of duty with their own moral judgement, to move between the obligations they oriented towards, to do what they needed to do in the place where they were doing it to make sense of morally distressing situations. The principals’ moral fluidity allowed them the intellectual and affective nimbleness they themselves required to find a measure of consonance within their own professional identities.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • moral distress
  • principals
  • Canadian-accredited schools
  • international education
  • China
  • Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

• Graduation date

  Spring 2024

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-e2fn-e866

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.