How to Become an Educational Leader in Five Simple Steps: An Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Decision Making (Relative to Time and Temporal Situatedness)

This study focuses on the phenomenon of time and decision-making in schools by asking the phenomenological question ' What does it look like to make decisions (relative to time and temporal situatedness)? ' It explores this question by working through the ideas of Heidegger's Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty's corporeality, van Manen's hermeneutics, Habermas' crisis, Bollnow's critique, Derrida's deconstruction, Foucault's poststructuralism, Nietzsche's free will, Innis' political history, Walker's music history, Hargreaves' Critical Theory, Mazis' dance, Morgan's metaphors, Wittgenstein's language logic, and Casey's remembering. Essentially, the thesis attempts to raise to awareness the intellectual pause, the moment that gives us deep appreciation for our roles as decision-makers and an awareness of decisions about to be made. If we are nothing more than movers-moving-in-endless-motion through a spiraling maze of decision-making, then as situated beings we are faced with the possibility of thinking ourselves back to awareness, thus entering into genuine dialogue with one another.