Mētis and principals’ tactics of resistance

Principals’ tactics of resistance are an area of major contemporary interest. This resistance can include the range of ways in which principals remain able to pursue their own educational goals when the policy environment or other contextual factors would work to thwart or inhibit this. The present paper uses Mētis in combination with de Certeau’s (1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press) concept of the practice of everyday life to furnish a new way of investigating and articulating the multifaceted and subtle behaviours through which principals successfully engage in ethical and purposeful tactics of resistance. Our analysis revealed that the principal in our study used a combination of tactics of resistance alongside genuine cooperation (or the appearance of genuine cooperation). He did not always adopt a position of perpetual resistance, but rather a more fluid, multi-dimensional resisting-conforming stance in response to his specific context, aligning with the notion of resistance as a lived experience.