The Architectonic Frames: Dialogic Leadership, Surveillance and the Problem of Invisible Pedagogies

Scholars and practitioners seldom consider pedagogy as a starting point in their appreciations of the role of leadership in education. However, the rise of invisible pedagogies may warrant a revaluation of this practice. Invisible pedagogies are enabled by cloud-based learning management platforms and their data-driven algorithms and protocols, which incentivize opaque practices and the monetization of dialogism in the form of surveillance textualism or shadow texts. As such, some scholars predict that the future growth of invisible pedagogies is inevitable. Even though dialogic leadership is positioned to calibrate the trajectory of invisible pedagogies and explicate surveillance textualism, it is largely a minority view in education. This conceptual survey reassesses the divergent approaches and changes in leadership thought, including the role that connectivism and dialogism now play in its reorientation. Valuing leadership as a dialogic practice, this study also examines the relationship between texts and pedagogy and how they are entwined and instrumentalized by surveillance capitalism. Based on the findings from this appraisal, the architectonic frames are introduced as a praxis and professional development tool that is designed to inspire agentic conversations among teachers and leaders on the dialogism inherent in the digitalization of texts, pedagogy, and surveillance. More significantly, this paradigm synthesizes the ideas of dialogic thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Michel Foucault, making their complex conceptualizations more accessible as teaching and leadership tools.