The Knowledge Base in the Field of Educational Administration and New Field Members

The field of educational administration (EA) is characterized by loose scholarly boundaries that enable the permeation of new sorts of knowledge, resulting in some intellectual confusion. The purpose of this article is to probe into the kind of knowledge base in the field that every new scholar should know and read in order to become an expert in the EA field, one who contributes to its knowledge production and academic programs. What is the basic knowledge every emergent scholar in the EA field should be familiar with, regardless of his/her main discipline? In other words, I wonder what sort of knowledge a new field member whose education is in business administration, psychology of organizations, or sociology of education should acquire in order to be competent enough to teach in EA programs or supervise PhD students in this field. My rejoinder is built on the following steps.Emergent EA scholars should realize that the connections between input-process and output are weak in the instructional aspects of the school organization. Emergent scholars trained in another discipline may continue teaching and analyzing educational administration from theoretical and conceptual perspectives that are alien to the basic characteristics of the school organization. Emergent scholars should not only know how to apply models such as transformational and participative leadership to educational institutions, but also comprehend the distinctive meanings of these models in schools. Emergent scholars should be familiar with models that seem to be particular to educational organization such as moral leadership, shared leadership, leadership for social justice, and distributed leadership.