This is a conceptual and comparative study, not an empirical investigation based on interviews, observations or surveys. The author draws on scholarly literature, professional standards, policy documents and official government sources to compare a decentralized U.S. system, a semi-centralized Abu Dhabi arrangement and a formally centralized Chinese system. The three jurisdictions were selected as illustrative governance configurations rather than representative samples, and the paper does not claim that policies and practices are uniform within them. Its purpose is to clarify concepts and develop an interpretive framework rather than test hypotheses, establish causal effects or estimate how common particular supervisory practices are.

The framework combines “leadership of recognition,” drawn principally from Paul Ricœur’s phenomenology of recognition, with Michel Foucault’s relational account of power. Recognition is treated as more than simple acknowledgment: it is the process through which people and their actions become intelligible, meaningful and morally significant. In supervision, recognition can affirm professional authority and responsibility, but it can also become conditional, bureaucratic or political. The framework therefore asks two linked questions: what qualities of principal leadership are affirmed, and what institutional arrangements determine which qualities can be seen, valued, challenged or withheld?

The comparisons reveal three dominant, though not exclusive, modes of recognition. In the United States, recognition is largely instrumental: principals are recognized as professional actors through leadership standards, multi-source evaluations and measurable outcomes, including student performance and teacher effectiveness. This approach can acknowledge professional competence, but its strong emphasis on results risks reducing leadership to outputs and making recognition contingent on performance. In Abu Dhabi, recognition is more institutional and developmental. Cluster Managers oversee groups of schools, while evaluation is connected to leadership standards, professional development and ADEK’s Irtiqaa school self-evaluation framework.

China provides the clearest ideological dimension. School leadership is organized through a dual structure in which a principal and a School Party Secretary may jointly exercise authority or occupy the same office. A 2022 trial policy reaffirmed the Party organization’s central role in setting direction, making personnel decisions and ensuring implementation while retaining the principal as the chief administrative actor. National college entrance examination scores, or Gāokǎo, carry substantial weight, alongside political and ideological compliance. The analysis characterizes this arrangement as political or ideological recognition, in which professional evaluation is inseparable from ideological alignment and legitimacy may be defined through political criteria.

Foucault’s analysis explains why differences among these systems do not erase their common power structure. Supervisors and principals are differentiated by knowledge, professional qualification, cultural and linguistic background, national identity and political affiliation, as well as by the sources of their authority. Decentralization therefore does not automatically redistribute power. In each case, a delegated official—typically an assistant superintendent or area director in the United States, an ADEK Cluster Manager in Abu Dhabi, or a School Party Secretary in China—occupies the structurally dominant position. Principals, although usually the highest-ranking leaders inside their schools, become supervisees when they encounter the administration above them.

Supervisory power becomes operational through several mechanisms. These include strict application of rules, legal or administrative sanctions, the prospect of constrained budgets or job instability, data-driven monitoring and technology-mediated surveillance. It is also enacted through institutional routines: hierarchical authority, structured procedures, inspections, observations and evaluation instruments. Foucault’s concept of normalization is especially important because standards do more than register behavior. They establish what counts as acceptable or desirable performance, and principals may internalize those expectations and regulate their own conduct. The paper notes that systematic research on a Hawthorne effect in principal supervision appears scarce, so this is a theoretical application of panoptic ideas rather than a demonstrated behavioral result.

A central tension is the overlap between formative supervision and summative evaluation. The same observation, inspection report, portfolio, feedback discussion or school-performance indicator may be used both to improve practice and to judge the principal. The problem is therefore not necessarily the evidence itself, but the purpose assigned to it and the relations through which it is interpreted. Formative work requires adult learning that is self-directed, experiential, problem-centered and relevant to principals’ existing knowledge. Yet hierarchy, role ambiguity and the conflation of coaching, monitoring and evaluation can make developmental supervision feel punitive or reduce it to procedural compliance.

The paper does not call for abandoning evaluation. Instead, it argues for separating developmental support from administrative sanction, using multiple sources of evidence, making the evidentiary basis of judgments transparent, and giving principals meaningful opportunities to interpret and discuss findings. Feedback is most likely to support improvement, according to the analysis, when it is ongoing, dialogical, instructional and decoupled from punishment. Supervisors would also need competence in judgment, dialogue and professional ethics, not only familiarity with evaluation procedures. These are theoretical implications rather than tested interventions, and the paper does not provide evidence that a particular reform will improve student outcomes.

Several limitations define the scope of the analysis. The comparison covers supervisory policy and published institutional arrangements rather than the day-to-day experiences of principals and supervisors, and the United States, Abu Dhabi and China are deliberately illustrative cases. The proposed typology is an interpretation of their governance logics, not a statistical classification or a finding that each country belongs permanently to one category. The paper also leaves empirical questions unresolved: how principals and supervisors negotiate, experience or resist recognition and power, whether formal decentralization changes perceived power distance, and how an observational Hawthorne effect operates in practice. Its central claim is that supervision of principals is not merely an administrative mechanism evaluating leadership; through recognition, categorization and control, it produces the kinds of leaders that governing systems regard as visible, acceptable and legitimate.

Subject of Research: Conceptual analysis of recognition and power relations in principal supervision across three education systems

Article Title: Recognition and power relations in the supervision of school principals

Article References: Park, J. (2026). Recognition and power relations in the supervision of school principals. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1896274. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1896274

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1896274

Keywords: school principal supervision, educational governance, recognition theory, Foucault power analysis, leadership accountability, professional agency, United States education, Abu Dhabi education, China education, Recognition, power, relations

The research team, led by Min Chen, Xiao Zhang, Qihui Wang, and Yating Li of the National Engineering Research Center for E-Learning at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, built their investigation on a structured digital literacy framework designed specifically for teachers at higher vocational colleges. Rather than treating digital literacy as a single, undifferentiated skill, the framework decomposed the concept into five measurable dimensions: digital awareness, digital knowledge and skills, digital application, digital social responsibility, and professional development. This multidimensional approach allowed the researchers to move beyond the familiar finding that teachers are somewhere in the middle of the digital competence spectrum and instead map precisely where strengths and weaknesses cluster within a large teacher population.

The headline result is both encouraging and cautionary. On the whole, teachers’ digital literacy registered at a moderately high level, suggesting that the sustained policy push for educational digital transformation in China is producing measurable gains. However, that overall score concealed a pronounced internal imbalance. Three dimensions stood out as relatively well developed: digital awareness, meaning teachers’ recognition of the value and importance of digital technologies; digital application, their actual use of digital tools in instruction; and digital social responsibility, encompassing ethical, legal, and safe conduct in digital environments. By contrast, digital knowledge and skills, the technical foundation underpinning everything else, and professional development, teachers’ capacity to grow and adapt their digital competencies over time, remained comparatively weak across the sample.

That imbalance matters because the five dimensions do not operate in isolation. When the researchers ran correlation analyses across the dimensions, they found that digital awareness, digital application, digital social responsibility, and professional development were moderately to strongly positively correlated with one another, forming a tightly interconnected cluster. A teacher who values technology tends to use it, behaves responsibly online, and invests in continued learning, and each of these tendencies reinforces the others. Digital knowledge and skills, however, told a different story: this dimension demonstrated only weak correlations with the other four. In practical terms, a teacher can be enthusiastic, ethically grounded, and application-oriented while still lacking the underlying technical mastery to convert that motivation into sophisticated classroom practice. The technical core appears to develop along a trajectory that is partially decoupled from attitudinal and behavioral growth.

The study also examined group differences, asking whether gender, years of teaching experience, and academic qualification were associated with digital literacy scores. All three factors showed statistically meaningful relationships, but with small effect sizes, a nuance with important policy implications. Small effects mean that demographic characteristics explain only a modest share of the variation between teachers; no single group is dramatically ahead of or behind another. Yet the relationships are consistent enough to suggest that training systems should remain attentive to them. The finding echoes international literature, including comparative studies of teachers in different countries and analyses of generational digital gaps among vocational education and training instructors, which likewise report that personal and contextual factors shape digital competence in subtle rather than dramatic ways.

From these patterns the researchers distilled two central challenges confronting vocational colleges. The first is the imbalanced development across dimensions already described, in which visible and valued behaviors outpace the quieter accumulation of technical knowledge and the habit of continuous professional growth. The second is insufficient data-driven capability and innovation capacity. As educational institutions increasingly rely on learning analytics, adaptive platforms, and evidence-based teaching decisions, teachers who cannot interpret data or generate innovative digital solutions risk becoming passive consumers of technology rather than active shapers of it. This weakness is particularly consequential in vocational education, where graduates must enter industries that themselves demand data fluency and adaptive problem solving, and where teachers are expected to model precisely the competencies their students will need in the workplace.

The technical architecture of the study lends its conclusions considerable credibility. A sample of 6,957 teachers drawn from 30 institutions within one province reduces the risk that results reflect the idiosyncrasies of a single campus or a small convenience sample. By holding the provincial context constant while sampling broadly across institutions, the design captures variation attributable to teachers themselves rather than to radically different regional policies. The structured framework aligns with, and extends, internationally recognized approaches such as the European DigComp framework for digital competence and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge model, both of which have guided a generation of research on what teachers need to know and do to integrate technology effectively. The Chinese Ministry of Education’s own 2022 standard for teachers’ digital literacy provided a national policy anchor for the framework’s construction.

The recommended remedies are correspondingly structural rather than superficial. The authors propose improvement across three fronts: policy refinement, optimization of training systems, and construction of an innovation-supporting ecosystem. Policy improvement would involve aligning institutional incentives and evaluation mechanisms with the full five-dimension framework, so that gains in awareness and application are not achieved at the expense of foundational knowledge. Training system optimization would target the weak dimensions directly, offering sustained, practice-based development in digital knowledge and skills rather than one-off workshops, an approach supported by research on teachers’ professional development pathways and their unmet technical training needs. The innovation ecosystem recommendation envisions colleges building partnerships and infrastructures, including school, university, and industry collaboration, that give teachers genuine opportunities to experiment, co-create learning technologies, and develop data-informed teaching practices.

The broader significance of the study lies in its demonstration that digital transformation in education is not a binary of digitally fluent and digitally excluded teachers. Even within a single province, and within a moderately high-performing teacher population, competence is structurally uneven, with some dimensions advancing in lockstep while others lag behind. For education authorities everywhere, the implication is that assessment systems must be granular enough to detect these imbalances and that interventions must be dimension-specific. A workforce can believe in digital education, apply digital tools daily, and behave responsibly online while still lacking the analytical and innovative depth that the coming decade of AI-enhanced vocational training will demand. Studies of this scale and precision provide the diagnostic evidence needed to close that gap before it widens, and they offer a replicable template for other education systems seeking to measure, understand, and systematically improve the digital literacy of the teachers on whom educational transformation ultimately depends.

Subject of Research: Digital literacy and its dimensional structure among teachers at higher vocational colleges in China

Article Title: Exploring Digital Literacy Among Teachers at Higher Vocational Colleges: Current Status and Recommendations for Improvement

Article References: Chen, M., Zhang, X., Wang, Q., & Li, Y. (2026). Exploring Digital Literacy Among Teachers at Higher Vocational Colleges: Current Status and Recommendations for Improvement. Frontiers of Digital Education, 3(3), Article 26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44366-026-0100-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44366-026-0100-4

Keywords: digital literacy, higher vocational colleges, teacher competence, vocational education, digital transformation, teacher training, digital awareness, digital application, professional development, China education, educational technology, data-driven teaching