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This paper synthesises international research on effective mentor training, education and development (MTED).

An adaptive theory methodology (Layder, 1998), combining deductive and inductive methods, was deployed in a qualitative meta-synthesis of thematic findings generated in three studies: a systematic review of literature published between January 2010 and July 2020, together with a secondary analysis of studies including evidence on MTED; a subsequent systematic review of literature published between August 2020 and May 2023 and a general inductive analysis (Thomas, 2006) of interviews of leaders of large-scale MTED programmes that had good evidence of impact.

Our meta-synthesis found that effective MTED is evidence-based, refined through ongoing research, tailored both to individual needs and context and includes sustained support. Effective pedagogical approaches in MTED are underpinned by adult learning principles and establish a learning climate that fosters open and trusting relationships. Effective MTED is shaped by the espoused mentoring model or approach, with particular emphasis on understanding, building and sustaining mentoring relationships and incorporating observing, practising, critically reflecting on and receiving feedback on mentoring.

The study will be helpful to practitioners designing, reviewing and evaluating MTED programmes, researchers seeking to enhance the sparse MTED evidence base and programme commissioners.

The original and significant contribution of this study is the identification of key principles relating to the overall design of – as well as specific content, pedagogical approaches and supporting resources within – MTED programmes that have evidenced positive effects on mentors, mentees, mentoring and/or organisations.

This paper presents the results of empirical research on the effects of teaching practice on student teachers’ teaching competence and psycho-emotional development using the “most significant change” narrative investigative technique.

Following a qualitative research approach, the study was conducted during the academic year 2021–2022 in two phases (January and May) with the participation of 73 student teachers of the Department of Theology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) during their mentored teaching practice. Student teachers’ narratives were collected and analysed using the most significant change technique (Davies and Dart, 2005). Content analysis was conducted with the contribution of seven independent judges.

The results indicate that the Teaching Practice course with the guidance of mentors has a direct and positive effect on student teachers’ teaching competence. Mentors also seem to have a positive effect on student teachers’ psycho-emotional development. The research also confirms the reliability of the most significant change narrative technique for investigating the effect of related educational interventions.

The study empirically validates the usefulness and potential of the investigative narrative most significant change technique for evaluating the effects of teaching practice on student teachers’ professional development with the guidance of experienced mentor teachers. The results of the study also have implications for the design and evaluation of teacher practice programmes.

Digital platforms that offer on-demand gig work, while providing work opportunities in the economy, have raised social and economic concerns. Though extensive research on regulation of the gig economy exists, the effect of economic regulations on the welfare of the workers is not well understood. In this work, this paper aims to specifically study the effect of minimum wage and leisure regulations on the unemployment rate and offered wages. This paper also analyses the effect of up-skilling of the workers on unemployment and wages.

This paper builds an agent-based model of the labour market with heterogeneous workers and online platform firms that interact to match supply and demand. This paper also interviewed online workers in the two under-studied markets in online beauty and house maintenance services in India and included salient observations in to the model. This paper further validates the model findings with the interview observations.

Extensive simulations of the model indicate that the regulator's intervention on minimum wage and leisure reduces unemployment and offers better wages/leisure in the short term. However, these cannot be sustained unless the workers upgrade their skills, thereby improving their value to the employers. This paper also corroborates the authors’ interview observations on platforms deviating on stated worker contracts by simulating the same in the model. This paper finds that when platforms deviate on their stated incentive schemes, the unemployment rate tends to increase. This paper also finds that the emergence of online platforms in an erstwhile off-line market decreases the average unemployment rate with a moderate increase in the offered wage and leisure.

In this work, the focus has been to determine the worker-platform dyadic relationship. However, this is affected by consumer-related attributes such as ratings and associated reputation systems to promote trust between different stakeholders. Examining such a triadic relationship between consumers, platform and workers is required to comprehensively address the challenges of online gig economy.

Skilling and training are critical for worker mobility across tasks and jobs, especially in the gig economy. Gig workers, in general, seek to improve their skill level through self- or platform-enabled training programmes. The workers are able to generate more revenue through the new skills and hence can improve their reservation wage as well. This in turn increases average offered wages and reduces the overall unemployment in the sector. Despite attempts to classify gig workers as formal workers by labour laws across countries, there is resistance from online platforms. This is due to increased liability and responsibility that the platforms have to incur that possible increase their costs and expenses. This study shows that regulations, such as minimum leisure or minimum wage, increase the average wage or leisure in the market and increase unemployment. However, this might be a short-term phenomenon. In the long term, the gig workers benefit by enhancing their skills to not only stay employed but also bargain for better wages and leisure. The governments can play a larger role by facilitating upskilling programmes for the gig workers.

An extensive literature survey indicates that while most of the work on gig economy regulation emphasises the social and legal aspects, this work is unique in modeling the techno-economics of gig work. Further, while most of the economic research on gig work, focuses on consumers, this work focuses on the under-researched area of worker welfare. This paper also validates the model results with findings from the interviews with gig workers.

Ethnoracial categories and classifications can change over time, sometimes leading to increased social mobility for marginalized groups or nonelites. These ethnoracial changes are often attributed to emulation, where nonelites adopt the elite's social, cultural, and political characteristics and values. In some cases, however, nonelites experience ethnoracial shifts and upward mobility without emulating elites, which events can help explain. I argue that the type of event, whether endogenous or exogenous, affects the ability of elites to enforce their preferred ethnoracial hierarchy because it will determine the strategy – either insulation or absorption – they can pursue to maintain their power. I examine this phenomenon by comparing the cases of Irish social mobility in 17th-century Barbados and Montserrat. Findings suggest that endogenous events allow elites to reinforce their preferred ethnoracial hierarchy through insulation, whereas exogenous events constrain elites to employ absorption, which maintains their power but results in hierarchical shifts. Events are thus critical factors in ethnoracial shifts.

This chapter discusses the challenges and opportunities of integrating big data generated by contemporary museums into data ecology and data fabrics of smart cities. First, it exposes that smart cities could enhance their global reputation, visibility and image by building on closer collaborations with museums. Second, it demonstrates that museums in the 21st century have transformed into hyper-connected cultural hubs, spreading their reach and impact beyond their immediate urban locations. Finally, this chapter discusses creative approaches to data-curation mechanisms that stress the role of museums and cultural heritage sites in supplying data for a more strategic and proactive smart city co-design and management. Specifically, this chapter offers a three-dimensional framework for integrating heritage data in the design of smart city data ecosystems, which includes such components as Data Resources, Data Republics and Data Impacts. Data Resources stresses museum collections’ data and meta-data as a strategic resource to empower creative public data-curation practices to tell meaningful stories about the city and enhance place-making. Data Republics focuses on big data generated by visitors online or on-site as a foundation for evidence-based urban research, design and management, empowering more sustainable, safe and enjoyable tourism. Data Impacts details data-driven methodologies that museums could employ to measure public sentiment and opinion to offer new human-centred indicators to understand the performance of smart cities. This chapter shares a conceptual framework for repurposing museum data within a smart city data ecology to translate the current data excess into data intelligence.

The use of the concept of “agency,” in the sense of action that is to some extent free of “structural” constraints, has enjoyed enormous and growing popularity in the sociological literature over the past several decades. In a previous paper, we examined the range of theoretical rationales offered by sociologists for the inclusion of the notion of “agency” in sociological explanations. Having found these rationales seriously wanting, in this paper we attempt to determine empirically what role “agency” actually plays in the recent sociological literature. We examine a random sample of 147 articles in sociology journals that use the concept of “agency” with the aim of identifying the ways in which the term is used and what function the concept serves in the sociological explanations offered. We identify four principal (often overlapping) uses of “agency”: (1) purely descriptive; (2) as a synonym for “power”; (3) as a way to identify resistance to “structural” pressures; and (4) as a way to describe intelligible human actions. We find that in none of these cases the notion of “agency” adds anything of analytical or explanatory value. These different uses have one thing in common, however: they all tend to use the term “agency” in a strongly normative sense to mark the actions the authors approve of. We conclude that “agency” seems to serve the purpose of registering the authors' moral or political preferences under the guise of a seemingly analytical concept.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the conversion of the former coal mining site in Kamp-Lintfort into a public park and learning space for biodiversity. In 2020, an urban green space was established, featuring various aquatic and terrestrial habitats and a high level of biological diversity in the city centre with broad community support.

This study presents secondary data of a literature review on participatory management of biodiversity in urban green spaces, with a focus on the sustainability context, participation approaches, theoretical frameworks and the role of education. The example of Zechenpark Kamp-Lintfort (Germany) shows how urban green space development can meet the challenging demands of inner city development while fostering knowledge generation via citizen science and participatory biodiversity management. The study collected primary data on plant biodiversity using a citizen science approach to raise awareness and create opportunities for human–nature interaction.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 is the most important development goal in the context of participatory biodiversity management of urban green spaces. Most of the studies have a place-based focus and integration of local knowledge is the main reason for a participatory approach. The findings show how a green learning space can offer opportunities for digital learning as well as participatory biodiversity management in urban areas. The project lead to an increase in local citizens’ awareness of biodiversity. Based on a literature review, this report identifies challenges and opportunities for establishing a green learning space for biodiversity education. The example illustrates that an urban green space can provide numerous possibilities for citizens and students to get involved and that it can foster the sustainable development of a new urban neighbourhood.

A place-based approach limits generalisability. To overcome this limitation, a literature review was conducted, and the location was compared to two parks with similar site conversion history.

The example of developing an urban green space can inspire universities to take an active role in biodiversity management in urban green spaces, integrating biodiversity into university activities and creating a positive impact in the urban environment.

Analysis of studies in the field shows that education deserves a more prominent role in theoretical frameworks.

The study represents an example of transition and citizen-led participatory management of biodiversity from a medium-sized city, transformation processes covering these aspects are underrepresented in literature.

This conceptual paper explores the complex, and neglected, area of mentor development in initial teacher education (ITE) in Australia. It focuses on the emotionality of mentoring, drawing on concepts of emotional labour and emotional intelligence to develop a framework of effective mentoring that helps explain the essence of a mentor’s role in supporting preservice teachers.

This conceptual paper draws together mentor-support practice wisdom and research literature from several relevant areas. It draws on constructive developmental theories and complex stage theory to reaffirm the intricate nature of mentor learning and development. This paper critiques the current utilitarian emphasis on mentoring as a way to improve student outcomes without first having clarity on how to improve mentoring itself.

We introduce the mentoring as emotional labour framework as a way to better understand the nature of mentoring within ITE and as a tool for developing more effective mentor supports. We present “exemplar cases”, which are amalgamations of field observations to illustrate aspects of the framework – however, we do not claim they provide evidence of the utility or accuracy of the framework.

Previous research and policy have tended to gloss over the skills required for effective mentoring, whereas this paper places the emotional labour of mentoring front and centre, explicitly conceptualising and describing the personal and interpersonal skills required in a way that aims to support and empower mentors to recognise existing strengths and areas of potential growth.

The closure of schools and nurseries during the COVID-19 lockdowns triggered the re-insourcing of childcare to the home, sparking extensive public debate and academic research on the pandemic's potential impact on gender equality (see, for example, Burgess and Goldman, 2021; Vandecasteele et al. 2022). My PhD research, which explores parents' decision-making influences when planning care during their child's first year in the UK context, coincided with COVID-19. The coinciding of my data collection with COVID-19 (seven online discussions with a total of 36 participants and 12 follow up interviews, 10 which include partners) created microcosms in which wider public debates were echoed. My research draws on the Capability Approach (CA) (Sen, 2009) to conceptualise parents' capabilities to share leave as they aspire to and employs dialogical narrative analysis (DNA) (Riessman, 2008) to explore how gendered parenting norms are constitutive of parents’ care capabilities. In this chapter, I draw on feminist ethics of care to explore the disruption of gendered parenting norms, in the COVID-19 context, within parents' decision-making and a possible ‘reimagining’ of the value attributed to care (Ozkazanc-Pan and Pullen, 2021; Tronto, 2017). My findings support anticipation of what the promise of greater flexibility could bring as a result of increased visibility of caregiving during COVID-19. However, I also find evidence which supports the caution previously recommended of the need to reflect on work cultures and the predominance of masculine ideal worker norms in the UK (Chung et al. 2021).

The detrimental effects of increased workloads and high-stakes accountability that impact on teachers’ job satisfaction and wellbeing have been well documented in the international literature (Holloway et al., 2017; Perryman et al., 2011). This chapter will explore the factors which influence staff mental health and wellbeing in schools. The authors unpack issues of burnout, job satisfaction and teacher attrition. The authors consider the concept of teacher resilience by situating resilience within a socio-ecological framework. Specifically, the authors draw on Greenfield’s (2015) model of teacher resilience. The authors draw on our own research to explore the relationship between staff wellbeing and student wellbeing (Glazzard & Rose, 2020). In addition, the authors consider the specific issues related to the wellbeing of school leaders.