This paper features a narrative case study of a leadership team engaged in an effort to transform both culture and instructional practice at an urban charter school. The paper…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper features a narrative case study of a leadership team engaged in an effort to transform both culture and instructional practice at an urban charter school. The paper describes the team's effort to align their decision-making with two frameworks selected to anchor the school's institutional change process: restorative justice and deeper learning. Interweaving rich case data with analysis, the paper explores the dilemmas that emerged as leaders struggled to “walk the talk” of these two frameworks, using this to theorize about the synergies between them and to explore the broader leadership challenges involved in transforming schools from authoritarian to humanizing institutions.
Design/methodology/approach
The researcher employed an ethnographic approach with the goal of generating a thickly-textured single case study. Data-gathering activities included more than 400 h of participant-observation, in-depth interviewing and artifact collection, conducted over the course of a ten-month academic year. Data analysis was iterative and included frequent member checks with participants.
Findings
The paper finds that restorative justice and deeper learning have powerful epistemological connections that school leaders can harness in order to ensure a coherent approach to change processes. The paper also illuminates several of the core dilemmas that school leaders should anticipate facing when embracing these two frameworks: the dilemma of responding to feedback, the dilemma of power-sharing and the dilemma of balancing expectations with support.
Research limitations/implications
The case study approach employed in this paper allows for rich understandings of specific phenomena while also providing a platform for exploring the general qualities that these phenomena might illustrate. This approach does not allow for statistical generalizability.
Practical implications
The paper suggests that it is imperative for school leaders to explore what it means to lead in ways that are coherent with their vision for change, e.g. to cultivate symmetry. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the value of such explorations lies in the process of grappling with the tensions that arise when humanizing frameworks are implemented within systems that uphold traditional power hierarchies. Additionally, the paper affirms the value of de-siloing the transformation of school culture from the transformation of instructional practice.
Originality/value
This paper offers an unusually textured account of the messy and uncertain processes that constitute the work of school change. This paper also draws together two educational paradigms which are rarely brought into conversation with each other despite their epistemological synergy.
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Christopher Humphrey, Peter Moizer and David Owen
Provides a response to Puxty et al.′s call for academics tobecome involved in public policy debate. Addresses the issue of theeffect on British university accounting research of…
Abstract
Provides a response to Puxty et al.′s call for academics to become involved in public policy debate. Addresses the issue of the effect on British university accounting research of the promotion and undertaking of continual research selectivity exercises. This should be of direct concern to accounting and other academics. The key message is that greater co‐operation, not competition, is needed both to secure a healthy future for academic accounting across the broad range of institutions in which the subject is researched and taught, and to provide a worthwhile educational experience for all students, not just the favoured few.
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A story of my time in Damascus and falling in love.
Prejudice against Jews was part of the landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted…
Abstract
Prejudice against Jews was part of the landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.6% of the country’s white (or European) population. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism was marked by fervent attempts to proscribe Jewish immigration. By 1939, Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party led by Dr D.F. Malan, along with a ban on party membership for Jews residents in the Transvaal province. Racial discrimination, in a country with diversified ethnic elements and intense political complexities, was synonymous with life in the Union long before the Apartheid system, with its official policy of enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became law in May 1948 under Dr Malan’s prime ministership. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own subcultural identity, were classified within South Africa’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. This chapter focusses on measures taken in South Africa by organisational structures within the political sphere to restrict Jewish immigration between 1930 and 1939 and to do so on ethnic grounds. These measures were underscored by radical Afrikaner nationalism, which flew in the face of the principles of ethics and moral judgement.
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Ira E. Bogotch and Cynthia B. Roy
Using sociolinguistic methods and ethnography, looks at the continuous and in process relationship between everyday talk and school leadership. Through close discourse analysis of…
Abstract
Using sociolinguistic methods and ethnography, looks at the continuous and in process relationship between everyday talk and school leadership. Through close discourse analysis of three distinct situations, demonstrates how administrative talk shapes and is shaped by a school’s contexts, creating constant possibilities for educational leaders. Discusses implications for understanding how and why moral leadership is tenuous and problematic using Dewey’s notion of mortality as the nurturing of educational ideas: that is, in practice, moral leadership is not always reflexive or progressive.
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Having discussed amiably with the editor the importance of women in the American library field, he responded with a request for some of my memories of individual ladies whom I had…
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Having discussed amiably with the editor the importance of women in the American library field, he responded with a request for some of my memories of individual ladies whom I had known professionally and for whom I had high regard. First I must admit that my field has been the public library and the activities of state libraries and library commissions in the extension of public library service. Undoubtedly in university and endowed reference libraries the men in the field showed up more prominently just as they did in activities and decisions of the American Library Association. However, when John Cotton Dana spoke cogently at a conference we did not forget the equally forceful and intelligent Beatrice Winser who had so great a part in running the Newark Public Library of which Mr. Dana was director. This is but one example plucked at random and I do not like to have these indispensable co‐workers ignored.