Editorial

Citation

Roberts, B. (2007), "Editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2007.06021caa.001

Editorial

I welcome you to this the third issue of the current volume, which coincidentally contains four Australian papers (one with the Philippines), as well as two from the USA. Please do not be discouraged if you are from other parts of the world as the content make up is coincidental for this issue. In future issues there will be more articles from the Asia Pacific area including a special issue from that part of the world in the next volume.

Now to the current issue. There is firstly a presentation from Dr Srikanthan and Prof. Dalrymple of RMIT university. Melbourne.Their joint paper is “A conceptual overview of a holistic model on quality in higher education”. The authors state that “contemporary challenge for higher education comes from the demands of political leaders for access to a greater share of the country’s population to meet the demands of the new economy”. The desire for access to HE by all bands in society has become an important community issue. It is difficult to apply quality management models to the teaching and learning aspects of university life particularly as customer focus is the key tenet of quality management models. A generic quality model, would therefore, have to be more complex.. The paper concludes that it is possible to synthesise a model, based upon existing literature to address in a unique way, higher education.

In the next, Peter Townsend and Caroline Wan of Monash University write on “The impact of multicultural experience in the development of socio-cultural adaptation for international business students”. The research sets out to assess the relevance and impact of interpersonal contact in the form of multicultural experience in the development of socio-cultural adaptation for international students studying in their new country. The original contribution of this research is the application of a statistical methodology to this subject area in the Asia Pacific basin. The results demonstrated statistically that a continuous increase of multicultural experience but also a u-curve shape of socio cultural adaptation thereby confirming previous qualitative research on the culture shock phenomena.

Dr Bernard O’Meara from the University of Ballarat and Dr Stanley Petzall from Deakin University ask, “How important is the role of the chancellor in the appointment of Australian vice chancellors and university governance?” A PhD research into the recruitment and selection process for vice chancellors yielded some useful results. Prior to this there had been little research. The chancellor appears to lead a complex process including a selection panel when the need for a new VC arises. The relationship between the chancellor and vice chancellor was crucial to the process in determining a successful outcome. The chancellor appeared to make the key decision in spite of the role of the panel which should be to make a choice for recommendation to the Council.

Dr Carole Edmonds is Assistant Professor in educational leadership at Northwest Missouri state university. Her paper is on “Continuous quality improvement: integrating P12 best practice into teacher education”.Traditionally in developing training opportunities for a new programme, teachers only tend to be trained but in this paper Dr Edmonds outlines a much more inclusive regime so that all are accommodated in new opportunities. University professional education faculty should make knowledge of current practices in P12 student learning central to their professional work. Through systemic professional development processes, the best practice team allowed faculty to become engaged in sustained intellectually rigorous study of what they teach and how they teach based upon “best practice”. When applying many of Deming’s 14 points to schools the best practice team looks especially at instituting training on the job and promoting employee education and self improvement.

Dr Phillip Uys of Charles Sturt university states that the pervasive use of e- learning in higher education has made it imperative to understand what the critical issues are when implementing enterprise wide learning strategies to support a digitally enhanced learning environment. This paper discussed the leadership, academic and student ownership and readiness (LASO) model for enterprise-wide technological transformation in higher education. Case studies are used in New Zealand and South Africa to support the paper.

The final paper is given by Mr San Antonio and assistant schools division superintendent in the Phillipines with Dr Gamage of the University of Newcastle, New South Wales and is entitled “PSALM for empowering educational stakeholders (participatory school administration leadership and management)”. The findings show that stakeholders who implemented PSALM performed higher levels of empowerment compared with the control group; school heads and teachers felt more empowered than the other stakeholders after one year of PSALM implementation. There was a trend for the younger and 51+ participants to feel less empowered after implementing the programme. The stakeholders faced challenges in implementing PSALM but they overcame them by opening communication channels and manifesting supportive behaviours.

Brian Roberts