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This chapter examines early childhood pedagogy in Germany. It developed in the wake of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) education debate, and the expansion of higher education led to new types of application-oriented courses. For a long time, child day care in Germany was not seen as a subject of theoretical worth. Vocational training for kindergarten teachers, overwhelmingly employed in day care centers, has not yet been academized. The academic study of childhood pedagogy is a thereof separate project, taught especially at universities of applied science. Nevertheless, constructions of new disciplines are directed toward professional fields, for which they claim relevance with their academic training. With its focus on “Bildung” childhood pedagogy in Germany claims to offer a scientifically based solution to the practical problems of action in child day care. This chapter discusses the specific content of the curricula statistical figures of graduates at universities and in the fields of practice. It provides first empirical clarification on observable phenomena of a scientific “penetration” of cognitive rationality in kindergartens. It fosters an academic habitus that induces a distancing from direct interaction with children, leads to a diversification of tasks in day care centers, and promotes hierarchical processes of professional role differentiation in the field of childcare.

This paper aims to consider the practices and experiences of the new school-based mentors for Early Career Teachers (ECT's), emerging from the UK Government's new early career framework (ECF) policy (DfE, 2019a). The paper uses Lipsky's (2010) framing of professionals as “street level bureaucrats” to consider the extent to which the ECT mentors, as new policy actors, exercise professional discretion (Lipsky, 2010) in negotiating and aligning the new ECF policy with existing practice.

To research the mentor's interpretation and enactment of the new ECF policy, semi structured interviews were undertaken with an initial sample of nine mentors and four induction tutors who were also mentors. Online semi structured interviews were held, lasting around 50 min. This method was largely pragmatic as the study started during a period when schools were still cautious of face-to-face visitors in terms of COVID-19. Although the benefits for the interviewer experiencing the culture and context in which the ECT mentor was situated were lost, offering online interviews was critical in securing mentors' time.

Findings suggest a disconnect between the intentions of the policy and the reality of its enactment at a local level. The ECT mentors have limited professional discretion, but some are exercising this in relation to their own professional development and the training they are providing for their ECTs. Most of the mentors are adapting the ECT's professional development journey whilst mindful of the programme requirements. The degree to which the ECT mentors used professional discretion was linked and limited largely by their own levels of confidence and experience of mentoring, and to a lesser extent the culture of their schools.

The ECF policy represents an important step in acknowledging the need to professionally develop mentors for the work they undertake supporting beginning teachers. However, the time and the content of the mentor training have not been given sufficient attention and remains a hugely missed opportunity. It does not appear to be recognised by the government policy makers but more significantly and concerning in this research sample it is not being recognised sufficiently by those mentoring the ECTs themselves.

There is an urgent need by the UK government and school leaders to understand the link between the quality of mentor preparation and the quality of the ECTs who will be entering the profession and influencing the quality of education in future years. More time and resourcing need to be focussed on the professional development of mentors enabling them to exercise professional discretion in increasingly sophisticated ways in relation to the implementation of the ECF policy.

The ECF policy is the latest English government response to international concerns around the recruitment and retention of teachers. The policy mandates for a new policy actor: the ECT mentor, responsible for the support and professional development of beginning teachers. The nature of the mentor's role in relation to the policy is emerging and provides an interesting case study in the disconnect between the intentions of a policy and its initial enactment on the ground. The mentors may be viewed as street level bureaucrats exercising degrees of professional discretion as they interpret the policy in their own school context.

The Agents of Change program is a two-year, project-based learning program to develop Extension Professionals’ capacity to engage in Adaptive and Transformative Leadership. Its primary goal is to develop the capacity of Extension Professionals to engage in leadership to create more diverse, equitable, inclusive and just Extension programs and community change initiatives. This manuscript describes the program and an initial evaluation and results.

Results of an evaluation of the first year of the program indicate that regular training sessions and support are appropriate for leadership development and that Extension Professionals are using the learning, awareness and tools from this program to address challenges with Adaptive and Transformative Leadership elements. Also, Extension professionals demonstrated commitment to personal growth, community engagement and understanding of their multifaceted roles as change agents.

Participants are sharing resources from the program with colleagues, leading meetings differently, questioning the status quo and pushing others to try new ways forward.

This case study explores trust at work, described by young professionals in the early stages of their careers. In this article, trust is approached as the study participants' experiences of interpersonal trust. More specifically, it refers to relationships between colleagues, among individuals or at group level (Ma et al., 2019). Supervisors or managers did not take part in this study. The research question was “What do young professionals tell about trust and its importance at work?”

The empirical study consists of qualitative data, focus group (5) interviews (n = 20) of young professionals who are in the early stages of their careers (1–3 years after graduation). The study is contextualized in Finland, in Helsinki metropolitan area, in three social and healthcare workplaces and two information technology (IT) organizations. Both public and private sectors are represented. The data were analysed by theory-based content analysis.

According to the study results, descriptions of trust and its importance at work can be placed in three main categories. First, trust is an important element in improving young professionals' adaptation into the working community. Second, trust strengthens young professionals' professionalism and professional development at work. Third, trust at work highlights ethical issues and their significance in workplace relationships. Practical implications and limitations are also discussed.

Due to the nature of this study, the research results should be viewed critically. The results can be seen as one suggestion to structure and increase understanding of trust in working life, from the perspective of young professionals in the early stages of their careers. As all research, the studies included in this review had several limitations that need to be taken into account. First, one of them is the size of the data, also in this study. Second, although literature has been searched carefully, there is always a chance of better literature existing for discussion on trust at work from young professionals' points of view, even though there is not a lot available on this specific topic. Nonetheless, literature of this study includes the most relevant classics of trust research. Third, the method has its own limits because it is based on focus group interviews, not interviews of individuals. On the other hand, it offered time for the team to reflect on trust in their own team. Still, this study offers one option for discussion of trust in work relationships. Additionally, it was noteworthy that the subjects were at the beginning of their careers, joining a new working community. They were in the early stages of building a professional identity, seeking confirmation of their skills and position in the working community. Thus, we recognize that this may have contributed to the collection of research data, which was a focus group interview. Few participants in the interview wanted to strongly point out the factors related to distrust, even if they had appeared at work. The authors recognize that exploring trust requires trust and acknowledge it. Data have been collected before the COVID-19 pandemic (see, e.g. van Zoonen et al., 2021).

This study implies that trust at work should focus on discussing young professionals' thoughts, expectations, feelings and experiences of trust at work as part of transitioning from graduation into working life or in early stages of their careers. Trust should not only be discussed in dyadic discussions between young professionals and supervisors but also as part of team discussions. The authors’ suggestion is that trust should be in the core of team discussions, not just as part of teams' social and emotional dimensions of their functionality and capacity. Courage and skills to take part in such discussions is needed from all parties. Especially leaders have to have the ability to create a trusting environment to talk about trust. In particular, the importance of peers in trust and their importance at work should be taken into account. By understanding young professionals’ point of view, we can prevent job changes or dissatisfaction at work too. The purpose of this study was to contribute to this line of research on trust at work. The trust resource contributes to and promotes the realization of participation in working life.

The trust resource contributes to and promotes the realization of participation in working life. Leaders and coworkers can learn about trust as a phenomenon, while developing more emotionally sustainable working environments for young professionals. Trust should be seen as a skill or competence to improve various positive functional dimensions at work.

The results demonstrate that it is crucial to ensure emotional sustainability at work, and a positive feeling of belonging at work supports young professionals by developing a trusting work environment. It strengthens their engagement in a new work.

Schooling expansion is typically operationalized as the proportion of the population attending and the number of years attained; however, expansion can also be examined through new fields of study. Early childhood education entered the university as occupational training and has grown into a legitimate field of study. For example, an analysis of the expansion of early childhood papers and topics in scientific journal articles shows a slow steady rise before a dramatic increase in the 1956–2021 time period. The expansion of early childhood education as a field has been synergistic with the process of academization. Training in the occupation of early childhood education started first in its country of origin and then moved to independent training programs and normal schools in the United States before landing in four-year institutions that include everything from small colleges to large universities.

Scholarly studies on mentoring have mostly focused on traditional mentor–mentee relationships, with little or no emphasis on how institutionalized mentoring activities that include different pedagogical approaches could be used to enhance the professional development of academics. To address this knowledge gap, this article examines how an institutionalized multilevel mentoring program could be used to enhance the professional development of early-career academics and academics in designated groups in a South African university.

The data for the study were gathered from 18 mentees and 2 program administrators using semi-structured interviews. The data gathered were assessed by way of thematic analysis that involved a detailed process of identifying, analyzing, organizing, describing and reporting the themes that were developed from the data set.

The findings revealed that when mentees participate in different mentoring and professional development activities that are structured based on different pedagogies, they can engage in higher-order thinking processes and develop multidisciplinary experiences within an expanded professional learning community. Enabled by the situated learning setting, mentees can negotiate the meaning of their professional practice within a professional community and comprehend the nuanced pedagogical approaches including scaffolding learning used by mentors to shape their career trajectory and guide them to secure promotions.

The current study contributes to the scholarly discourse on situated learning by showing that mentoring could be planned and implemented as a pedagogical endeavor with diverse learning activities and structured as a form of professional development program within a professional community.

The increasing push towards centralisation and bureaucratisation in higher education, further exacerbated by the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for a better understanding of the nature of collegiality in contemporary universities. We address this issue by looking into the necessary conditions and barriers to sustaining a collegiate environment. The empirical focus is on academics, academic leaders and professional support staff at Anonymous Business School (ABS), a department in a large civic UK university. We interviewed 32 participants across the school, ranging from early-career academics to experienced professors and members of department leadership teams. The findings suggest multiple emerging perspectives on collegiality, with features of horizontal collegiality perceived as key to successful academic responses to the crisis. The findings also indicate how sustaining a collegiate environment within the department requires both choice and effort from leadership and from staff, particularly when decision-making is primarily located at the centre of the university. The choice and effort made across different collegiate pockets contribute to the department becoming an ‘island of collegiality’ within the increasingly centralised and bureaucratised university hierarchy. In this sense, the actions of the department leadership to establish supporting mechanisms, and the actions of the staff to, in turn, embrace and build interpersonal relationships and professional identities, are key to sustaining a collegiate environment.

This study aims to examine the impact that diagnostic factors such as duration of diagnostic period, number of professionals consulted and perceived social support have on parental stress during the diagnostic process of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Forty parents of 2–18 year-old children/adolescents with a formal ASD diagnosis recruited from five specialized private clinics in Lisbon completed a survey which included diagnostic questionnaire, parental stress scale and social support scale from April to December 2022.

Data analysis indicated that the mean age of the diagnosis was 5.6 years with a delay of 3.95 years from first concern until final diagnosis. On average, parents consulted a mean of 3.62 professionals. Other findings indicated that as age of parents increased, levels of parental stress decreased. Parents with higher levels of social support had lower levels of parental stress. Furthermore, higher age of child at first concern predicted higher affective social support.

This study reflects on the experience of obtaining the ASD diagnosis in Portugal, raising awareness on the importance of providing early detection and social support for distressed parents.

Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.