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This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

Recognizing the need to build global-minded citizens, higher education institutions are increasingly trying to find ways to leverage their international programs to develop students’ intercultural competence. The MA in global leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada, created an international partnership in Ecuador that serves to go beyond the traditional student study abroad or service learning focus and instead focuses on developing competencies of global mindedness and strategic relationships. In this chapter, we present an analysis of how an international student group engaged in building dynamic partnerships within a Global South country to create change for sustainable development initiatives of mutual concern. Through a case example, we describe how these partnerships evolved and adapted in ways that enhanced the learning needs of the students while simultaneously supporting the development of new educational opportunities for Ecuadorians. To illustrate, this chapter delineates the activities that members of the program undertook to connect and develop a mutuality of relationship across diverse stakeholders in Ecuador. The authors analyze this network-building process from the perspective of cultural context, building trust and influence, and responding to social development needs of host communities.

The ability to develop and employ competent leaders with a global understanding has and continues to be a major challenge facing today’s universities and professional workforce. To effectively lead within today’s globalized society, it is imperative that leadership skills and knowledge relevant to international contexts be included within the leadership development and educational process. Through conceptual discussion and specific examples, the authors will argue that utilizing learner-centered instruction techniques such as cultural experiences, learner-centered assignments, and international leadership immersion experiences are all important ways to disseminate important leadership skills and knowledge. Keywords: Global Leadership, International Immersion, International Leadership Experience, Leadership Development, Learner-Centered Instruction.

This chapter provides a critical and comprehensive review of the internationalisation literature. It starts with a brief discussion of the main factors and features that need to be considered when internationalising the educational administration and leadership field. This is followed by a critique of the internationalisation of education and the many challenges that hinder the achievement of proper internationalisation. The third section provides an overview of the internationalisation models and practices in different disciplines such as psychology, sociology and political science, which is followed by a discussion on the internationalisation of education organisations in different countries with some examples from Arab and non-Western countries. The final section presents a critical review of literature on internationalising the curriculum and how culture competency and knowledge acquisition are key factors in achieving effective internationalisation. The chapter concludes with an overview of the book collection and the main ideas and concepts discussed in each chapter.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to discuss methodological challenges facing US scholars when conducting international research; and to present personal reflections as educational leadership faculty in the USA conducting and publishing on research undertaken in Haiti and Thailand.

This study drew from educational leadership literature and personal experiences to identify methodological challenges to conducting and publishing international research in the field of educational leadership.

The methodological challenges facing international research – language, data, publication, and career incentives – should not be reasons to hinder scholars from conducting research in international contexts. Allowing methodological deterrents to impede international research limits US scholar engagement in global conversations and places the field of educational leadership in the USA at risk of a parochial and myopic future.

This paper explores the methodological reasons as to why US scholars are not engaging in international research and provides two vignettes of faculty research in international contexts. This discussion is valuable for faculty interested in or presently conducting research beyond US borders.

In a global context characterised by a growing recognition of the role that educational leaders play in ensuring school effectiveness and the consequent need to design effective leadership preparation programmes, many educational leadership preparation providers around the world have borrowed international standards and frameworks in order to guide their programmes and assure their quality. This trend has been on the rise as a response to globalisation pressures and a growing interest in acquiring international recognition through accreditation agencies. However, this raises important questions about the potential repercussion of using foreign, mainly Western, frameworks to develop or assess national leadership preparation provision. Evidence from relevant literature indicates that these frameworks, when applied to local contexts, need to take contextual factors into account. In this chapter, we engage with existing literature in relation to leadership preparation, internationalisation and professional standards to reflect on our experience of using international standards to develop the Masters in Educational Administration programme offered by Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Oman. We hope to contribute to existing internationalisation literature by providing a different perspective on educational administration and leadership preparation from a non-Western tradition, thereby expanding the understanding of meaningful leadership preparation in general.

This chapter highlights the characteristics of Asia through the analysis of policy-related documents by five donor countries, namely Japan, South Korea, China, India and Thailand. It will also examine the roles played by regional bodies such as the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) and ASPBAE (the Asia South Pacific Association for Basic and Adult Education) as the horizontal channels influencing aid policies in respective countries. Together with the analysis of the national and organizational policies, the regional process of building consensus on the post-2015 agenda is examined, with a particular focus on the Asia-Pacific Regional Education Conference (APREC) held in August 2014.

The analysis reveals that the region has two faces: one is imaginary and the other is functional. There is a common trend across Asian donors to refer to their historical ties with regions and countries to which they provide assistance and their traditional notions of education and development. They highlight Asian features in contrast to conventional aid principles and approaches based on the Western value system, either apparently or in a muted manner. In this sense, the imagined community of Asia with common cultural roots is perceived by the policymakers across the board.

At the same time, administratively, the importance of the region as a stage between the national and global levels is recognized increasingly in the multilateral global governance structure. With this broadened participatory structure, as discussed in the chapter ‘Post-EFA Global Discourse: The Process of Shaping the Shared View of the ‘Education Community’’, the expected function of the region to transmit the norms and requests from the global level and to collect and summarize national voices has increased.

In this chapter we explore gender and regional disparities in leadership positions in major international organizations. To this end, we conducted data mining of the Yearbook of International Organizations 2007–2008, the largest database of profiles of high-ranking officials in international organizations ranging from intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental organizations. Findings indicate that significant gender and regional disparities exist in leadership positions; the vast majority of global leaders in the organizations were males, mostly educated in Western-based universities. Given the increasing influence of international organizations on various global issues, our findings enable us to question whether key international organizations equitably represent all people by developing and implementing the best policies for all people. Our findings also suggest that these organizations’ hiring and promotion practices need to be better understood, given that certain types of human resources (males educated in top Western-based universities) appear to be selectively appreciated, preferred, and accepted as leaders.

Education reform and policy formation have become national priorities in all of the Gulf States that make up the six member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). This move toward developing and sustaining effective education provision for the national citizenry gained greater importance in the wake of the Arab Spring movement that swept across the region. Although not as directly impacted as some other Arab nations further north, the leadership of Gulf States recognized that the large youth demographic in the region needed greater education and employment options, partly to stem the tide of unrest in their own nations. Many Gulf States, including the Kingdom of Bahrain, were already looking overseas for education models and systems that they could “buy-in” and implement in local schools. One such provider that seemed attractive to Bahrain, among others, was Singapore, which is widely hailed in the Gulf region as a model of a high-performing, global economy and education system. Yet importation of foreign models, with little or no accommodations made for local needs and cultures leads to an uncomfortable “grafting” of systems that seem out of place. This, coupled with the desire by Gulf States to take part in international benchmarking exercises, such as TIMSS, has created an awkward skewing in many educational practices and processes in Bahrain and other GCC states. This chapter, using Bahrain as a case study, will explore the regional importation of systems and models and the effect that participation in international assessments is having on localized education practices.