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Examines the main benefits and pitfalls of facilities management as applied to grant‐maintained schools (GMS) by assessing its implications for selected school buildings. Addresses a number of questions regarding the desirability of this method as applied to GMS. On what assumption has the GMS model been based? To what extent has this model affected their operational efficiency? What are the financial implications? What are the future prospects? Concludes that, despite the degeneration of school buildings resulting from lack of funding, there are still many opportunities for the facilities manager.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a reflexive account of the co‐production of a qualitative research project with the aim of illuminating the relationships between research participants.

The paper draws upon personal experience of designing and conducting a research project into management learning, run jointly between an academic and a senior practitioner. The methodological issues involved and the reflexive dynamics of how the work of research collaboration is accomplished are considered.

Engaging with radical reflexivity helps to produce insights about the co‐production process.

This paper contributes to the field of reflexivity and is innovative in its context of academic‐practitioner research.

The collapse of world economic systems brought the interconnectedness between business and global events sharply into focus. As Starkey points out: “leading business schools need to overcome their fascination with a particular form of finance and economics […] to broaden their intellectual horizons […] (and to) look at the lessons of history and other disciplines”. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence from three years of research on the Aston MBA suggesting that an emphasis on developing capabilities within a far broader, connected and reflexive business curriculum is what business students and practitioners now recognise as an essential way forward for responsible management education.

This research paper examines the reflective accounts of 300 MBA students undertaking a transdisciplinary Business Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability core module.

As Klein argues, transdisciplinarity is simultaneously an attitude and a form of action. The student reflections provide powerful discourses of individual learning and report a range of outcomes from finding “the vocabulary or the confidence” to raise issues to acting as “change agents” in the workplace.

As responsibility and sustainability requires learners, researchers and educators to engage with real world complexity, uncertainty and risk, conventional disciplinary study, especially within business, often proves inadequate and partial. This paper demonstrates that creative and exploratory frames need to be developed to facilitate the development of more connected knowledge – informed by multiple stakeholders, able to contribute heterogeneous skills, perspectives and expertise.

Through the perspectives of a grant director and external evaluator, this chapter explores processes used and lessons learned to design and conduct ongoing evaluation of a multisite university-based principalship program supported in part by a US Department of Education grant. Using frameworks developed by Guskey (2000) and Kirkpatrick (1998), the authors highlight the conceptual context of program evaluation and describe the process used to develop a comprehensive evaluation plan aligned to program goals. The chapter appendix includes a summary of Developing Evaluation Evidence (Orr, Young, & Rorrer, 2010), a free program evaluation planning resource available at ucea.org.

There is growing national attention on the question of how the quality of leadership preparation programs can help to develop effective school leaders and thus impact student learning (Davis, Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, & Meyerson, 2005). In recent years several educational leadership preparation programs have redesigned their content and delivery to be more influential in graduates’ leadership development and subsequent leadership practice focused on school improvement (Young, 2009). Davis, et al. (2005) add that exemplary programs that are effective include important components such as having a rigorous selection process in admission of candidates.

This chapter discusses the recruitment and selection mode utilized by the University of Texas at Austin Principalship Program (UTAPP), which includes several key components associated with exemplary preparation programs (Darling-Hammond, LaPointe, Meyerson, Orr & Cohen, 2007). These components include: rigorous recruitment and careful selection of participants, a cohort structure, and an emphasis on powerful authentic learning experiences (Orr, 2006). While the process has undergone some changes in reason years, it has sought to explore multiple manifestations of the candidate’s leadership. As a result, the program’s recruitment and selection process has evolved into the current iteration, which is outlined in this chapter.

Preservice English teachers are expected to use literary theories and criticism to read and respond to literary texts. Over the past century, two of the most common approaches to literary encounters in secondary schools have been New Criticism – particularly the practice of close reading – and Rosenblatt's transactional theory, both of which have been expanded through critical theorizing along the way. Elucidated by data produced in iterative experiments with Frost's “The Road Not Taken,” the authors reconceptualize the reader, the text, and close reading through the critical posthuman theory of reading with love as a generative way of thinking outside of the habitual practices of European humanisms.

In “thinking with” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2023) desiring-machines, affect, Man and critical posthuman theory, this post qualitative inquiry maps how the “The Road Not Taken” worked when students plugged into it iteratively in processes of reading with love, an affirmative and creative series of experiments with literature.

This study mapped how respect for authority, the battle of good v evil, individualism and meritocracy operated as desiring-machines that channeled most participants’ initial readings of “The Road Not Taken.” In subsequent experiments with the poem, the authors demonstrate that reading with love as a critical posthuman process of reading invites participants to exceed the logics of recognition and representation, add or invent additional ways of being and relating to the world and thereby produce the possibility to transform a world toward greater inclusivity and equity.

The authors reconceptualize the categories of “the reader” and “the text” from Rosenblatt’s transactional theory within practices of reading with love, which they situate within a critical posthuman theory. They eschew separating efferent and aesthetic reading stances while also recuperating practices of “close reading,” historically associated with the New Critics, by demonstrating the generativity of critically valenced “close reading” within a Deleuzian process of reading with love.

In his first two months at the immigration detention facility, euphemistically called a ‘shelter’, Deruba consumed his daily lessons of vocabulary and math. ‘Good morning. My name is Deruba. What is your name?’ he would chant. ‘I am from Guatemala. Where are you from?’ ‘Good afternoon. How are you? I am fine’. He had only attended school for four years in Guatemala before his parents died in a bus accident forcing him to support his younger sister, Isura. ‘It was not a good time. We did not have anybody. No aunts, no uncles to help us. My grandparents died long ago. I don't even remember them. It was just me and my little sister’.⁵ Deruba, 13 years old at the time, and Isura, then 11 years old, lived on the streets of Livingston, Guatemala for over 2 years. He worked as a boat hand on boats [lanchas] transporting tourists to Livingston, painting cars at a small auto body shop and selling marijuana to young German and American tourists coming to soak up Livingston's bohemian environs.⁶

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges and opportunities associated with attempting to maintain a healthy traditional diet for newcomers living in the North End neighbourhood of Winnipeg, Canada.

In this mixed-methods photovoice study the researcher used food photographs taken by participants to facilitate in-depth, semi-structured interviews with newcomers living in the area of interest. Community workers involved in food and newcomer programming were also interviewed. Qualitative data from the interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Food security status of newcomer participants was also determined using The Household Food Security Survey Module.

Newcomer participants reported many struggles, including low incomes, gardening challenges and little access to culturally acceptable foods. Community worker interviews, field notes and an environmental scan of community resources also revealed a lack of social inclusion/support and few food and nutrition resources for newcomers.

Newcomers to Canada experience high rates of food insecurity and diminishing health status associated with length of time in Canada. This study demonstrates an imminent need for additional resources and programmes in this inner city community in order to decrease food security rates and help newcomers in Winnipeg to eat healthy traditional diets and avoid a decline in health.

The United States Department of Education School Leadership Program funds aspiring and current school leadership preparation programs throughout the United States. These projects represent over 100 million in funding educational leadership development since 2002. In this book we have sought to provide the reader a variety of lessons learned from grants originally awarded in 2008, 2009, and 2010. Within these pages you will learn about the experiences of grantees and how they have worked to provide exemplary preparation for aspiring and current assistant principals and principals in the United States. It is our hope that you will use these chapters to support and strengthen your own programs in order to provide training for our schools’ leaders, who, in turn will work to provide high quality educational experiences for our nation's students.

This chapter draws upon the leadership and work of two social entrepreneurs who believe that inclusion of community members in project/venture planning and design is key to accelerate equitable system change. The social justice leaders featured, through their actions in diverse, marginalized communities, will provide a model of leadership behaviors that utilize a repertoire of styles framed in the Connective Leadership Model™. They are system-changing champions driven by their social justice passion which requires that they provide leadership through planning and design processes to achieve equity in communities and influence policy. Short case studies will define the venture’s mission, processes, and social change outcomes with examples of the type of leadership necessary for building inclusive and equitable community-based initiatives. Their words and actions will illustrate how leaders can innovate to create system impacts not by a single intervention but through multilayered processes with a broad range of benefits – for infrastructure, education, social, economic, and environmental justice programs. The results described will emphasize the critical elements of process, the insight and power of community input and involvement, and the influential cross-sector shaping of programs and policy to achieve sustainable change. This chapter concludes with a more detailed description of the Connective Leadership Model™ and how the model enables a leader to “consciously and systematically utilize a variety of behaviors,” effectively reacting to the leadership needs of a particular situation as well as using the achieving style behaviors most valued for a community-based system change venture (Lipman-Blumen, 2000, pp. 113–114).