Search results

Staff turnover may have important consequences for the development of collective social resources based on trust, shared norms, and support among school professionals. We outline the theoretical role-specific consequences of principal and teacher turnover for features of principal leadership and teacher community, and we test these ideas in repeated teacher survey data from a sample of 73 Los Angeles elementary schools. We find evidence that principal turnover fundamentally disrupts but does not systematically decrease relational qualities of principal leadership; negative changes for initially high social resource schools offset positive changes for initially low social resource schools, suggesting that relational instability “resets” the resources that develop in the relationships between leadership and teachers. Greater consistency in measures of teacher community in the face of teacher turnover implies that the social resources inhering in the relationships among teachers are more robust to instability.

In this chapter, I reflect on the past, present, and future of gender and education research, policy, and practice in the context of the field of comparative and international education. Points of discussion include who comprises the gender and education professional community, common challenges, shifting development paradigms and terminology (i.e., from Women in Development to Gender and Development), the historical roots and trajectory of the field in terms of research, policy and practice, and future directions, including new topics, approaches, and methods.

How can we explain the development – or equally the non-development – of professional ethics norms in a particular case? And how can we enhance compliance with existing professional ethical norms? In this chapter, I develop a supply/demand theory of professional ethics. That is, I consider the demand-forces and pull-factors that call for the construction, reform or continuance of a professional ethos. These demands may come from various stakeholders, including individual service-providers, the professional community, actual and prospective clients and the general public collectively as interested third parties. The supply-side, on the other hand, constitutes the ethical materiel out of which norms emerge: these are the felt-motivations of individual professionals at the coalface of action that drive them to recognize, acknowledge and act upon a professional norm. This material includes traditions and stories, the conscious application of common-sense ethics, explicit endorsement of public moral codes, internal excellences within the activity, a discrete community capable of cultivating attractive role-identities and so on. As well as considering such ethical-materiel, I canvas the institutional and cultural supports that facilitate the production of these motives.

This chapter focuses on ways of giving voice to the survivors of institutional abuse and how their contribution can be capitalised in raising community awareness of this phenomenon. The collection of testimonies demonstrates that institutional abuse is a common and widespread phenomenon that in most cases remains unrevealed throughout the life course. The participatory research process we describe is part of an important social and clinical intervention developed in the framework of two projects. The chapter illustrates outputs and outcomes related to disclosure of institutional abuse and its long-term consequences, as well as the meaning and implications of collective trauma. Results confirm the need to promote the voice of survivors to build a new professional and community culture and sensitisation towards children's right to be heard as an essential instrument to prevent and detect institutional ill treatment. Participatory processes can overcome the resistance of individuals, professional communities and politicians to recognising the phenomenon, emphasising institutional responsibilities and the specific effects of a serious form of maltreatment that requires extraordinary and specific interventions in terms of intensity and flexibility. This chapter describes a fieldwork and research experience made possible thanks to a strong alliance with survivors who engaged in a process of reflection and theoretical elaboration that generated both social and clinical impacts.

This chapter is focused on a 3-year, privately funded project. Dean David England, the dean of our College of Education at Western Michigan University from 2000 to 2002, worked in collaboration with Elizabeth Binda, the chairperson of the board of directors for the Guido A. and Elizabeth H. Binda Foundation, to develop a project that would contribute in substantive ways to the improvement of teacher education. As a veteran K-12 teacher and teacher educator, Elizabeth Binda has long taken great interest in contributing to the profession where she has invested a good deal of her life.

This chapter examines the recalcitrant effects of isolationism and the intentional efforts that are necessary to create authentic, collaborative partnerships between schools and universities, between schools and schools, and among educators. The tension between a vision of community and collaboration and the ability to enact that vision raises questions about the necessary knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to be a part of a community-based professional culture, what it means to prepare teachers to work in such a professional community, and to question the unexamined assumptions about the definition of professionalism and teacher knowledge that undergird current accreditation and accountability frameworks. To relieve that tension, we must start demanding data that demonstrates preservice candidates' ability to work collaboratively toward more effective practice, rather than focusing so narrowly on statistics that describe what they know and have done individually within a classroom setting.

Recent academic studies, as well as media reporting, have devoted substantial attention to the ongoing “crisis of democracy.” Democratic “backsliding” of Central and Eastern Europe – sometimes referred to as an effort to establish a new system of “illiberal democracy” – is one of the most visible symptoms of this crisis. This narrative is supported by the quantitative metrics of democratic quality, reflecting professional community views on the appropriate criteria to define and assess democracy. However, once general public views expressed in the survey item of “satisfaction with democracy” are taken into account, the picture changes markedly. This chapter analyzes quantitative metrics reflecting expert community consensus and the general public assessment of the quality of democracy in the 27 EU members over the period 2010–2019. It documents substantial divergence between the perspectives of the experts and the general public – while expert-based indexes portray Central and Eastern European backsliding as the most significant trend in the EU democratic landscape, public opinion identifies a very different set of democracy's successes and failures. As experts and the general public fail to arrive at mutually accepted criteria of democratic performance evaluation, public debate has become futile. Meaningful discussion and systemic corrections have become unlikely, creating conditions easily exploitable by the populists, eager to frame it as an example of “elite” detachment from the “ordinary people”.

The MOFET Institution, which began under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, is Israel’s national center for research and professional development on teacher education. It consists of three communities: (1) the Writing Channel; (2) the Study Channel; and (3) the Research Channel. MOFET additionally has an Academic Committee that assists the aforementioned communities in their deliberations if needed. Although the MOFET Institute deals with multiple and sometimes conflicting agendas (i.e., Ministry of Education, participating teacher education colleges, the institute’s own goals), it remains one of the most unique and powerful ways to nationally address teacher education research and dissemination and the development of teacher educators in the world.