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Schools in resource challenged communities require principal approaches that break patterns of low expectations and low student achievement. This study identifies Alabama’s “outlier” schools that have been consistently successful in attaining higher student outcomes than their neighboring schools despite their similar community conditions. Then, it describes the perspectives and practices of principals leading these outlier schools. The purpose of this paper is to discuss findings on principal leadership in five of Alabama's outlier schools.

In a sequential, explanatory mixed-methods design, the authors first use state administrative data to identify which Alabama schools had better results than their peers as evidenced by standardized testing between 2016 and 2020. Then, through semi-structured interviews, they examine the beliefs and approaches of five principals who are currently leading an outlier school. The frame of contextual leadership provides a deeper understanding of how these principals navigate successful schools in the midst of challenging community influences.

The evidence demonstrated that (1) community factors of low education, high unemployment, single-parent households and generational poverty are associated with considerably lower levels of student growth and achievement; (2) measured school and community factors do not explain student growth and achievement in these outlier schools; (3) outlier principals have a realistic view of their community’s challenges but focus on supporting students through a context sensitive, relational approach that emphasizes assets over limitations.

While research has attended to leadership in turnaround schools and effective schools, there is little literature on principals leading in positive outlier schools. This study contributes to the literature on school leadership in resource challenged contexts by identifying high performing, resource challenged schools and then showing the perspectives and practices of principals who lead in schools that have consistently achieved better than expected student outcomes. It extends the construct of “outlier leadership” in education and connects it to contextual leadership in schools.

The purpose of this paper is to report the formative evaluation results from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development Healthy School Communities (HSC) pilot project.

This study utilized 11 HSC pilot sites in the USA (eight sites) and Canada (three sites). The evaluation question was “What are the levers of change in a school community that allow for the initiation and implementation of best practice and policy for improving school health?” Pre- and post-site visits along with in-depth interviews with school teams, teachers, students, administrators, community stakeholders and other involved individuals, school site report reviews, Healthy School Report Card results and school improvement plans were used for evaluation purposes.

This study identified nine levers of change: principal as leader of the HSC efforts; active and engaged leadership; distributive team leadership; effective use of data for continuous school improvement; integration of the HSC process with the school improvement process; ongoing and embedded professional development; authentic and mutually beneficial community collaborations; stakeholder support of the local HSC effort; and creation or modification of school policy related to HSC that increased the likelihood that school improvement via health promotion would be pursued and sustained.

Owing to the qualitative methods used in this study and the number of schools in the pilot project, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed evaluation question further.

This study has implications for schools seeking to create sustainable, systemic integration of health and education for effective health-promoting schools and continuous school improvement.

This study provides evidence that integration of health and education can become a sustainable and integral part of a school’s culture.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how school-based drug education programmes in Australia have sought to reduce adolescent drug use.

Drawing on insights from Foucault's later works and writers on governmentality, the paper considers how, through the use of various technologies, techniques and strategies, students have been encouraged to problematise their understanding of self by way of a series of choices they are required to make in relation to recreational drug use.

Drugs are positioned as a key factor in the psychic and social well-being of youths insofar as their health and personal happiness is said to depend on the decisions they make concerning their use of drugs. In the process, moral and political objectives are met as students internalise norms, values and objectives consonant with a self-disciplined, self-governing society.

By bringing into question school-based drug education, a space is created for further discussions around this historically controversial strategy.

What is common to all school-based drug education programmes is that the problem is conceptualised in terms of individual and interpersonal deficiencies or inadequacies. Conceptualised thus, both the problem and the solution lay with the individual; it is the individual who must change.

The focus of this paper has not been on why school-based drug education is needed or how to improve it (the focus of most research on the subject), but rather on the methods employed to influence student use of recreational drugs. By identifying how school-based drug education has sought to shape student subjectivities, this paper has exposed specific moral and political dimensions of the project.

As students increasingly incur debt to finance their undergraduate education, there is heightened concern about the long-term implications of loans on borrowers, especially borrowers from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Drawing upon the concepts of cultural capital and habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977), this research explores how student debt and social class intersect and affect individuals’ trajectory into adulthood. Based on 50 interviews with young adults who incurred $30,000–180,000 in undergraduate debt and who were from varying social classes, the findings are presented in terms of a categorization schema (income level by level of cultural capital) and a conceptual model of borrowing. The results illustrate the inequitable payoff that college and debt can have for borrowers with varying levels of cultural resources, with borrowers from low-income, low cultural capital backgrounds more likely to struggle throughout and after college with their loans.

This paper presents recently published resources on library instruction and information literacy. It provides an introductory overview and a selected annotated bibliography of publications covering various library types, study populations and research contexts. The selected bibliography is useful to efficiently keep up with trends in library instruction for busy practitioners, library science students and those wishing to learn about information literacy in other contexts.

This article annotates 424 English-language periodical articles, monographs, dissertations, theses and reports on library instruction and information literacy published in 2021. The sources were selected from the EBSCO platform for Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts (LISTA), Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), Scopus, ProQuest Dissertations and Theses, and WorldCat, published in 2021 that included the terms “information literacy,” “library instruction,” or “information fluency” in the title, abstract or keywords. The sources were organized in Zotero. Annotations summarize the source, focusing on the findings or implications. Each source was categorized into one of seven pre-determined categories: K-12 Education, Children and Adolescents; Academic and Professional Programs; Everyday Life, Community, and the Workplace; Libraries and Health Information Literacy; Multiple Library Types; and Other Information Literacy Research and Theory.

The paper provides a brief description of 424 sources and highlights sources that contain unique or significant scholarly contributions.

The information may be used by librarians, researchers and anyone interested as a quick and comprehensive reference to literature on library instruction and information literacy within 2021.

Wonders whether companies actually have employees best interests at heart across physical, mental and spiritual spheres. Posits that most organizations ignore their workforce – not even, in many cases, describing workers as assets! Describes many studies to back up this claim in theis work based on the 2002 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference, in Cardiff, Wales.

Management in education departments must cater for the special nature of professional administration within them. The problems to be faced in managing such changes required are outlined and the main areas of management development described.