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This chapter explores the Three-Block Model of inclusive education, which is situated in the framework of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). The chapter demonstrates how the model informs both instructional design and social-emotional learning objectives focused on fostering community through celebrating diversity, and explores the essential role of parents as collaborators. Examples are provided of IEP development through shared examination of goals, strategies, and assessment, and of innovative learning processes and outcomes associated with incorporating parent involvement in children’s education.

This paper aims to explore parent and school leader partnerships to engage high poverty and minority families against the backdrop of transformative educators fulfilling federal policy advice on parent involvement in schools. Policies encouraging school and home collaboration are considered in an urban school district.

Qualitative methods explore perspectives of parents and educators regarding parent engagement supporting student advancement. Data collection includes individual and group interviews, document analysis and observations.

Findings suggest that federal policy encouraged collaboration between parents and educational leaders. District initiatives contextualized parent involvement models of school home collaboration. Parents believe parental engagement is essential for student advancement but are uncertain about how to participate. Opportunities exist for transformative leadership in the district and schools.

Research implications suggest that policy can be a catalyst for parent involvement activities. Parents learn that opportunities exist for them to support children in schools and that educational leaders can be partners and advocates. Understandings are extended for educational leaders regarding parents as collaborators supporting students. Finally, policy makers are urged to be mindful in crafting legislation about school home partnerships.

This paper fills literature gaps about parent and educational leader collaboration in advancing parental involvement. Educational leaders are in prime positions to cultivate trusting linkages with high poverty and minority parents by sharing advocacy for students. Transformative educational administrators who strive for equity in schools can further school home alliances. Policy can present opportunities for educators to embrace parental involvement.

This chapter presents case studies of two doctoral students in a program designed to develop leadership for social justice. Amidst criticisms that doctorate programs promote neither research nor professional expertise, the question of program relevance is addressed by asking a different question. How are urban school leaders uniquely positioned to conduct research that can transform schools? The tale of two scholar-practitioners illustrates the changes in site and district practices that result from collaborative, site-based studies. Inquiries were grounded in critical theory: by collaborating with those most affected by policy, school leaders and participants transformed inequitable practices at and beyond their schools.

The purpose of the chapter is to give an overview of special education in Iceland, historically and with reference to modern use of terms, research, policy, legal trends and funding. Recent data is provided on demographic developments amongst children in Iceland and detailed account is given of practices in schools, including collaboration with parents and teacher education. Finally some issues and challenges are discussed that still remain to be solved with respect to meeting the special needs of students in school. One of the findings is that only 1.3% of students attend special schools and special classes and that the term special education has outlived its usefulness except perhaps in the context of the three segregated special schools that still remain in the country. Official papers have replaced it with the term special support. Despite a diversity of views and practices the main implication is that a new model of education is required, in line with that proposed by Slee where the needs of individuals are served in all schools and the binary thinking related to regular versus special education is no longer necessary.

Purpose – This chapter critically engages with a positively oriented emotional reflexivity with the aim of improving inclusivity in bereavement research.

Methodology/Approach – The heartfelt positivity methodology intentionally creates positivity through the everyday practices of academic research. In this chapter, emotional reflexivity is guided by the heartfelt positivity methodology to identify and learn from collaborators’ emotions. It focuses on collaborators whose involvement in the academic community falls beyond that of the immediate research team at different stages of bereavement research.

Findings – The emotions of collaborators involved in bereavement research have been overlooked, yet their inclusion reveals a significant potential for the sanctioning of bereaved mothers’ potential participation in bereavement-focused research or breastmilk donation programmes. Key learnings that may be applied to conducting future bereavement research are (i) the potential for collaborators to also be bereaved parents (ii) the continued need to strive for the inclusion of bereaved parents in research and (iii) to extend the methodological principle of emotional reflexivity to include research collaborators when researching emotionally sensitive topics.

Originality/Value – This chapter argues that bereaved mothers’ knowledge and practices of thriving in hard times can either be fostered or derailed at different stages of the research cycle depending on which narratives frame human suffering. For researchers and collaborators, emotional reflexivity is crucial to inclusive research practices and knowledge translation.

This chapter reflects on how ethics was managed in Basque educational ethnographic research. Specifically, it addresses researcher positionality when relating to research collaborators in an attempt to manage inclusive ethics in situ. Nowadays, most research is evaluated by an ethical review board that ensures adequate research practice. However, unexpected fieldwork events need to be managed in the field, and this chapter addresses the impact of these events on the relationship between researchers and collaborators. Influenced by a post-qualitative stance we posit that research collaborators should be included in the research process. It reflects on the data collected during an ongoing ethnographic study with higher education students. The method used includes several interview meetings between researchers and collaborators, multimodal representations of collaborators' learning, and participants' self-observations. In the interviews, participants' discourses, representations, and self-observations were collaboratively analysed. The ethnographic data from these meetings show how researchers use a collaborative approach to practise ethics. Through such meetings, the knowledge derived from the ethnographic data is co-constructed in a research relationship where participants engage in dialogue and negotiation about the discourse created around them. Based on this relationship, we propose the concept of inclusive ethics as a process requiring an honest, inclusive, and collaborative relationship with the research subject.

Emerging research demonstrates that the community school model holds promise for meeting the needs of families by improving academic and social-emotional outcomes for students and strengthening communities. In this model, school leaders play an integral role in building relationships among multiple stakeholders, cultivating community partnerships and developing democratic decision making. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the community school coordinator (CSC) as a school leader who carries out all of her/his work in collaboration with students, teachers, school administrators, families and community partners.

Findings in this single qualitative case study are based on multiple data sources that include semi-structured interviews (n=29) of stakeholders (families, partners and educators), participant observations of partnership meetings and school events, and document analysis.

Data analysis shows how the CSC leads and facilitates professional capital among multiple school and community stakeholders. Findings are organized into three themes: the CSC as bridge-builder who connects and promotes trusting relationships with multiple stakeholders; the CSC as collaborator who fosters joint work and a sense of collective responsibility; and the CSC as leader who supports the emergence of decisional capital.

Given the nascent literature on the role of CSCs, this case study provides insight into the leadership role of the CSC as builder of professional capital. The research informs practice by providing an example of how one community school made a strategic investment in a leadership role intended to design and develop a culture of professional collaboration.

Socialization of young virtuosos in the milieu of soloists involves creating and entertaining particular ties. Those ties, which mix the private and professional lives of teacher, student, and parents, offer an interesting avenue for studying socialization. I examine one relationship crucial to the virtuoso's career: the close-knit relationship between teacher and student, and the effect each one has on the career of the other. I define this process as “career coupling,” where those involved build their careers together. I base this analysis on ethnographic research of the careers of elite musicians.

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

This study aims at a better understanding of parents’ identity work when their parenting skills are questioned, in an organizational setting. The parents in this study were assessed as at risk of unsatisfactory parental functioning because of problems related to drugs, mental health and/or psychosocial functioning, and they were observed and offered guidance at an extended health centre in Norway. The study explores how individual self-presentations are interwoven with and dependent on organizational narratives of identity.

Based on an analysis of 16 qualitative interviews, three exemplary cases are analyzed in detail. Narrative identity and professional gaze constitute the theoretical framework.

Parents and service providers negotiate which organizational narratives of identity are available, and the narratives are integrated in parents’ self-presentations in different ways. The most common strategy is to accept the organizational narratives offered, but they are also transformed and rejected. The experience of being seen by an empathic professional gaze contributes to the creation of an acceptable self-narrative.

Tending to parents’ identity needs should be an integral part of services provided. If parents are to cooperate with state services and engage in interventions, their needs for preserving an acceptable and coherent self-narrative must be considered.

This paper adds to the understanding of how identity work is a central feature of service provision. It also adds to the literature on relationships between identity narratives at different levels of society.