Search results for "educational leadership"
showing 10 items of 39 documents
The Cultural and Social Foundations of Ethical Educational Leadership in Finland
2021
This chapter provides the Finnish scope on cultural and social foundations of ethical educational leadership. Finland is often seen as an outlier. Predominant transnational trends are recognized but they tend to reach Finland with a delay and manifest themselves somewhat differently from the mainstream. There are contextual reasons for the deviance. We will present these focusing on how cultural and social aspects have been evolving in Finland. Furthermore, we will analyse the constituents, organisation and responsibilities embedded in the Finnish education system. This analysis makes use of contemporary education policy documents including legislation and other regulations, curricula, and …
Narratives on access to higher education : educational leadership looking beyond barriers
2017
This research aims to understand the social, economic and political complexities that surround a learner’s access to higher education in South Africa. The objective of the study is therefore to particularly examine the enabling and constraining factors in accessing higher education for the participants in the study. The study looks at the experiences of four young men and women (two men and two women) from South Africa that led to their educational achievements. It weaves their success stories through the complex interwoven social, familial, school and community environments. The narratives have been observed in con-text to existing key educational leadership theories and mainly by evaluati…
Globalization and leadership and management: a comparative analysis of primary schools in England and Finland
2006
This article analyses the impact of processes of globalization on both policy and practice in relation to primary school leadership and management in England and Finland. Data are drawn from case study research carried out from 1994–1996 in six schools in Finland and six schools in England and a follow‐up study on teacher professionalism (2001–2002) that involved 37 of the original participants being re‐interviewed. The article contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the extent to which global trends lead to homogeneity in educational systems or a ‘glocalized’ response. Such a glocalized response is derived not only from different cultural mediations at the national policy level but al…
The Role of Instructional Activities for Collaboration in Simulation-Based Games
2021
Tiina Lamsa (Ph.D.) has a Ph.D. of education and she is a qualified early childhood education and care (ECEC) teacher. She has been focusing on the questions of arts based research, visual and digital methodologies in childhood studies and cultural research, pedagogy and curriculum development, sustainable learning and educational leadership in the past several years. She is currently working as a university teacher at the Open University of the University of Jyvaskyla. Since the year 2006, she has been involved in several research projects that produced and developed electronic diary methods for use in research focusing on family life and children’s wellbeing. Her ongoing post-doctoral res…
Partnership for training. Parents, teachers and leaders: the educating community
2021
Family and school are the educational agencies that play a primary role in the child development. Therefore, an educational partnership based on values and responsibilities sharing and on the mutual respect of competences is necessary. This idea is reflected in Bronfenbrenner (1979; 2001), Epstein (2018), Eccles and Harold (2013) theoretical/methodological models and in the Pati (2019) pedagogical-epistemic reflection. Starting from this theoretical framework, it is considered necessary to investigate the point of view of teachers, parents and managers in order to provide a clear vision of the practices of educational co-responsibility in reference to the Italian school context. We predicte…
Three orientations for understanding educational autonomy: school principals’ voices from Australia, Finland, and Jamaica
2021
This paper reports on the findings from a multi-site case study conducted in Australia, Finland and Jamaica which explored the conditions that enabled and constrained the autonomy of school principals. Systematic data collection was carried out in the form of interviews of school principals and the data was analysed using a qualitative approach. The analysis indicates that: (1) school principals’ practices are prefigured by the peculiarities of historical trajectories and ideological traditions enmeshed in schooling sites; (2) these prefiguring arrangements in turn influence varying realisations of autonomous decision making practices across national sites; and (3) even in the expression of…
Analysis of leadership dynamics in educational settings during times of external and internal change
2017
Background: The article concerns the tensions that can arise during demanding external, and consequential internal changes and considers how educational leadership is able to respond to them. Leadership is here understood as a collaborative endeavour, producing shared sense-making in situations of tension. Purpose: The main research question was: what kinds of leadership dynamics underlie situations of tension brought about by external and internal change? The sub-question was: what kind of micro-level sense-making processes, argued to be the true source of change, assist in revealing these dynamics? Programme: Educational organisations increasingly face demanding external changes, such as …
Symbolic leadership and leadership culture in one unified comprehensive school in Finland
2012
The research presented in this article is a description of the symbolic leadership and leadership culture in one unified comprehensive school in Finland. The study is a phenomenological qualitative case study based on triangulation. Leadership is studied through its functional, verbal and material dimensions. Leadership culture is regarded as one of the part cultures of the organisation culture. It is a product of the meaning and interpretation process which forms itself through the symbols of the principal's leadership. According to the present study, the leadership culture of the unified comprehensive school can be described as consisting of respect, communality, equality and humour.
A meta-analysis of distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013 : Theory development, empirical evidence and future research focus
2015
This article provides a meta-analysis of research conducted on distributed leadership from 2002 to 2013. It continues the review of distributed leadership commissioned by the English National College for School Leadership (NCSL) ( Distributed Leadership: A Desk Study, Bennett et al., 2003), which identified two gaps in the research during the 1996–2002 period. The review found that the studies had been unable to conceptualise distributed leadership or empirically outline its application. The two research gaps identified by Bennett et al. (2003) constitute the focus of the present review, which attempts to determine whether recent research has been able to fill these gaps. Based on the find…
Collaborative Educational Leadership: The Emergence of Human Interactional Sense-Making Process as a Complex System
2014
The article aims at explicating the emergence of human interactional sense‐making process within educational leadership as a complex system. The kind of leadership is understood as a holistic entity called collaborative leadership. There, sense‐making emerges across interdependent domains, called attributes of collaborative leadership. The attributes give rise to the complex system. They are suggested to be the very agents, i.e. both the source and the outcome of the synergetic sense‐making process. Hence, the agents are not the single persons involved who, however, supply the collective attributes that are modified through human interaction in a holistic way. For studying the emergence pro…