The shifting discourses of educational leadership:International trends and Scotland’s response

Increasing emphasis has been placed on leadership within educational theory, policy and practice. Drawing on a wide range of academic literature and policy documents, this paper explores how the discourse of leadership has shifted and for what purposes. The authors are critical of the lack of conceptual underpinning for that discourse, evident both nationally and internationally, and they identify key issues that the teaching profession has been left to try to understand and make sense of. They caution that, despite attempts to align contemporary policy developments to position leadership as inherent in the role of every teacher, flaws in the conceptualisation of leadership, and particularly in favoured forms such as ‘distributed leadership’ and ‘teacher leadership’, pose significant challenges to a serious attempt to ‘reprofessionalise’ teachers. Contemporary developments in Scottish education are referred to, exemplifying key tensions inherent in translating international trends into practice

Foreword: Reflections about conducting research in teachers’ science classrooms.

This book explores how teachers can navigate the complex process of managing change within the classroom. The chapters highlight the new challenges that have arisen with the emergence and introduction of educational technology as teachers find themselves having to be responsive to the needs and demands of multiple stakeholders. Traversing a range of conceptual, disciplinary and methodological boundaries, the editors and contributors investigate the tensions that impinge on research-based change and how to integrate directed changes into their education system and classroom. Subsequently, this volume argues that posing these questions leads to increased understanding of the possible long term effects of educational change, and how teachers can know whether their solutions are effective

The 'schooled identities' of Australian multiculturalism : professional vision, reflexive civility and education for a culturally complex world

Since their inception in Australia in the 1970s, multicultural policies have been met with general but qualified public support (Ang, Brand, Noble and Sternberg, Dunn et al., 2004). The national and international contexts since 2001, however, have heightened anxieties around immigration and social cohesion, evoking the claims of ‘crisis’ around multiculturalism (Lentin and Tilley, 2011). This has exacerbated a longstanding lack of clarity about what multiculturalism actually means, both here and overseas (Parekh, 2006; Modood, 2007). In 2001, however, against the international trend, the Australian Government (2011) reasserted its policy commitment to multiculturalism. Yet, multiculturalism is still in a moment of uncertainty and re-evaluation, not just because of criticism from conservative commentators (Donnelly, 2005), but because there is some concern that policies developed in the 1970s and 1980s may no longer be as relevant in Australia’s increasingly transnational, culturally complex and technologically mediated societies (Modood, 2007). Within this wider context, multicultural education has faced challenges to its relevance, framework and modes of delivery. This chapter emerges from a series of projects reassessing multicultural education – its concepts, practices and goals – to ensure schooling practices can function more effectively in promoting cultural inclusion and social justice. It argues that multiculturalism has always entailed ‘logics’, in which demands for cultural recognition existed alongside imperatives towards social justice. However, this is a difficult balance to maintain and in the last 20 years we have seen an increasing emphasis on cultural difference in defining multicultural education. The schemes of cultural difference that structure teachers’ professional practice may, therefore, shape classroom teaching in sometime problematic ways, producing particular kinds of reduced student identities. The chapter concludes then on the need for professional development programs to engage teachers – not just students – in developing the critical capacities for understanding a culturally complex world