Within this essay and the author's reflections on the articles in this special issue, the question considered is: where have all the disruptions gone? On a fundamental level, educational leadership should have something to contribute, since it holds in trust the very educational systems that go a long way to producing the human condition, and…

In this paper, we weave the auto-ethnographic narratives of the two authors with Bourdieu's key concepts of "habitus," "field" and "capital," as we seek to bring to a level of explicitness the reflexive lens which has shaped our scholarly work. In particular, we examine the process of becoming educational…

This article examines the rapidly shifting relationship between teachers and the state and efforts to re-model teacher identities within the wider context of public sector modernization and the New Public Management. The construction and development of officially authorized and normative discursive practices relating to leadership and the…

While educational policy-makers bemoan the ways in which educational reforms falter, they both valorize and punish leaders for their key role in change. In this paper, using a national study funded by the English Creative Partnerships programme, we suggest that it may be helpful to understand the limits to change by seeing change leadership as…

Since the 1980s, there has been a burgeoning literature on women and educational leadership. The focus has primarily been on the underrepresentation of women in leadership informed by a feminist critique of the mainstream literature. Over time, key feminist theories and research have been appropriated in education policy and are now embedded in…

Over the last decades, policy trends have differentially and negatively affected women educators, defied, denied or repressed feminist values and missed opportunities for using feminist insights to reframe policy issues. This article provides a critical feminist analysis of educational and social policies with negative implications for women in…

This paper presents a case for the importance of an application of Jean-Francois Lyotard's ideas to the analysis of educational leadership. Through exploring Lyotard's concepts of "language games", the "differend" and "performativity", this paper argues that the approach taken through the development of…

This article follows the lead of several researchers who claim there is an urgent need to utilize insights from the arts, aesthetics and the humanities to expand our understanding of leadership. It endeavours to do this by exploring the metaphor of dance. It begins by critiquing current policy metaphors used in the leadership literature that…

It is crucial to the progression of the school counselling profession that counsellors-in-training receive the training, knowledge, and practice in leadership that they need to counter systemic challenges that they may face. Effective leadership practices have been shown in research to be instrumental in promoting program delivery success in the…

The purpose of this paper was to examine the experiences of a Hispanic undocumented high school graduate in Texas (USA) that did not attend a higher education institution in spite of her desire to do. Using qualitative research and narrative analysis, the researcher conducted three interview levels with the participant and developed an emplotted…

The purpose of this research was to understand ways exemplary award winning secondary school leaders have transformed their schools for twenty-first-century education and student achievement. This article presents three diverse case studies and identifies ways that each school's leader and leadership team reconfigured its culture and…

The past two decades have been a period of active education reform throughout much of the world, and East Asia is no exception. This paper synthesizes findings from a series of empirical studies of educational reform in Thailand where an ambitious educational reform law was adopted in 1999. The purpose is to identify lessons learned about…

Interest in human experiences, especially positive experiences, has been increasing ever since positive psychology gained a foothold in public attention. In this research, higher education administrators from Finland and the USA ("N"?=?13) were asked to describe positive or successful situations or chains of events in which their…

This article argues that an educational organization's type of leadership will to a very large extent determine the quality of personal transformation it instigates among its stakeholders. Focusing on the importance of transformative leadership, such leadership will be viewed as a critical and collaborative process in which school-based…

"Moving Your Numbers", a technical assistance and dissemination initiative begun in 2010 by the National Center on Educational Outcomes, described the work of 10 school districts that were using assessment and accountability to increase performance for students with disabilities as part of their overall district reform and improvement…