Educational Leadership SIG activity at the conference  and next steps September 2016

Thank you to all those who attended and participated in the BERA Educational Leadership SIG activities: we had five individual paper session slots, an innovative early career panel and workshop, a SIG forum meeting and an informal meal. A summary can be found on one of this site’s blog posts. These provided rich spaces to discuss our current and future work, as well as find connections which we hope will productive ones.

Across all these activities we took forwards the commitments identified at our April session. Slides from the early career panel session will be found shortly under keynotes and panels (both for the combined panel and Liz Hidson’s slides as a subset of the panel), with a summary of the discussions appearing as a blog post on this site.

Three strands to our work appear to be arising, which might lead to collaboration and expanding research agendas:

1. Self-study of practitioner leaders in a range of settings
2. Critical mapping of the impact of policy on landscapes of leadership practice
3. International dimensions to leadership enactment

All of these strands see us seeking to expose and challenge assumptions – our own, in our research setting and ultimately in wider society. Some of the aspects we commit to being alert to are: race, gender, class, status, cultural norms and power and have been thinking about whether an intersectionality lens is useful in thinking through the multiple ways these issues interact.

Our next steps:

• Creation of the special issue of Mangement in Education. Advice from the deputy editor shared at the early career workshop is available here: writing-for-mie and the call for papers can be found here
• Using the BERA blog to draw attention to our special issue papers leading up to the time of its publication
• Contribution to a practitioner research SIG led event mapping the methodological territory within an educational leadership practitioner research subtheme
• Exploring asynchronous chat mechanisms for continuing our discussions through Twitter, BERA discussion forums and this website