This is just to announce that the BERA Educational Leadership special issue of articles arising from its events in 2016 have now been developed and submitted to the publishers, aiming for an early 2018 publication. As well as articles generated by the presenters we also commissioned two response papers: one from school leader practitioners and one from an educational research methodologist. Additional material includes an interview around the kinds of evidence useful to educational leaders and a BELMAS RIG report related to the focus of this special issue. For details of the authors and contents please see the outputs page of this site.

We now have seven articles being prepared for our special issue of Management in Education, which are to be submitted in February 2017 for response papers to be written and a review process which will see us through the summer to submitting to the publishers Autumn 2017. The papers offer a great range of methodological approaches and will focus on different aspects of the research process; each with reflections on how the research methods chosen help enhance what we know about and how we can practice educational leadership. For more information on the process of producing this special issue please consult belmas-mie-proposal-schedule-jan-2017

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

Please click on the link below for information about our plans for the special issue arising from our work in 2016.

belmas-mie-proposal-for-bera-leeds

Full call for papers for special issue post BERA version

And access the advice on authoring and reviewing for the journal, as shared at the BERA annual conference using the link below.

writing-for-mie

bera-leeds-el-sig-poster

We invite you to:

Critical conversations about how to research educational leadership: A workshop for early career researchers

Parallel Session 8 | Thursday 15th September 2016 | 10.05-11.35

This is to let you know about an innovative session in the BERA 2016 annual conference programme which focuses on supporting early career researchers. This session will suit anyone who can see a leadership strand to their studies. It is the result of collaboration between the Educational Leadership and Research Methods SIGs in BERA, together with BELMAS. The workshop builds on an event held at Newcastle University in April 2016 to allow further discussion about methodological creativity and challenges, as well as planning for submissions to a special issue of the BELMAS journal Management in Education in 2017. We already have the panel membership for the September session in place, of early career researchers who attended the initial event, who will pick up and lead further discussion of the themes identified. This discussion will be followed by a writing for publication workshop led by one of the members of the editorial board of the BELMAS journal, Dr Gerry Czerniawski.

This session creates a space for a narrative to be collectively built through a combination of brief presentations and reflective panel discussion, followed by a workshop. It will be conversational, hence the title, and seeks to include a wide range of voices. You, as audience, will be active participants in helping build a collective account of research in this field, identify trajectories of future work and work towards joint publication.

We hope to see you there…Alison Fox, Anna Reid, Victoria Showunmi and Gerry Czerniawski

Follow us, the BERA Educational Leadership SIG at: #edleadres

Please circulate this through your networks to any early career researchers you know are, or are thinking about, attending BERA Leeds 2016.

The event was a lively and productive day, bringing together a mixture of practitioners and academics and allowing voices to be heard who couldn’t make it in person through pre-recordings, as well as lively Twitter activity using #edleadres. A big thank you to all those who contributed.

We are very grateful to Newcastle University for hosting the event in their Research Beehive, for support from the department’s leadership and to Eat Courtyard for excellent catering.

The sleet lashed down on the building and we found a cosy space to hear first hand accounts challenging educationalists to pick up research on current leadership issues, to find out how researchers were constructing appropriate designs to address topical issues and to explore through a keynote and plenary the context for this research, its challenges and its opportunities. Notes from the day which summarise the key questions arising (apologies to those in the qualitative design workshops for whom there are no direct references) are available here.

Presenters have been given an opportunity to add their on-the-day presentations to the website and we have started planning the follow-on event for early career researchers as part of the BERA annual conference, this year in Leeds. This will allow further discussion about methodological creativity and challenges as well as planning for a special issue in the BELMAS journal Management in Education in 2017.

I just wanted to advertise the activity of a growing community within the relatively new social media platform Yammer amongst women in education/educational leaders and those who support them. In particular this post advertises more widely their recent news about securing a column in the TES (please see below). The message is “join up to Yammer and #womened and consider contributing”. This is a vibrant group discussing and supporting one another to deal with contemporary issues for women in education and educational leadership. A series of 1st birthday party events are currently being organised, suggesting members invite those committed to the He4She campaign.

Overarching agenda

a) Scope current contemporary educational leadership issues
b) Map the range of methods being used to address these (including novel methods to try)
c) Identify possible research agendas to follow

Post-morning questions

1. Which conceptual challenges arise from the presentations?
2. Which conceptual resources/traditions are/could we draw on to deal with these?
3. Does this see educational leadership research boundary crossing into new territories/fields?
4. Which methodological challenges arise from the presentations?
5. Can we, and is it helpful to, categorise these challenges?
6. In what ways do educational leadership research studies need to speak to one another to offer complementary research designs?

Panel questions

‘How can we know which research topics/questions are worthwhile within educational leadership?’ Led by Miriam David.

‘How can we ensure that we are approaching educational leadership research topics/questions appropriately?’ Led by Victoria Showunmi

‘How can we reveal and promote educational leadership research topics/questions within broader educational research?’ Led by Liz Todd

‘How can we consider impact of educational leadership research?’ Led by Sue Robson

‘How can we go about studying educational leadership research topics/questions ethically?’ Led by Alison Fox