Leading change that promotes social justice requires courage and conviction. Drawing on identity theory, insights from a New Zealand case study show how two principals found their leadership identity challenged as they resolved issues arising from social disadvantage. The programs they developed to enhance pastoral care, behavior management, and…

Recent studies of caring school leadership have focused on the way that caring leaders support teachers and influence the school environment. Though caring is understood improve educational outcomes, questions about the interpersonal and organizational enactment can lead to significant disagreements--micropolitical contests. Using case study data,…

Shared leadership among school principals and teachers has been touted as a means to enhance student achievement. Using grounded theory, we interviewed six principals and 20 urban elementary school teachers, in Pennsylvania, to examine their perceptions about federal and state mandates on shared leadership. Results indicate that although teachers…

Within caring science, the concept of caring leadership is well established. The aim of this study is to introduce Bondas's theory of caritative leadership into education. The theory of caritative leadership is a theory of caring leadership with the 'caritas' thought of human love and mercy at its core. The article considers a hypothetical testing…

From a normative perspective, education serves a double purpose, that is, to prepare students to live well in a world worth living in. The practices of educational leadership are crucial elements in achieving this telos. In this article, we reimagine leading practices as pedagogical love, orchestrating conditions which enable refugee students'…

This paper aims to interpret the lived experience of Indonesian universities' leaders in order to offer a new way of understanding leadership and exercising leadership in higher education. Heidegger's Hermeneutic Phenomenological approach is used to capture the real experience of those leaders in demonstrating how they live and exercise a…

Although an emerging field in the leadership literature, destructive leadership is an under-researched area in the context of education. Destructive leadership in schools is the focus of the article. To understand the phenomenon we first undertake a transdisciplinary review of the literature from across philosophy, psychology and sociology. We…

This article presents findings from a case study that examined the educational leadership practices that successfully established a climate of care at school. Semi-structured in-depth interviews, observation, shadowing, focus groups and document analysis were used to collect data from the principal and school staff. Findings show that the personal…

This case study based on data from a larger study seeks to explore how aspects of a 'communities of parental engagement' model and Hispanic leadership forms are present in a community-based program aimed at teaching basic technology skills to Hispanic immigrant adult family members. The program's culturally relevant methodology emphasised care,…

This qualitative study explores the perspectives of 52 high school students on the meaning of caring in the school setting. Seven focus groups were utilized to collect data. Five groups were racially homogeneous and mixed-gender; one group comprised males of various races; and one group comprised females of various races. In the focus groups,…

The importance of parents to the success of students in schools and to school improvement has long been established and acknowledged by researchers and educators. In this article, we present a fourth--generation model of school--family linkages, one anchored in understandings of schools as communities as opposed to schools as institutions. Our…

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…

Trust is widely recognized as one of the key qualities that a successful leader needs to bring about change within his/her organization. Literature has also shown that trust plays a pivotal role in effective school leadership. However, little research has been undertaken to identify specific actions of a transformational school leader enabling…

This article examines "caring" in the context of radical education reform in one Canadian province and school district. Historical provincial policy documents set the context for the district analysis. Drawing on our experiences both as participants and researchers, we use theories of care, critical policy, and the tools of critical…

The idea of inclusive education has featured very highly in the educational priorities of many countries. Our involvement with the literature that relates to inclusion leads to the conclusion that, if we are interested in moving towards more inclusive practices, a factor that has to be studied in more depth is leadership and its role in developing…