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This paper undertakes a critical analysis of a planned change, the Safe Learning Model (SLM), devised over time by Concern Worldwide, and implemented in 100 primary or elementary schools in a rural district of Sierra Leone. We situate the documentation pertaining to the SLM (micro) within its wider national (meso) and international (macro) context of influential policy texts. We undertake a mixed methods analysis of these macro, meso and micro documents, interrogated through the prism of various change paradigms (scientific management, progressivism, critical theory, teacher professionalism and social movement) and in doing establish where these various document clusters, their explicit and implicit influences, may be located along the arc of change paradigms, thus surfacing their ideological assumptions, intent and influences. The paper concludes that in seeking to improve the quality of teaching, learning, and living in this instance, scientific management casts long shadows. The power, perspectives and financial influence of international agencies dominate change discourses whereby 'learning crises' require urgent responses in the form of testing and measuring that prevail over more expansive pedagogical capacity building. Consequently, perpetuating a 'weighing the pig' mindset downplays or ignores the ecology of teaching and learning, particularly the centrality of teachers, as professionals and role models, more likely to be compliant than transformative.

In spite of widespread initiatives to improve access to education for girls, substantive concerns remain. While there is a rich and growing body of literature on gendered experiences of school in majority world contexts, absent is a focus on how this intersects with children's out of school lives. Further, research with children in rural communities is limited, including those who are in the earlier years of their schooling. This paper addresses these gaps, focusing on gendered dynamics in the everyday lives of children in five rural communities in Northern Sierra Leone. Drawing on Bourdieu, it explores the dialectical interplay between gendered and generational structures, understood as the gendered habitus, in a wider context of structural poverty, uneven and fragile post-colonial restructuring and development. This sets the groundwork for children's gendered dis/positioning, and ultimately capacity to engage with schooling.

There are increasing external pressures on 21st-century universities to be engines of economic recovery and growth. In this rapidly altering landscape, how university senior leaders articulate the purpose of university education and the contribution of academic developers to fulfil these education purposes is a matter of empirical interest. Senior leaders and academic developers have particular responsibilities since they impact educational quality at an institutional level. Senior leaders are responsible for orienting their institutions, giving direction to colleagues in the process, while their implicit leadership theories animate effort and interactions. Academic developers are employed to provide educational programmes for academics to develop their pedagogical competence, and are increasingly deployed by university leaders to implement new quality assurance systems. Such responsibilities strongly suggest agency and relative autonomy to forge new alliances and collaborative networks where these did not previously exist; they are simultaneously required to be leaders and followers. Consequently, the portfolios of academic developers have expanded exponentially, strategically walking a tightrope between the potentially coercive message of strategic missions and the relative autonomy of academic staff, brokering new horizons of university education in a collegial, collaborative and horizontal manner. The paper captures the dynamics of leading education in four universities: the brokering responsibilities of academic developers.

Universities are allocated considerable public resources and are expected to fulfil societal mandates through teaching, research and service to local, national and international communities. University strategic plans are public documents that express how university leaders, students, academic and administrative staff are expected to aspire to meet these societal mandates. We suggest that strategic plans can be a point of departure for academic staff and leaders to reflect on their values and articulate their praxes. By praxis we mean the sense-making and purpose academic staff and leaders identify in their practices and how they choose to live out their values. We suggest an approach, using the principles of deliberative communication, intended to help academic staff and leaders articulate their praxis and find ways to live out their values in a liberating or transformative manner.

Amidst the rapidly evolving Higher Education (HE) landscape, this paper provides a systematic review of Academic Development (AD) work, the roles and responsibilities of Academic Developers (ADs) in HE. Beginning from the perspective that HE institutions, as publicly funded organisations, have responsibility to contribute to the public good, more than 100 peer-reviewed papers (1995--2015) are interrogated under five themes. These are: a review of reviews, technology and AD work, their status and identity, assessment of AD work and impact, and the leadership roles of ADs and their impact on institutional leadership. Critical to the evolution of their work has been a more mainstream and public contribution. Their emerging responsibilities in collaboration with institutional leaders, as 'brokers' and 'bridge-builders' position them more strategically within institutions -- with potential to be compromised in terms of their espoused values and dispositions while potentially more influential in shaping the futures of their organisations.

In a climate of accountability and performativity, do teachers experience CPD provision as an externally imposed demand for conformity, compliance, to be accountable, or as a personal and professional rejuvenation that enhances their sense of professional responsibility? Through a qualitative study of secondary schools in England, this paper critically scrutinises the experiences of teachers in five case study schools to create a composite picture of the realities of their lives as they are buffeted and shaped by performativity while also examining the extent to which their CPD experiences may be perceived as enhancing their sense of professional responsibility. Critical analysis of the evidence suggests that the language of accountability is pervasive, and its logic gains currency by being imposed throughout schools where there is limited space to craft an alternative, thus performativity and conformity are more likely than dissent while enhancement of a sense of professional responsibility is rendered more difficult, marginalised if not entirely silenced. The concluding discussion raises critical questions regarding the health of the profession from a policy and practice perspective if the language of professional responsibility continues to be weakened or diluted by being filtered through the closely woven weave of externally prescribed accountability criteria. It concludes that the language and logic of professional responsibility is vitally necessary in provoking alternative discourses on the future of the profession and the quality of teaching, learning and leading in schools within and beyond the confines of the study.

As higher education (HE) comes under increasing pressure from policy-makers, nationally and internationally, to contribute more directly to economic development, tensions between more traditional missions of universities and their more recent entrepreneurial makeovers create major dilemmas for academic staff regarding their roles and responsibilities. Using the lens of professional responsibility and accountability, the paper takes Initial Teacher Education as an instrumental case study to illustrate how these tensions, in terms of policy documents, and perceptions of teacher educators unfold. Analysis strongly suggest that when external prescription is increased, and reforms under-resourced, pressures for accountable conformist compliance render the exercise of professional responsibility extremely difficult if not impossible, compromised rather than finding "legitimate compromise." The paper argues that HE has significant lessons to learn from this case while signalling that current challenges within teacher education are already becoming a gauntlet that the entire HE community needs to consider seriously.

The question of dangers and safety in children's lives has become a matter of increasing concern. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion in this field and elaborate on children's experiences of risks and dangers in the context of chronic poverty. Drawing on the post‐humanism approach, we argue that children's conceptions of risks and dangers emerge through their active and mutual exchange with other human and non‐human beings such as rivers, trees, animals and insects, however, these perceptions should be carefully placed within the local socio‐economic context of poverty and social hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consistent with the impact of globalisation and international social movements in general, the rather conservative and stable educational system in Ireland has been buffeted severely over the past two decades by a major acceleration in the pace of change and the extent of policy churn. Now that the Celtic Tiger has died, it is a time for reflection: what has been the impact of unprecedented spending on the continuing professional development of teachers on the quality of teaching and learning? Through a multi-focal lens of curriculum reform and professional development from policy and practice perspectives, this paper provides a critical meta-analysis of available research in the setting. It is anticipated that key messages regarding overload, time for learning, the necessity to conceptualise a more coherent and comprehensive policy for building pedagogical and leadership capacity rather than delivering "inservice" are legacies and lessons that will resonate readily with emerging findings on professional renewal and systemic reform in other contexts. (Contains 4 tables and 12 notes.)

In the fast paced, fluid contemporary world, and in a headlong rush to invent the future, there is a tendency to jettison aspects of the past as flotsam and jetsam, unworthy of a place in steerage into the future. This paper argues that is some respects the ordinary heroes and heroines who enact school leaderships, and from their practice contribute to contemporary leadership literature, are short changed by a tendency towards collective cultural amnesia that denies them ordinary hero status; a tendency towards emasculation of ordinary heroes and heroines. While situating more contemporary concepts of leadership within a longer trajectory of leadership archetypes, myths and legends, the paper argues that some valuable aspects of more traditional conceptualizations of leadership have been debased, marginalized by a tendency towards celebrity in academic discourses that values more fashionable notions of teacher and distributed leadership where claims to authenticity outstrip available evidentiary warrants, as well as silence more enduring aspects of leadership literature. This is not a denial of incremental contributions to contemporary leadership by more recent emphases on more democratic and participative or distributed approaches to leadership so much as a call for a more considered recapitulation of the field whereby ordinary people doing extraordinary work are given due recognition for their sterling contributions with some potential also to render school leadership more attractive to teachers. Thus a more perspectival rendering of leadership literature is more likely to have an emancipatory impulse, while recognizing that individual agency, no matter how carefully choreographed in the dance of distributed leadership practices, continues to be indispensable.

While "paradigm wars" have raged internationally during the past decade in particular, the research community, qua community in the Irish context has been largely silent on these important issues. This paper provides a synthesis of key aspects of these international discourses against a brief historical backdrop of the field of educational research. Thereafter, this theoretical lens is used to interrogate the more than 200 papers published in "Irish Educational Studies" (IES) over a period of 10 years: 1996-2006. This analysis seeks to establish the relative health and quality of educational research in the Irish context, and in the third section of the paper, this analysis is the basis for discussion of lessons that may be learned from insights and understandings gained. The paper concludes that a more systematic and comprehensive review of educational research funding in the Irish context would be particularly apposite and timely, while also advocating the necessity for a comprehensive educational research policy and the creation of a national educational research council. In the absence of such endeavours, research is likely to remain fragmented, small scale and easily dismissed by policy-makers, thus enabling advocacy rather than evidence and research generated elsewhere to overly-influence educational reform, while failing to enhance and extend a comprehensive "native" research literature, a vibrant research culture, while funding and systematically supporting and developing the next generation of educational researchers. In the absence of policy and funding, quality and capacity will continue to falter in a more complex, sophisticated interdependent world. (Contains 2 figures, 3 tables and 2 notes.)

The evidence presented in this article regarding policy reforms in the Irish context may suggest that, until now at least, professionalism prevails over performativity when viewed from the perspectives of primary principals. Nevertheless, the article argues that the prevalence of professionalism may indeed be short lived and principals themselves may be complicit in hastening a more performative-driven culture within school communities as they compete for a share of systemic power and in the process increase professional distance between themselves and their teaching colleagues while promulgating a rhetoric of collegiality and shared leadership.