Conference Agenda

The central research question asks how the policy of the LCA programme is being lived out in practice today and whether this lived experience continues to marry with the original aims and rationale upon which the programme was conceived and developed. This study will examine the LCA programme from the perspective of those who live the programme, namely students and teachers, as well as from the perspective of policy makers and school leaders. The study will place these voices at the heart of the analysis. The discursive, spatial and relational discourses explored in this study in relation to the recognition and valuing of difference in education is pertinent not only in an Irish context but also in a European and international context.

This research is situated within the wider field of the sociology of education and employs a critical emancipatory perspective, as informed by a Foucauldian critical approach to analysis. It was informed by a number of theoretical commitments shaped by a critical theory perspective and which underpin the conceptual and contextual framework of this study. This approach changes the focus from the perceived deficits of students in order to focus on the practices and discourses within schools and the ways in which these affect students’ experiences and their ability to voice these experiences. The voices of students are foregrounded in this study and as such there is a refocusing of analysis from student deficits to student voice. In its commitment to an emancipatory approach that centred on student voice, recognition, and lived experiences, I was keen to locate thinkers who could enable an exploration of power, dialogue and affect, hence the choice of Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire and Anna Hickey Moody as key theoretical interlocutors. Foucault’s theories of discourse, power/knowledge, the micro-physics of power, and heterotopias help us in understanding the lived everyday experiences of students. However, while Foucault offers us much, he does not deal specifically with the critical nature of pedagogy nor the affective or emotional aspects of lived experiences so his work is brought into conversation with Freire’s work on critical pedagogy and Anna Hickey-Moody’s work on affective pedagogy. Foucault’s concept of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges helps to foreground the voices of students as the starting point in a politics of possibility, with the works of Freire and Hickey-Moody further developing this in possibility to pedagogy in practice, in particular the critical and affective possibilities of pedagogy. The combination of this theoretical framework and the methodological commitments to voice, lived experience, and recognition, as I will outline below, allowed for a nuanced examination of the Leaving Certificate Applied programme. This brings wider issues of inclusive education to the fore such as the emotional aspects of inclusion, the spaces students occupy, the embodied experience of policies, and the highly contextualised nature of schools, as well as the complexity of policy enactment.

Rather than seeking demystified insights that I could use in order to ‘emancipate’ LCA students, I aimed instead to open up a space where these students could be heard and make possible a new way of seeing or doing things and the concepts offered by the thinkers utilized in this study offered a conceptual language for this. The way things are is only one, limited possibility. As Foucault puts it, ‘it is seeking to give a new impetus…to the undefined works of freedom’ (Rabinow, 1984b)

Collaboration between schools has been recently promoted by policy and policy discourses as a central component for the improvement of Chilean schools. In fact, it is at the core of national-scale policies mandating public schools to take part in school–networks as a way to promote the encounter between different actors, and the emergence of locally-based collaborative work. However, these endeavours take place in a highly-privatised school system, where 55% of schools are privately owned (MINEDUC, 2022), and privately driven throughout (Bellei and Orellana, 2014). Moreover, schooling provision is highly marketised (Zancajo, 2019), and schools are individually liable for their performance through centrally designed schemes of accountability (Parcerisa and Falabella, 2017), conditions which would seem to make school-to-school collaboration unlikely.

One of these reforms is the New Public Education (NPE), a policy aiming at enhancing the quality and equity of the depressed Chilean public-school education. This reform implies the transference of schools from municipalities to school districts, new meso-level institutional arrangements provisioned with resources and staff supporting the administration and teaching and learning processes at the school level. One of the key principles of the NPE is the promotion of collaboration between schools, encouraging them to exchange information and educational practices, offering opportunities for professional development, and promoting collective strategies to address shared challenges (Bellei, 2018; Villalobos et al., 2019).

The abovementioned informs and frames my doctoral research project, which aims at exploring, describing, and understanding relationships of support between Chilean schools, and reflecting on the capacity of ongoing policies to fit or enhance these ties or create meaningful new ones. This project supposes that examining the way schools relate to others, delving into the characteristics of those that are more likely to build trustworthy relationships, and understanding the dynamics of those interactions may shed light on key worldwide educational issues in at least three ways. First, by informing to what extent building collaborative relationships is possible within highly privatised school systems. Second, intends to inform ongoing policies with school-to-school collaboration at its core. And third, to propose a relational perspective that may illuminate the understanding of wider questions regarding the work schools daily do.

In particular, this paper aims at exploring and describing how school leaders are navigating and making sense of new school-to-school collaborative arrangements as part of their transition to the New Public Education (NPE) system.

This research project is underpinned by a Social Network Analysis (SNA) approach (Borgatti and Halgin, 2011; Crossley et al., 2015), a conceptual and methodological framework concerned with the social structures (Marsden and Lin, 1982; Wasserman and Galaskiewicz, 1994) schools and their communities are embedded in. Empirical data was yielded through Ego-centric Network Map interviews (Altissimo, 2016) with a sample of public school headteachers. Interviews aimed at collecting data on relationships schools forge with others to support the work they daily do, acknowledging features of the networks, drivers, and the content of these bonds. Data was both quantitatively and qualitatively analysed, and show that schools relate to others as part of mandated and non-mandated networks, both encompassing different purposes. Whilst mandated networks are focused on facilitating school improvement processes by promoting the reflection and exchange of good practices between leadership teams, non-mandated networks are key to getting access to resources that schools need on a daily basis, but also to support other schools in crisis in the area. Findings also highlight some characteristics of schools and leadership teams that make them more prone to establish supportive and collaborative relationships with some and not others.

While demands on academic leadership in higher education have been increasing, there is a lack of empirical studies exploring the effectiveness and impacts of leadership development interventions. In addition, recent studies suggest a model of leadership development from international approach. Unfortunately, evaluation of those programs is scarce in the available literature. This article presents the results of the mid-term impacts of an international academic leadership development (ALD) program that has been organised since 2019. The project involved six European and six Chinese universities. After 2 years of project implementation, participants were invited to take the online survey and follow-up interview. 92 participants voluntarily took part in the online survey. Of those, 21 participants participated in semi-structured interviews. A mixed-methods approach using an online questionnaire and semi-structured interviews was utilised in to evaluate each individual’s behavioral changes. The findings revealed substantial impacts on participants in two major respects: personal growth and professional practices. The research uniquely provides empirical evidence concerning the mid-term impacts of this international leadership development program that has equally emphasized leader development and leadership development. Theoretical, practical, and policy implications were presented.