Conference Agenda

Research has increasingly examined the emotional experiences of principals in special education, including professional failure, instructional leadership, inclusive practices, and leadership complexity (Stark & Billingsley, 2024). Recent studies have also highlighted principals’ frustration in these settings (Dor-Haim, 2024). However, despite this growing attention, principals’ experiences of worry remain largely unexplored.

Worry is a persistent cognitive-emotional process that emerges in response to perceived threats to one’s goals, values, or significant relationships. It is typically future-oriented, repetitive, and characterized by negative thoughts concerning uncertain outcomes (Armitage, 2024). The significance of studying worry in the context of principals working with students with severe disabilities lies in the distinct nature of worry. Although closely associated with anxiety, fear, and stress (Paulsen, 2025), worry is best understood as a cognitive anticipation of threat. In contrast, fear is a reaction to an immediate threat to survival (Oplatka and Oren, 2020). Anxiety represents emotional alertness in the face of uncertainty (Vazard, 2022), and stress arises when environmental demands exceed an individual’s coping resources (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). Worry, therefore, is unique in its role as a mental process that enables individuals to anticipate threats, regulate their emotional responses, and prepare for possible action (Armitage, 2024).

Worry emerges from how individuals perceive threats to their goals, values, and professional relationships within a given work context (Armitage, 2024; Paulsen, 2025). Across occupational settings, employees encounter diverse stressors that challenge their sense of control, responsibility, and effectiveness (Sharmanov et al., 2020). Accordingly, worry can be understood as a multidimensional phenomenon whose meanings and expressions are shaped by contextual conditions rather than as a uniform emotional response. In European education systems, where centralized and decentralized governance structures coexist (European Commission, 2020), examining principals’ sense of worry is particularly relevant. This is especially true in special education settings serving students with complex developmental and physical disabilities. Principals in these schools operate under distinctive demands and moral responsibilities. They are accountable not only for educational outcomes but also for the daily care and safety of children with severe impairments (Stark and Billingsley, 2024). Many of these students face heightened risks of physical and psychological harm due to chronic medical conditions and co-occurring mental health challenges (Tesfaye et al., 2023). These principals must also manage widespread teacher burnout and high attrition rates (Cook and Ogden, 2022). Therefore, their experience of worry is likely to be distinct, with unique interpretations and forms of expression.

This study places particular emphasis on understanding how Israeli principals in special education schools interpret and articulate the feelings of worry that arise in their professional lives. Specifically, the study aims to explore the distinctive meanings principals attribute to worry in the context of their work. The research addressed two main questions: (1) What are the various meanings that special education principals assign to their feelings of worry? (2) What instances of worry events at work do special educational school principals provide across various contexts?

Rather than treating worry only as a sign of strain, this study conceptualizes it as a dynamic and anticipatory process. Worry is shaped by professional roles, values, and perceived threats. This perspective is important because most research on stress and coping focuses on reactions to past or present stressors. The anticipatory phase of stress has received far less attention (Biggs et al., 2017; Casper and Sonnentag, 2020). By addressing this gap, the study expands current understandings of leadership emotions. It offers a nuanced framework for examining how school leaders cognitively manage uncertainty, anticipate risk, and sustain professional commitment in complex educational environments.

Educational leaders worldwide face challenges as schools respond to 122 million refugees globally (UNHCR, 2025) and ongoing refugee movements. School leaders must navigate complex organizational, pedagogical, and ethical decisions about how to integrate students with refugee background effectively. Leadership in these challenging circumstances requires balancing language acquisition needs, social integration goals, resource limitations, and stakeholder expectations while maintaining educational quality for all students.

Current research on refugee integration and education remains fragmented (Eppenstein, 2017). While existing studies address mental health considerations (Pearlman, 2017) and measurement challenges (Cappella, Blair, & Aber, 2016), more research is needed on how school leaders navigate organizational decision-making under uncertainty, resource scarcity, and competing priorities.

This research responds to calls for understanding how educational leadership operates in challenging circumstances (Bogotch et al., 2020), where traditional organizational structures and pedagogical approaches may prove insufficient.

The study is grounded in school quality theories (Pfeifer, 2017; Ditton, 2007) that position school-level leadership as playing a crucial role in enabling high-quality teaching, even though classroom-level factors have more proximal effects on student outcomes. School leaders serve as key actors in creating organizational conditions, allocating resources, establishing institutional cultures, and making strategic decisions that shape teachers' capacity to address diverse student needs (Pfeifer & Voss, 2022).

This study addresses the research question, which approaches educational leaders and teachers use in practice and which conditions they identify as prerequisites for successful integration of students with refugee background in schools.

Data of this study reveal that school leaders implemented two fundamentally different organizational approaches, each reflecting distinct leadership philosophies. The first approach involves establishing separate classes exclusively for students with refugee backgrounds, prioritizing intensive German language acquisition before integration in regular classes—a sequential integration logic whereby language competence serves as prerequisite for full participation. The second approach—the "GO-IN model"—involves immediate placement in regular classes in school alongside German-speaking peers, based on the rationale that inclusion, social integration, and authentic language exposure should occur simultaneously from day one.

These organizational decisions represent significant leadership choices with implications for resource allocation, staffing, teacher professional development, and school culture. Leaders implementing segregated models emphasized maximizing language learning intensity, while those implementing the GO-IN model prioritized peer relationships, social belonging, and avoiding marginalization. Both groups identified critical challenges: German language instruction varied dramatically across schools (four to twelve hours weekly), interpreter services proved insufficient, and leaders desired clearer guidance from educational administrators regarding support levels for students with refugee background.

School leaders emphasized democratic leadership practices as integration strategies. Establishing class councils, designing participatory instructional approaches encouraging diverse perspectives, and creating spaces for students to explore interests emerged as ways leaders fostered inclusive school cultures. These democratic practices reflect distributed and shared leadership approaches where teachers act as change agents and students develop civic competencies (Beutel & Fauser, 2011).

A critical finding concerns assessment objectivity challenges. Some school leaders and teachers reported that knowledge of students' temporary status in Germany influenced perceptions of motivation and learning readiness, raising questions about how contextual knowledge may bias professional judgment. This highlights the need for leadership-supported professional development addressing assessment equity, reflexive practice, and collaborative exchange (Radhoff, Ruberg, & Wieckert, 2019).

The study contributes to educational leadership research by illuminating how leaders in challenging circumstances make complex organizational decisions, negotiate relations with educational administrators, and develop school cultures responsive to increasing diversity. Findings reveal how school leaders in Germany conceptualize and enact organizational approaches to refugee student integration, with implications for educational leadership practice and professional development.

According to the Times Higher Education, the number of women leading the world’s top universities has increased for the first time since 2017, but the percentage of women leaders remains under 20. Another analysis of the top 400 universities in the Times Higher Education’s university rankings also indicated that the typical university leader is male, 62 years old, and a scientist. While the importance of gender equality has been widely acknowledged both in research and policies, relatively little research has examined gender and academic leadership in universities outside Anglo-Saxon contexts. Our systematic literature review analyses 62 peer-reviewed academic articles on women and academic leadership published between 2000 and 2021, focusing on three national contexts: Bangladesh (15 studies), China (17 studies), and Finland (30 studies). The reasons for selecting these three country examples are twofold. First, we prefer to enrich geographical consideration by the topic in filling the gap. Second, the three countries represent three different developmental statuses of gender equality in higher education systems worldwide.

We designed the following research question: How has women’s academic leadership been studied in the context of Bangladesh, China and Finland?

Our findings indicate that research on gender and academic leadership remains underdeveloped across all three countries, particularly in Bangladesh. Existing studies predominantly concentrate on the barriers women face in attaining leadership positions, highlighting the need for broader and more diversified research perspectives. Furthermore, the results suggest that societal, cultural, and institutional differences contribute to varying levels of progress in gender equality in university leadership across the three contexts. However, despite these differences, male-dominated structures and organizational cultures within higher education institutions continue to constitute significant obstacles to women’s advancement into leadership roles in all three countries.

This review underscores the necessity for more comprehensive, comparative, and context-sensitive research to deepen understanding of gendered academic leadership and to support more effective policy and institutional reforms.