Leadership and Culture in Chinese Education

This article discusses the evolution of Chinese culture in the People's Republic of China through recognizing a number of different stages and their respective influence on education and school leadership. Among the recognized stages are traditional culture, socialist culture, enterprise culture and patriarchal culture. To some extent these stages have developed sequentially, although all are claimed to be of relevance today. Traditional culture is reflected in continued respect for authority, collectivism and harmony in schools. Socialist culture has, in many ways, reinforced aspects of traditional culture while, at the same time, further politicizing the principal's role, and enterprise culture has served to integrate market values into the education system. The influence of patriarchal culture continues to determine the role of men and women in schools, and particularly in school leadership. The article concludes by briefly discussing both the cumulative and enduring influence of the hybrid Chinese culture on education.     

Invisible barriers: the career progress of women secondary school principals in Greece

This paper examines the career progress of female principals in Greek secondary schools and the under‐representation of women in management positions. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with six women principals in Athens, the paper considers the factors affecting women's participation in school management. The findings demonstrate that women are greatly under‐represented in secondary school management positions. The main reasons for this disadvantage are personal factors, covert discrimination, gender stereotypes and constraints experienced through their socially defined roles.     

Delivering distance training to rural health care professionals

This article reports on a project that delivers distance training to rural health care professionals. Traveling to provide training on information-seeking skills to rural health professionals is time consuming and costly. In addition to face-to-face training, the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library's SAMNet project seeks to deliver multimedia training to rural health care professionals. The project uses information technology to package training courses combining PowerPoint slides and video instructions. This article describes the rationale, training module design and development, and the information technology and software used in the project. Multimedia packaged distance training courses provide a practical alternative to on-site training for rural health care professionals. It enables librarians to provide training without traveling long distance, thus saving time and money. Additionally, rural health care professionals may access the modules at a time convenient to them and proceed at a pace suitable to their learning style.     

School Leadership in West Africa: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review

The literature shows that leadership is the second most important factor influencing school and learner outcomes, including levels of literacy and numeracy, school leaving examination results, and progression to secondary and higher education. This article focuses on school leadership in West Africa, drawing on a systematic review of the academic and ‘grey’ literature, commissioned by UNESCO. The aim of the desk research was to ascertain the state of school leadership at all levels. The study shows that no West African countries provide specific preparation for school principals. It also shows that the predominant leadership style is managerial, with accountability to the hierarchy, within and beyond the school. The article concludes that specific development programmes should be provided for current and aspiring principals.     

University-level teaching of Anthropogenic Global Climate Change (AGCC) via student inquiry

This paper reviews university-level efforts to improve understanding of anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) through curricula that enable student scientific inquiry. We examined 152 refereed publications and proceedings from academic conferences and selected 26 cases of inquiry learning that overcome specific challenges to AGCC teaching. This review identifies both the strengths and weaknesses of each of these case studies. It is the first to go beyond examining the impact of specific inquiry instructional approaches to offer a synthesis of cases. We find that inquiry teaching can succeed by concretising scientific processes, providing access to global data and evidence, imparting critical and higher order thinking about AGCC science/policy and contextualising learning with places and scientific facts. We recommend educational researchers and scientists collaborate to create and refine curricula that utilise geospatial technologies, climate models and communication technologies to bring students into contact with scientists, climate data and authentic AGCC research processes. Many available science education technologies and curricula also require further research to maximise trade-offs between implementation and training costs and their educational value.