Leadership and Strategic Management: keys to institutional priorities and planning*

Allocating and managing resources have always been important cornerstones of institutional leadership. Institutional resources include financial, physical and human components. Even in the best of times, it is a challenge to do this effectively. In times of diminished and shrinking resources, distributing these precious commodities across the institutions in the most equitable and productive manner is fraught with complications. As higher education funding streams expand and present more options, they also create new challenges. Leaders today must be well-versed in the emerging realms of philanthropy and entrepreneurialism. Beyond monetary resources, leaders and senior managers must monitor and understand the external environment in order to make discerning decisions about the viability of further infrastructure investments because of changing student demographics or the complexities of personnel within the dynamic culture of social organisations. This article will stress the need for leadership and an institutional planning process as essential prerequisites to effective resource allocations. Portugal will also be discussed as a case study.     

Education in the Realm of the Senses: Understanding Paulo Freire's Aesthetic Unconscious through Jacques Rancière

In this article I re‐examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts‐based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem‐posing classroom is an accompanying shift in the very aesthetics of recognition. In order to demonstrate the always already aesthetic nature of all education, I will turn to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Through Rancière we can begin to understand how the pedagogy of the oppressed is predicated on an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, of what can be seen and what can be heard. As Rancière will confirm, if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy.     

Reducing Aggressive Behavior and Increasing Motivation in School: The Evolution of an Intervention to Strengthen School Adjustment

The pervasive links between problem behaviors and school adjustment suggest that effective intervention programs to enhance school adjustment must focus both on decreasing the motivation to aggress and increasing the motivation to achieve. We describe a program of intervention research to improve social behavior and academic motivation in elementary school students organized around principles of attribution theory. Our intervention curriculum initially focused on reducing children's aggression and was then expanded to include enhancing personal responsibility. A series of efficacy and effectiveness studies have demonstrated that children's attributions in both the social and academic domains can be changed with cost-effective, educational strategies. These changes in children's cognitions have reliably produced positive changes in behavior. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our work for the design of effective interventions.