Facilitating a culture of relational trust in school-based action research: recognising the role of middle leaders

Abstract

Practices such as formal focused professional dialogue groups, coaching conversations, mentoring conversations and professional learning staff meetings have been taken up in schools and pre-schools as part of long-term action research and development activities to improve the learning and teaching practices. The development of relational trust has long been described in the literature as pivotal for the ongoing ‘success’ of such research and development in sites. In this article, we attempt to re-characterise relational trust as it is accounted for by participants in action research. We present data from a cross-nation study of middle leaders from Australian primary schools and Swedish pre-schools. Middle leaders are those teachers who ‘lead across’; they have both an acknowledged position of leadership or responsibility for the practice development of colleagues and a significant teaching role. The larger study examined the practices of middle leaders; and in this article we draw on interview data from one of the case-study sites that illustrate how colleagues in schools recognise the role middle leaders have for facilitating action research and teaching development. This article specifically presents excerpts from semi-structured interviews with 25 teachers, three principals, three executive teachers and three district consultants. Interviewees described how nourishing a culture of relational trust and mutual respect are critical features in the change endeavour. For them, the practices of the middle leader who facilitated the action research were instrumental in developing trust for teacher development. Analysis of participant accounts revealed five dimensions of trust: interpersonal trust, interactional trust, intersubjective trust, intellectual trust, and pragmatic trust.     

On the return of art investment return analyses

We survey more than twenty studies estimating rates of return of investments in single art objects and whole collections and evaluate the various approaches to art price movements taken so far. The majority of the estimates find lower returns for investments in art objects than for investments in financial assets. However, most existing analyses are restricted to auction data and neglect transactions cost and taxation. They partly focus on mechanistic calculations and disregard the distinguishing institutional and behavioral characteristics of art markets. We look into the possibilities to capture and empirically estimate psychic returns from owning art.     

Seeing,hearing, reading,writing, speaking and things: on silences,senses and emotions during the “zero hour” in Germany

This article focuses on senses, emotions and cultural practices such as writing, reading and speaking in West Germany after 1945. The period immediately following the end of the Second World War – the so-called Stunde Null, or “zero hour” – has generally been seen as a time of new beginnings, also with regard to cleansing the German language and breaking the silences of the past. This historical examination of sensory-emotional and material contexts and related cultural practices takes as its source Hanns-Josef Ortheil’s autobiographical novel Die Erfindung des Lebens (The Invention of Life), published in 2009. Ortheil’s novel is about a child’s enormous struggle to learn how to feel, see, read, write and speak. This so-called “ego document”, told by a first-person narrator, focuses on the links between things, objects, senses, emotions, and the acquisition of cultural skills and techniques while at the same time providing subtle commentary on post-war West German society.     

Tracing mobile inventors—The causality between inventor mobility and inventor productivity

This paper analyses the causality between inventor productivity and inventor mobility. The results show that the level of education has no influence on inventor productivity. Making use of external sources of knowledge, on the contrary, has a significant effect on productivity. Finally, firm size has a positive impact on productivity. Firm size also influences inventor mobility, although negatively. Whereas existing research implicitly assumes causality to point in one direction, this study ex ante allows for a simultaneous relationship. To deal with the expected endogeneity problem, instrumental variables techniques (IVREG and IVPROBIT) will be employed. Results show that mobile inventors are more productive than non-movers. Whereas a move increases productivity, an increase in productivity decreases the probability to observe a move.     

Instrumentality,Expressivity, and Relational Qualities in the Same‐Sex Friendships of College Women and Men

Using the relational–cultural model (Jordan, Kaplan, Miller, Stiver, & Surrey, 1991), the authors hypothesized that instrumentality, expressivity, and the individual affective experience of same‐sex friendships would predict increased relationship mutuality, with college women and men showing different predictive patterns. Overall, results supported the hypotheses. Gender moderated the associations among variables, notably between mutuality and individual affective experiences of same‐sex friendships. Implications for counselors serving college student populations are discussed.     

Inventors and invention processes in Europe: Results from the PatVal-EU survey

Based on a survey of the inventors of 9017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents.     

Social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia: five decades of resilient findings

This article provides a panoramic view of research findings on social inequalities in access to higher education in Croatia since the 1960s, guided by the question of what has changed in the findings. Our review shows that there is stark continuity over the last five decades: students from better educated family backgrounds tend to be overrepresented in higher education; students from better educated and white-collar family backgrounds are more likely to enrol in academic as opposed to professional study courses; students at one Croatian university in particular stand out in terms of their more privileged social background; and medicine seems to be the prime academic field for observing social reproduction. We note that these persistent findings run parallel to a dramatically changing political, economic and social context in Croatia, including transformations in the 1990s resulting from social ownership of the means of production to widespread private ownership, as well as transformations from a one-party political system to the establishment of a multi-party political system. The article maps possible theoretical explanations for the resilience of social inequalities in access to higher education in the context of dynamic times. It also questions the role of educational policies in this process.