Leadership and Social Justice

ABSTRACT

Leaders have tremendous influence not only in their organizations but for the profession and within the communities they serve. Librarianship has strong core values that are the foundation of our services but librarians also create an environment that supports diversity of opinions. How does a library leader balance social justice while serving the broad needs of a community? Is there an inherent conflict between personal perspectives and the encompassing multiple viewpoints? Library leaders may face difficult decisions in determining social justice issues within their libraries considering personal beliefs, institutional responsibilities, and community impacts. Every library leader has opportunities to address social justice issues within libraries and in so doing, will advance community goals of inclusiveness of all members.     

A Leader's Toolbelt

Leaders need a variety of tools to be effective in their management, communication, and leadership. These tools should be used for specific jobs and are operational in working with some personalities but not all. Leaders can develop these tools and over time, learn when and how to effectively use them. Such tools will enhance the leader's ability to address a variety of situations and issues drawing upon expertise gained through experience.     

Leadership Reflections: Extrovert and Introvert Leaders

Leadership calls for the ability to work well with people, communicate with stakeholders, participate in and lead meetings, and often public speaking. As a leader advances within an organization, expectations increase for the individual to engage with others as leaders spend more time working with colleagues and stakeholders to advance the organization. These expectations tend to favor extroverts in leadership roles but organizations may overlook the strengths of introverts as leaders losing out on the potential for effective management. An understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of personality types will help individuals as well as organizations in developing leadership in order to achieve organizational goals.     

Performing support in higher education: negotiating conflicting agendas in academic language and learning advisory work

ABSTRACT

This article critically explores neoliberal administrative priorities and the ways in which they shape and constrain academic language and learning (ALL) advisory practice in the Australian higher education sector. Drawing on semi-structured interview data collected from in-service ALL advisors working in Australian universities, we highlight a disjuncture between the participants’ understandings of effective practice and the institutional framing of ALL advisory work as a mechanism to improve accessibility of higher study and retention of diversifying student cohorts. The data indicate the potential for institutional priorities to generate dilemmas in advisors’ daily practice as they are tasked with performing support via formats considered antithetical to meeting students’ needs and fostering productive approaches to study. Under these circumstances, participants characterised collaboration between advisors and content specialists in the pursuit of more embedded approaches as dependent on individual endeavours and stymied by a lack of institutional support. We call for renewed consideration of the formats and affordances with which advisors work in order to better align ALL advisory practice with the holistic development of students’ academic literacy skills.