MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT/BONJOUR TOUT LE MONDE

Comment ça va ACEAS/CASEA members? In this second fall newsletter, I would like to provide the membership with the following updates:

• 2009 CASEA/ACEAS CONFERENCE: will be held May 23-26, 2009 during the CSSE/SCEE Annual Conference at Carleton University in Ottawa. Submission of proposals can be made through the CSSE/SCEE website (www.csse.ca). Deadlines for submissions is November 12, 2008. More information to follow from Bonnie Stelmach; 2nd Vice President and Co-Chair of the 2009 program.
• 2009 CASEA/ACEAS CONFERENCE CONVERSATION SESSIONS: If you are interested in facilitating a conversation session this year, please submit a one-two page proposal to me, Rosemary Foster at ryfoster@ualberta.ca by November 26, 2008. All proposals will be peer-reviewed. See what some colleagues did last year by viewing the examples of conversation summaries attached at the end of this newsletter.
• CASEA/ACEAS 2009 BANQUET: will be held at the very picturesque LAGO Bar and Grill located at the end of the Rideau Canal adjacent to Carleton (www.lagobargrill.com). More information to follow from David Burgess in the near future.
• CASEA/ACEAS WEBSITE: has been updated thanks to the leadership of Coral Mitchell. Check it out:  http://www.casea.org. AWARDS: submission information can be found on the website. Deadline for all nominations is February 1, 2009.
• COMITE DES CHERCHEURS FRANCOPHONES: Nouvelles de Claire Lapointe.
• CCEAM: Thanks to Ken Brien for representing CASEA/ACEAS at the CCEAM held in South Africa in September. Please see Ken’s written report included in this newsletter, and which we will discuss at the 2009 AGM at Carleton.
• CSSE/SCEE OCTOBER BOARD MEETING: held in Ottawa, October 17-18. “Knowledge Mobilization” continues to be a topic of discussion. CSSE/SCEE will offer another New Scholar pre-conference session at the 2009 annual meeting.

Rosemary Foster

CASEA/ACEAS CONFERENCE 2009

Dear CASEA Colleagues/ACEAS collègues:

Thank you to those who have already submitted a proposal for the CASEA program 2009.
Just a brief reminder to those preparing to submit before the November 12th deadline that proposals undergo a blind review process; therefore, before uploading your document be sure to eliminate your name from the header/footer as well as within the text (i.e. references). I´ve taken care of this so far, but would appreciate if you could double check. Thank you! Please note that reviewers are expecting a three-page, double-spaced proposal (excluding reference page and abstract).
Also, thank you in advance for participating in the process by serving as a reviewer. This is a critical part of ensuring a rigorous and stimulating CASEA program. Consistent with past practice, all submitters will be invited to review four proposals. Reviews will be due December 11, 2008. Proposal acceptance notification will be sent before Christmas. A tentative CASEA program will be created at this time, but will not be finalized until the end of January 2009.
On veut vous voir à Ottawa! See you all in May in Ottawa!

Bonnie Stelmach

COMITE DES CHERCHEURS FRANCOPHONES

Tel que décidé à l’Assemblée générale annuelle de 2008, un comité est en voie d’être formé afin d’encourager la participation des chercheurs francophones à l’ACÉAS. Le prochain bulletin de nouvelles présentera les membres de ce comité pancanadien. Voici par ailleurs quelques informations récentes sur ce qui se passe en administration de l’éducation au Canada français :

• Le Ministère de l’éducation, des loisirs et du sport du Québec a adopté en mai dernier un profil des compétences qui devront être visées par les programmes de formation des directions d’établissements scolaires de la province. Ce profil est disponible en français et en anglais à l’adresse web suivante : http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/sections/publications/index.asp?
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• L’Association pour le développement de l’enseignement et de la recherche en administration de l’éducation (ADERAE), qui regroupe des professeures/professeurs d’université et des praticiennes/praticiens francophones du Québec et d’ailleurs, a tenu, le 31 octobre dernier, une journée d’étude sur les programmes de formation professionnelle en gestion scolaire donnés par les universités au Québec ainsi que par l’Université d’Ottawa.

Claire Lapointe, présidente sortante

CCEAM 2008 CONFERENCE REPORT

The Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration and Management (CCEAM) held its 2008 conference in Durban, South Africa from Sept. 8 – 12, 2008. CCEAM has just over 2000 members in 32 countries, including 25 Commonwealth countries. CCEAM is the publisher of the journal International Studies in Educational Administration (ISEA), currently edited by Jacky Lumby and Nick Foskett of the UK. The current president of CCEAM is Dr. Petros Pashiardis of the Open University of Cyprus, whose term of office will conclude on Dec. 31, 2008. CASEA members are also members of CCEAM and, since Aug. 1, 2008, I have been the Canadian representative on the CCEAM International Board.

Here are some highlights from the conference:

• A new CCEAM president was elected for a four-year term: Ms. Zandile Kunene, Executive Director of the Matthew Goniwe School of Leadership and Governance (MGSLG), an agency of the Gauteng Department of Education in South Africa. She is the first woman from Africa to serve as CCEAM president. Her term begins on Jan. 1, 2009.
• The theme of the conference was Thinking Globally, Acting Locally. The keynote speakers at the conference included Andy Hargreaves, Tony Townsend, Petros Pashiardis, Zandile Kunene, and Jonathan Jansen.
• Approximately 445 delegates attended the conference, over 300 from South Africa with the rest from other countries. Delegates included faculty members, government education officials, district administrators, principals, and teachers. I met the following Canadian colleagues during the conference: Bruce and Sarah Sheppard, David Burgess, Michèle Schmidt, Dolana Mogadime, Carolyn Shields, and Jane McLeod.
• Discussion about ISEA included the improvement in the quality and the delivery schedule under the current editors and printing company in Cyprus. With 39 institutional subscriptions, there is a need for members to encourage more libraries to carry ISEA in order to attract a commercial publisher to take over our journal. The contract with the current printing company in Cyprus expires in December 2008.
• Next conference: The CCEAM 2010 conference has been awarded to the Australian Council for Educational Leaders (ACEL) and will be held Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, 2010 in Sydney, Australia. Since it will be held in conjunction with ACEL’s annual conference, as many as 1200 delegates are expected to attend.
• Request for 2012 conference: During the CCEAM Board meeting, we learned that there was only one bid submitted to host the 2012 conference, and that bid came from Cyprus only because there had not been other bids received. Cyprus hosted the 2006 conference. Several Board members, including the current president, asked me if Canada would be willing to host the 2012 conference. I relayed the request to the CASEA Executive and indicated that the CCEAM Executive would need a response from our affiliate by the end of September 2008. I held some informal conversations with some Canadian delegates at the conference about the request. I heard later in the conference that our affiliates in India indicated an interest in hosting the conference as well. I was told that the last time that the CCEAM conference was held in Canada was in Toronto in 1994. If CASEA were to undertake to bid and then host the conference in 2012 or 2014, it is worth noting that the host affiliates for 2006 and 2008 hired an outside company to manage the conference (e.g., registration, accommodation, venues, technology,vprograms, etc.) so that the local affiliate could focus on academic matters.
• Membership fee: At the CCEAM Biennial Meeting, an increase in annual membership fees from £10 to £12 effective Jan. 1, 2009, was approved. For CASEA members, this amount is included in the annual CASEA membership dues.

Ken Brien

CONVERSATION SESSION SUMMARIES: 2008 CASEA/ACEAS CONFERENCE

Knowledge Mobilization
Facilitated by: Ben Levin (OISE)
Opening questions/set:
How do we strengthen the connections between research, policy and practice?
Context:
- There is growing interest among all parties in enhancing the contribution that research can make to education policy and practice
- Many ideas have been proposed as to how this can be done, and many projects and activities are underway
- There is a growing, though still limited, conceptual and empirical literature on these issues in education and more generally (e.g. health)
- Many different conceptual frameworks have been suggested
- Empirical evidence is still in short supply as to the impact or effectiveness of various strategies.
Key questions:
- What are the biggest barriers to and facilitators of strong connections between research, policy and practice in education?
- What steps are most desirable to create improvement in this field?
- What conceptual questions need clarification?
- What empirical evidence is required and how can it best be gathered?
- What practical steps could be taken to support knowledge mobilization by:
            - Individual scholars/researchers
            - faculties of education and universities
            - schools and school systems
            - departments/ministries of education
            - other partners such as third parties and brokering agencies?
Discussion (June 2):

• Individuals can play multiple roles – not just ‘producers’ or ‘users’ – grad students are both, for example, and people move back and forth in their careers.
• Discussion of use of large data sets and extracting value from those, but also issues around getting access and having the quantitative skills
• The idea of a model of research production and sharing based on ongoing support to a researcher or organization but with specific deliverables negotiated annually.
• Balancing between creating new knowledge/expertise and exploiting existing knowledge/expertise for maximum impact on the education system.
• How do we use Web 2.0 to support effective knowledge mobilization?
• Support for research partnerships, but what happens to controversial research in a partnership world?
• Different parties (inevitably?) have different perspectives on what has happened and why
• Language issues – different language for different actors
• translation needed from ‘research’ to be accessible to others
• underutilization of graduate students as ‘brokers’
• terminology without definition
• many different audiences may require different forms of communication

            Do we know who the audiences are?
Communication vs persuasion?

• Products vs networks/ personal interactions
• Results of research not clear or consistent leading to lack of credibility
• Quality of research – what counts as research/evidence?
• Individual studies vs syntheses of bodies of research
• Interests of those commissioning the work
• What is a fair conclusion or implication to draw from a study, or many studies?  How far can implications be pursued?

Research related to political agenda

• Different motivations and purposes of researchers compared with governments or school systems
•  what counts, criticism vs support…
• Ideas for improvement?
• KM as an activity in its own right

Leading for Democratic Learning Communities (DLC)
Facilitated by: Philip Woods, Larry Sackney, and Coral Mitchell
Opening questions/set:

• What does or what can the idea of democratic learning communities mean?
• How can it be developed in practice?
• How can it be researched in meaningful ways?
• To what extent to more extensive understandings of learning and inclusion already exist as seeds of change within some of the current thinking about professional learning communities and their practice?

Discussion:

• Tacit and dominant organizational narratives of bureaucracies and hierarchy keep non-democratic arrangements enshrined in people’s thought patterns and anchored in organizational structures and expectations.
• If we want to move in this direction, we need to figure out how to move it forward so that it becomes deeply rooted in the “way we do things.”
• Power and control (assumption of, practices of, expressions of) are implicated in the search for DLCs.
• If we think about the three aspects of DLC, what does it mean to be democratic? To be learning? To be in community? What does it mean when we (try to) bundle these three elements together into a DLC?
• The culture of the school is expressed through/lived in the stories the people in the school tell each other.
• Schools are rooted in a system that may have different tacit arrangements and understandings about power, control, and democracy (and learning).
• Sustainability is an issue, especially when leaders move from school to school.
• Followership and leadership will have different concept of/ values around the idea.
• If you have a democracy, you have everyone fully informed, but we don’t have that

       case in schools – we have differently informed people and groups.

• Democratic leadership is probably quite different from distributed leadership because it will likely carry different assumptions and arrangements about power and control.
• Professional learning communities and DLCs are approaches, not objects or things – it’s a journey that can move in different ways in different contexts and different times.
• Can a democratic school exist in a non-democratic system?
• It will be a “flavour-of-the-month” if it doesn’t become part of the bigger system as the way we do things.
• Morality and ethical values are a large (but often silent) part of the conversation.
• Students are often neglected or silenced in the conversations. What is the role of the students in a democratic school? Are they future citizens or active citizens today?
• Democracy doesn’t mean that we all agree.
• To what extent is the professoriate willing to become democratic? If we don’t show in practice, what we advocate for the practitioners in the schools, the practitioners will look at our recommendations with cynicism and suspicion.
• Who are the range of people who have the capacity to engage in different democratic conversations and decisions? What do we do about the concept of an “age of majority”?
• Entrepreneurship and market choice are presenting challenges to traditional bureaucracies – but is the challenge good for the development of a good educational system for the 21st century?
• How does democratic schooling relate to the current search for strong leadership?

Supervising/Mentoring the ‘New’ Graduate Student in Colleges/Faculties of Education
Facilitated by: Bonnie Stelmach (Saskatchewan) and Brenda Spencer (Alberta)
Opening questions/set:

• Who is the ‘new’ graduate student in programs of educational administration?
• What is the purpose of graduate studies in educational administration programs? Is the aim graduate study and scholarship, or is the aim professional development? How do/should educational administration programs respond to this mounting tension between university tradition and contemporary goals?
• What are the implications of accommodating a “professional development” posture in designing graduate school programs? Example: SSHRC has developed the expectation that professors develop students’ research capacity, but if they are not interested in that, or if they are not available…?
• How can professors reconcile their desire and need to develop mutually beneficial relationships with graduate students based on research interests, intellectual passions and the advancement of understanding of educational administration issues with graduate students’ increasingly utilitarian focus on “finishing” a program to receive a sought-after credential?
• What strategies can be employed in the area of graduate admissions, programming, mentorship, and assessment to adequately satisfy both professors’ research passions and graduate students’ desire for technocratic skill?
• How do faculties/colleges of education maintain their raison d’être of knowledge creation and pursuit of excellent scholarship in the face of what seems like students’ growing resentment for what they perceive as extravagant theorizing?
• How can professors support graduate students, many who choose to maintain full-time teaching or administrative assignments while pursuing graduate studies, to produce excellent scholarship?

Discussion:
Who are we educating? Balance this with SSHRC expectations. Force students to do SSHRC.

• Mentorship – help people understand what they’re getting into.
• Balance – full vs part-time? How external forces play into this.
• Students need to reclaim power.
• Issues:  full vs part-time; professional vs scholar; engagement vs appeasement of students; educational tourist vs educational traveler; power- students having more input/say over their programs; what does the university as a whole perpetuate?
• Implications/suggestions: remember character of the field; adjust to the needs of the profession; see students as in transition (might begin with a credential in mind, but may develop genuine curiosities); no recipes for motivating; people – who are our learners?
• PhD students:
• Not part of the group, when the groups are all full-time members
• Age
• English as a first language or a second language
• Life experience (“baby”) or 50 year old when most students are 29-35
• Mundane stresses
• Anti-intellectualism
• General comments:
• Credentialism was far more intense 25 years ago
• Don’t mind coming in for credentialing, but we will “snag” them
• Time to think
• Field in which we work: professional faculty and huge workforce
• Start with the problems of practice
• Can’t force – what are the incentives?
• Different streams for different needs
• Lack of information about what students are getting into when they enter the field of education
• “Check list” approach. Focus on what happens after, rather than what is happening now (in the process).
• Students to reclaim power to control their own programs.
• Elitist/privileged “tradition” that all cannot access
• Teaching must be interacting and engaging
• What conceptualization of the program/curriculum will enhance learning
• Don’t appease students – challenge students (not the “smiley faced,” easy prof. Profs should be courageous and hold high expectations.)
• Curriculum (what constitutes knowledge?) David Phipps notion of “catch and release.” E.g., undergraduate programs – students won’t comply. New kind of students. Curriculum must be fluid in a global context. Universities must offer a “revolving door” for students who come in and out.
• New kind of graduate student (e.g., This is “good enough.”). Need to challenge students. We need to push that “this is good enough.”
• It’s a different world.
• Universities about “fun, fun, fun” – undergrad is not about academics.
• With life experiences and travel, students become learners who are about to philosophize and theorize differently.
• Could be about internationalization in European countries.
• Careful about generalizing abut individual experiences. Germany, Italy, France – hard to get in and few get out.
• Motivation, engagement – “Where are our learners?” No “right” way to go about this.
• On board:
• Degree of commitment on part of the supervisor/instructor and student
• Non-stop obligations to two sets of students (i.e., full time and part time), provide two sets of course offerings
• Tensions: time for intellectual engagement and the need for professional credentialism