Urban Literacy Leadership: Examining One Principal’s Vision and Practice: A Sociocultural Investigation of One Principal’s Practice

School leadership research offers prescriptions for strong instructional and culturally relevant leadership for diverse and urban adolescent populations, yet little evidence describes how school principals impact adolescents’ in-school reading experiences. This qualitative inquiry sought to understand how one urban secondary principal perceived and enacted his role in a school’s effort to teach reading. It also investigated how staff and students perceived his actions. Framed by sociocultural perspectives of reading and a distributed leadership perspective, data analysis revealed that the principal made time and nurtured relationships to grow teacher capacity, support and participate in independent reading, and attend to individual readers and teachers. This study affirms the importance of context in shaping urban adolescents’ reading experiences and raises implications for the urban school principal’s role in their literacy instruction.

Pathways to Critical Literacy Leadership: An Examination of a Cohort Model of Professional Development

As faculty at a land-grant university, we wanted to better understand the complexity of and pathways toward critical literacy leadership among educators. Specifically, we asked: What forms of critical literacy leadership become visible when educators participate in a cohort model of literacy professional development? Thirty educators enrolled across four different literacy cohorts at the university participated in this case study. Participants were diverse in their teaching experiences, racial identity, teaching placement, and literacy expertise. Participants shared similar geo-political-educational realities as they were all a part of the same large, urban district. Survey data, interviews, teaching and learning documents, and categorical data were analyzed in overlapping phases. Descriptive statistics were generated. Four themes related to critical literacy leadership surfaced from interviews using constant comparative methods: brokering equitable literacy practices, negotiating tensions, sharing/strengthening existing literacy practices, and imagining the futurity of literacy leadership. Educators offered complex portraits of critical literacy leadership in various spaces—often leading through learning. Participants’ voices highlighted the impact literacy leaders have on transformative, grassroots efforts toward change.

Human Resources Competency in the Era of Industrial Revolution 4.0

<p>An era of technological disruption is marked by digitization in various lives. Apart from offering benefits, the industrial revolution 4.0 also has challenges that must be faced. The challenges faced by a country when implementing the 4.0 industrial revolution are the emergence of resistance to changes in demographics and social aspects, instability in political conditions, limited resources, risk of natural disasters and demands for the application of environmentally friendly technology. The PESTEL framework is the basis for considering political, economic, social, technical, environmental and legal factors to analyze challenges in the era of the industrial revolution 4.0. Indonesia needs to improve the quality of workforce skills with digital technology. The relevance of education and work needs to be adjusted to the development of the era and science and technology while still paying attention to aspects of humanities. It is important to identify in competency classification, including: 1) Technical competence consists of all knowledge and skills related to work, 2) Methodological competencies include all skills and abilities for general problem solving and decision making, 3) Social competence includes all skills and abilities as well as attitudes to cooperate and communicate with others, and 4) Personal competence includes social values, motivation, and individual attitudes. New literacy, leadership, team work, mental maturity and character, culture and entrepreneurship make HR function properly in the community. The development of thematic studies in various disciplines is linked to the real world, project-based learning, through general education (extra-curricular) programs, and internships/practical work and the important thing that can support it is foreign language skills. Thus, competent human resources (HR), critical thinking, lateral thinking and entrepreneurship can be realized.</p>

Twenty-five books a day: Literacy events in subsidized childcare

The purpose of this case study was to investigate a segment of a data set collected as part of a larger ethnographic study exploring the early language and literacy practices of one unique preschool programme, selected for its unusually high outcomes for children in typically underserved populations. The original study explored administrators’ literacy leadership within the context of system-level funding and oversight inequities and inadequate local, state, and federal support. Analysis from the original study showed that their lofty commitment to a ‘twenty-five books a day’ mindset guided them in supporting teachers as they made books, stories, and language play a universal occurrence throughout the school day. This article, reporting on an extension of this original study, explores how school administrators operationalized this ‘twenty-five books a day’ mindset: prioritizing ample and consistent (1) access to high quality, diverse books, (2) both structured and impromptu, responsive literacy interactions, and (3) professional support for teachers.