Ulf Leo

Under One Umbrella : Professional Norms Promoting Education for Sustainable Development at School level

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the link – the professional norms – between legal norms and actions regarding education for sustainable development based on an empirical study. The study has a special interest in the role of school leaders and how the implementation of education for sustainable development (ESD) is led, organised and realised. There is also an interest in identifying the kinds of support mechanisms and obstacles to implementation and norm setting exhibited by the school organisations. The theoretical framework follows theories in sociology of law where the relation between law and society is the focus of the research. Education for sustainable development is regulated in the Swedish national curriculum and syllabi, thus constituting legal norms and national goals, which the professionals have to interpret and put into action.

Professional Norms Guiding School Principals’ Pedagogical Leadership

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the professional norms surrounding school development, with a special emphasis on school principals’ pedagogical leadership. Design/methodology/approach – A norm perspective is used to identify possible links between legal norms, professional norms, and actions. The findings are based on answers given by 974 school principals in a web-based questionnaire. The design of the study and the findings are structured around three questions used to identify professional norms: what tasks principals prioritize as pedagogical leaders, where the external expectations on principals are derived from, and with whom school principals communicate regarding issues related to their pedagogical leadership. Findings – The most evident professional norms identified in this study are that principals should: be present and close to the teaching and learning processes; involve teachers in quality development; enhance the development of formative assessments; engage i...

Child Rights, Classroom and School Management: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper provides a systematic review of scholarly literature concerning the enforcement of children’s rights in the classroom context and school management. The literature review is based on a systematic review methodology the authors developed drawing on the methods and guidelines used in the medical sciences over the last 15 years. Forty-two articles published between 1990 and 2014 were selected and analysed. The paper presents both a descriptive analysis and a thematic analysis in order to provide the state-of-art of international literature on child rights, classroom and school management. The descriptive analysis highlights the main characteristics of the articles included, such as type of study and methods used, classification of literature based on the geographical and thematic focus, article citation frequency, and chronological development of the subject in question. The thematic analysis synthesises the main findings extracted from the literature and highlights the main trends and gaps in research.

Change Agents and Change of Norms : International Experiences on Training in UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in Schools

Education is usually seen as an instrument for making changes in knowledge, values and norms. Norms are action instructions or imperatives and thus direct actions and changes, which is the essence of norms. If one knows more about norms – guiding actions – one understands more about changes. It is well-known in sociology of law that there is an important, complex interplay between social norms and legal norms. The aim of this article isto reflect upon empirically based results on international training on implementation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) – the legal norms – in schools and educational organisations. The article is ended by concrete examples and applications of changes taken from schools and educational areas in the state of Kerala in southern India. The overarching idea is to study some change processes where the change of norms is taking place following the new legal norms stemming from the CRC. If legal and the social norms are congruent, one of the conclusions is that the implementation of new norms will be sustainable. (Less)