Lutheran schools transform students, families, congregations, and communities. While effective school leadership is crucial for this potential transformation, the difficulties of school leadership continue to increase. Leaders of Christian schools face challenges unique to the parochial context. The purpose of this study was to explore how…

Previous studies suggest that small rural schools experience a range of challenges relating to their size, financial difficulties and geographical isolation, as well as potential opportunities relating to their position within their communities. In Northern Ireland, these schools are situated within the comparatively rare context of a religiously…

Children's religious education is vital for the formation of pupils in Dutch Orthodox Protestant schools. Therefore, it seems self-evident that parents and teachers cooperate. This article presents research on parents' and teachers' opinions about the helpfulness of cooperative practices in religious education. A total of 1346 parents and teachers…

A long tradition of both State and religious interest and support characterised provision for education on the island of Ireland from the 1700s. Following the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, the newly created political entities of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland forged separate and distinct education policy trajectories that largely…

This article explores adolescents' and teachers' interpretations of shared education through interviews with participating teachers and pupils in one school partnership in Northern Ireland. As an initiative explicitly designed to bring pupils from Catholic and majority Protestant schools together, shared education offers potential for building…

Society in Northern Ireland can be characterised as being underpinned by an enduring cultural, religious and political divide between two dominant communities: Catholics and Protestants. The educational system largely reflects and contributes to the reproduction of this separation. Teachers are generally deployed in schools that are consistent…

The aim of this study is to gain empirical knowledge about how the Bible functions in the context of Protestant Christian primary schools in the Netherlands. It presents the results of an empirical explorative and qualitative study on the perceptions of teachers and school administrators (directors and internal supervisors) on the goals of Bible…

There is considerable literature concerning the impact of education in divided societies. Some seek to defend separate schools, often for different faith groups, while others stress the benefits of school integration on social cohesiveness. Contact theory has been employed in efforts in many countries to address social discord. Northern Ireland is…

In this article, we present a reconceptualization of sport as a series of collaborative contests with players on different teams scoring goals cooperatively: players on both sides lose or both sides win together depending on whether they can improve the scores they earn in overcoming limitations and obstacles by working with the other team. When…

This action research project occurred to assess the effectiveness of the continual learning process, a philosophy described by W. Edwards Deming. The study took place at a small, U.S. Midwest Lutheran school, conducted as a positive response to a teacher survey indicating the study's need. Five of the central concepts of this philosophy were that…

This article reports on the impact visits to community-based museums in a divided society, Northern Ireland, had on young people's historical, political, and cultural understanding of the commemorated past. It examines the responses of two student groups, one predominantly Protestant and the other Catholic, to two museums, each presenting its own…

The ethnic separation of the school system in Northern Ireland along Catholic and Protestant community lines limits opportunities for daily cross-community interaction between young people. Recent research has shown that, whilst the deployment pattern of teachers is largely consistent with this divide, a small proportion of teachers has diverted…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the experiences of pupils and teachers within two primary school Shared Education partnerships in Northern Ireland; in particular, how intergroup contact is experienced within such contexts. A comparative, instrumental case study design was employed, which included document review, observation of Shared…

The importance of K-12 school leadership for student learning, teacher recruitment and retention, and school culture is well documented by research. Furthermore, there are compelling reasons for examining the connection between faith and educational leadership practice, a connection which should yield distinctive practices in faith-based schools.…

Variationist researchers are increasingly adopting intersectionality approaches to analyse identity-linked practice. However, the field of sociolinguistic variation is yet to embrace the full ramifications of intersectionality as an analytical framework. The current paper offers a new method for integrating intersectional approaches into…