This paper reports the results of a study that examined the ways a group of department heads in Ontario, Canada, describe their role. Despite their ubiquity and importance, department heads have been seldom investigated in the educational leadership literature. The study uses the metaphor as an analytic tool to examine the ways participants talked…

This study examined the role of written feedback in the academic discourse socialization of second language doctoral students at a Canadian research university. Using a second language socialization framework, and foregrounding the sociocultural and interactional contexts of language learning and use, this article considers written feedback to be…

Background: The importance of "evidence-informed practice" has risen dramatically in education and in other public policy areas. This article focuses on the importance of knowledge mobilisation strategies, processes and outputs. It is concerned with how these can support the adaptation and implementation of evidence from research and…

As part of globalisation, academics have become more mobile and are tempted to move to institutions that have the most favourable research funding and work environment. The university is now viewed as a global magnet for academic talent and a key institution that enhances competitiveness by connecting cities and nations to global flows of…

This article considers a secondary science department that has, since 2000, developed distributed leadership as a form of human capacity building. Using a longitudinal ethnographic case study allowed us to consider how distributed leadership can be nurtured and developed in a department. Our analysis centres on two key issues: the nature and…

This article provides a detailed description and analysis of how one Canadian institution used groups of department heads as change agents to address their most acute department head role tensions. It is demonstrated that this institution's change initiative aligned very closely to the recommendations proposed, in both the literature pertaining to…

This paper reports on the findings of an international case study in which researchers examined two mathematics departments (Canada/UK) in which the sustained use of technology was strategically established in a mathematics degree program. This case study forms part of a larger research initiative which involved an extensive literature review…

A consortium of 10 Canadian research-intensive universities launched a data exchange program in 1999 to share information that could be used to identify and evaluate the best practices of each institution and to help each institution position itself strategically to achieve its mission. One part of the program was devoted to collecting…

This article examines the controversy that ensued when the Education Department of the province of Ontario, Canada, granted the tender to publish elementary school readers to the T. Eaton Company, a department store, in 1909. This decision eliminated an important source of income for retail booksellers, who could not compete with the consumer…

Policy-making is viewed in this paper as a major mechanism for meeting the educational aspirations of the provincial publics and inducing improvements in the quality of education. The reconstructionist's transmittal and traditionalist's transformation ideological philosophies are merged as legitimate symbiotic functions of education; thereby…

Salaries and promotion patterns in the social sciences faculty at a large Canadian university were examined for evidence of gender discrimination. No patterns of discrimination in promotion were found, and women were not more underrepresented in higher-salaried departments. Male and female faculty similar on salary-relevant variables were found to…