This article studies the dialogues, agreements, and actions in defence of a fairer and more inclusive school, carried out during ethnographic research in a Spanish rural school between 2019 and 2021, the period in which an ethnographer accompanied the professional work of the school principal, also the tutor of a class group. The research is…

This study describes the life story of two female principals who carry out their work in particularly challenging schools in the Spanish educational context. This work is part of two larger international (ISSPP) and national research projects that aim to study the professional identity of school leaders. In this case, our objective was to analyse…

To understand the evolution and current status of qualitative research in School Psychology, we reviewed 4,346 articles published across seven school psychology journals between 2006 and 2021. The bibliometric analysis indicates that publication of qualitative research has increased over the years, but remains small (3%) when seen against the…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to present the results obtained from the investigations that have been carried out within the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP) project in the Spanish for social justice. Design/methodology/approach: Twelve case studies have been carried out within the three lines of research…

This study investigated social justice from the point of view of school directors, teachers, and parents. We chose two schools that were undergoing major demographic changes because of increased immigration into Catalonia, Spain. They were both classified as "schools of maximum complexity" because of their socio-economic characteristics.…

This study explores the conceptions developed by primary and secondary education teachers in Spain and England about democracy in education. To this end, we conducted a phenomenographic study involving 39 teachers. The results identify four major conceptions of democracy in education: (a) democracy as freedom, (b) democracy understood as…

This article presents a comparative analysis of educational policy documents on leadership and teacher development in Spain, Colombia, and Mexico, countries that are represented in the International Study of Teacher Leadership (ISTL) (Webber, 2018). We are comparing public policies in three participating countries that do not declare an explicit…

This case study investigated the strategies used by a school principal who successfully leads an educational centre in a vulnerable context. This article aims to explore how a school in a vulnerable context can be strengthened by the actions implemented by the principal and his leadership based on social and pedagogical commitment. Initially, the…

The process of teaching and learning is not merely a question of transmitting a received cultural legacy but also of its transformation. Education is inseparable from life and from any socio-political model we wish to build and defend. This implies the impossibility of separating education from politics. Hence we must attempt to provide future…

The article proposes and illustrates a methodological framework that aligns with the action-research models and utopian methodology in particular, although it represents a more substantial leap forward, especially regarding the distributed nature of decision making in the different processes of research/intervention, and its multiple and…

Education is suffering from the consequences of strengthening neoliberal policies, which impose an education model that serves the interests of the hegemonic economic system. The market rationale is being implemented in schools, moving the interests from equity to efficiency, from equal opportunities to performance. Starting from setting out a…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of school leaders to provide social justice in three contexts: Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study was conducted under the interpretative tradition characterized by a search for an understanding of the social world from the point of view of a…

Project-based learning and artistic creation provide future secondary teachers with an opportunity to experience and to reflect on the importance of including a gender perspective in education. This article describes a case study where students of the Postgraduate course in Secondary Teacher Training explore the image of the female body in comics,…

In 2012 Spain inaugurated a reform of its higher education financial aid system inspired by three principles: cost-sharing, increasing academic performance and school efficiency. This reform has shifted the aim of the system from equality of access to a type of meritocracy that can be defined as class-biased, as it is only applied to low-income…

This article aims to interpret how different policies of priority education deal with the notions of "educational needs" and "educational inequalities." Indeed, it is the processes and mechanisms embedded in the deployment of such policies that ultimately model a category of educational need that goes beyond the…