This qualitative study examines the progress of a rural New Jersey school in addressing longstanding racial conflict after implementing a Youth Participatory Action Research project two years prior. Here we take up the thread as students continued to develop activities meant to increase awareness of ongoing issues, and as adults used professional…

This paper is designed to contribute to the discussion on how to conceptualise and study contextual influence in local school development. We propose a theoretical framework and an empirical illustration to supplement former research on rural school research. Focusing on what the school perceives as important in its community may explain why…

When a major fire occurs in a school, the impact can be felt for years to come. How the school community rebuilds depends on strong leadership and the resilience of the members of that community. This article explores the stories of four Australian schools, two rural NSW schools, Kelso High School and Oxley High School and two urban schools;…

The aim of this paper is to explore perspectives on equity, quality, motivation, and resilience by focusing in depth on the perspectives of educators in one small, semi-rural school in Japan. The paper is intended to provide rich, in-depth data and discussion as a way of providing insights from different perspectives into findings from large-scale…

The Education Act (1998) is a key policy document in Irish education, emphasising the rights, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, including parents, teachers and pupils in schools. Since 1998 the Department of Education and Skills (DES) has stressed the need to introduce an increased role for teachers and pupils in decision-making. It…

Background: Comprehensive School Health (CSH) approaches to developing a healthy school community can be effective in supporting chronic disease prevention while positively impacting on student behaviour and academic performance. Although a CSH framework provides principles for action, there is a lack of evidence regarding the processes that best…

To address the important challenge of taking good care of India's environment, substantial, good quality information is crucial. Unfortunately, pertinent information is in very short supply. Much of the nationally collected information lacks quality and is incomplete. Modern science has demonstrated that good information flows from an open,…

This article explores how leadership can help to enable student voice to occur in schools. We find that the relationship between teachers and the school leader is a critical context for enabling voice. Specifically, we find that the following concepts were important for efforts to enable and foster student voice: (1) clear vision of school that is…

This article describes a fitness curriculum grounded in the sport education model. The curriculum consists of 18 lessons that were taught to fifth-grade students at a rural school in the South. All features of sport education--team affiliation, season, formal competition, culminating events, record keeping, and festivity--were preserved. The…

This research study was designed to determine leadership and instructional behaviors of administrators and teachers who are participants in the Alabama AP Initiative, as well as evaluate the perceptions of the AAPI with regard to student performance. The importance of this research was three-fold. First, this study provided principals, as well as…

An attempt to chart the process of educational innovation in a rural school system in sociological terms is presented in this paper. As the system dynamics are described, the writers also attempt to extrapolate those aspects of the process which are common to other attempts at innovation, whether in education, health care, technological…

In this paper, in response to Ajay Sharma's paper titled "Portrait of a science teacher as a bricoleur: A case study from India" and associated reviews, I address the value of bridging two narrative styles for describing teacher development, discuss questions of over-essentializing an Indian school context, propose that teacher and…

Points out eight factors consistently associated with effective schools (academic focus, student participation in decision-making, etc.) and eight common problems with effective schools projects (short-term focus, unrealistic expectations, etc.). Summarizes successful projects at a K-12 village school and an urban junior high school. (JHZ)

Uses Cherry County, Nebraska, to exemplify current experiences of learning and teaching in a one-room school--Nebraska has 350 of the nation's nearly 800 one-room schools. Interviews parents and teachers who cherish their one-room schools because they provide quality education, convenience (relative to consolidated schools), and support for rural…

The state-of-the-art review addresses the problems faced by rural education in the area of curriculum development and suggests that mechanisms for curriculum development may need to be different or redefined to allow rural schools to operate at their maximum potential. The report looks at the positive and negative factors influencing rural…