A principal at work : a story of leadership for building sustainable capacity of a school

This study explores through a lifestream narrative how the life experiences of a female primary school principal are organised as practical knowledge, and are used to inform action that is directed towards creating a sustainable school culture. An alternative model of school leadership is presented which describes the thinking and activity of a leader as a process. The process demonstrates how a leader's practical knowledge is dynamic, broadly based in experiential life, and open to change. As such, it is described as a model of sustainable leadership-in-process. The research questions at the heart of this study are: How does a leader construct and organize knowledge in the enactment of the principal ship to deal with the dilemmas and opportunities that arise everyday in school life? And: What does this particular way of organising knowledge look like in the effort to build a sustainable school community? The sustainable leadership-in-process thesis encapsulates new ways of leading primary schools through the principalship. These new ways are described as developing and maintaining the following dimensions of leadership: quality relationships, a collective (shared vision), collaboration and partnerships, and high achieving learning environments. Such dimensions are enacted by the principal through the activities of conversations, performance development, research and data-driven action, promoting innovation, and anticipating and predicting the future. Sustainable leadership-in-process is shared, dynamic, visible and transparent and is conducted through the processes of positioning, defining, organising, experimenting and evaluating in a continuous and iterative way. A rich understanding of the specificity of the life of a female primary school principal was achieved using story telling, story listening and story creation in a collaborative relationship between the researcher and the researched participant. as a means of educational theorising. Analysis and interpretation were undertaken as a recursive process in which the immediate interpretations were shared with the researched participant. The view of theorising adopted in this research is that of theory as hermeneutic; that is, theory is generated out of the stories of experiential life, rather than discovered in the stories.

Changing pedagogic codes in a class of landscape architects learning 'ecologically sustainable development'

Professional discourse in education has been the focus of research conducted mostly with teachers and professional practitioners but the work of students in the built environment has largely been ignored. This article presents an analysis of students’ visual discourse in the final professional year of a landscape architecture course in Brisbane, Australia. The study has a multi-method design and includes drawings, interviews and documentary materials, but focuses on the drawings in this paper. Using the theory of Bernstein, the analysis considers student representations as interrelations between professional identity and discretionary space for legitimate knowledge formation in landscape planning. It shows a shift in how students persuade the teacher of their expanding views of this field. The discussion of this shift centres on the professional knowledge that students choose rather than need to learn. It points to the differences within a class that a teacher must address in curriculum design in a contemporary professional course.

Urban growth monitoring techniques for sustainable development

This paper discusses the role of advance techniques for monitoring urban growth and change for sustainable development of urban environment. It also presents results of a case study involving satellite data for land use/land cover classification of Lucknow city using IRS-1C multi-spectral features. Two classification algorithms have been used in the study. Experiments were conducted to see the level of improvement in digital classification of urban environment using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique.

Lift@Weimar : sustainable interaction with food, technology, and the city (Workshop)

This workshop explores innovative approaches to understanding and cultivating sustainable food culture in urban environments via human-computer-interaction (HCI) design and ubiquitous technologies. We perceive the city as an intersecting network of people, place, and technology in constant transformation. Our 2009 OZCHI workshop, Hungry 24/7? HCI Design for Sustainable Food Culture, opened a new space for discussion on this intersection amongst researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds including academia, government, industry, and non-for-profit organisations. Building on the past success, this new instalment of the workshop series takes a more refined view on mobile human-food interaction and the role of interactive media in engaging citizens to cultivate more sustainable everyday human-food interactions on the go. Interactive media in this sense is distributed, pervasive, and embedded in the city as a network. The workshop addresses environmental, health, and social domains of sustainability by bringing together insights across disciplines to discuss conceptual and design approaches in orchestrating mobility and interaction of people and food in the city as a network of people, place, technology, and food.