How do public leaders learn from society? A reflexive analysis of action learners

This empirical study contributes to critical action learning research by theorizing the role of an action learning facilitator from a cultural perspective. Our article adds to critical action learning by conceptualizing the dynamics of facilitation in managing interpersonal politics within action learning sets. Employing Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as a theoretical lens, we explore both participant and facilitator accounts of action learning at three Pakistani business schools, shedding light on the culturally influenced social practices that shape their learning interactions. Through a critical interpretation of our data, we illuminate the challenges of facilitation by revealing how deeply ingrained power relations, within the context of gender and asymmetric relationships, influence participants’ ability to organize reflection. We contribute to critical action learning by theorizing the critical role of facilitator mediation in managing interpersonal and intra-group relations within the Pakistani MBA context, outlining the implications for the dynamics and facilitation of action learning.

A small but growing strand of literature is beginning to make the case for ‘critical action learning' (CAL). Much of this interest operates on theoretical terrain, speculating on the extent to which it might differ from more conventional notions of action learning. This paper draws on insights from (CAL) to demonstrate the importance of being ‘critical by design' in the formulation and implementation of interventions. It is based on a five-year inquiry involving a network of small business owners. We demonstrate the importance of explicitly questioning the rationale for interventions; assessing how the composition of the action learning set relates to power relations within its organizational context; the process of governance; and an active role for facilitators.

South Africa faces a severe youth unemployment crisis, particularly among those aged 16-25, with NEET (not in education, employment, or training) youth at high risk of mental health challenges and social exclusion. Despite their lack of formal qualifications, these young people possess personal assets that can foster resilience. This study explores how critical action learning (CAL) can help NEET youth develop their collective capability by engaging them in after-school programmes (ASP), which not only benefit adolescents, but also enhance the self-confidence, agency, and social networks of NEET youth themselves. Using participatory action learning and action research (PALAR) with arts-based methods, the study engaged 14 young women in two cycles: first, to reflect on barriers and personal assets, and second, to design and implement after school programmes (ASP). The findings show that participation in an action learning group (ALG) fostered trust, emotional openness, and self-belief, demonstrating the potential of CAL in empowering marginalised youth.

This paper reports on recent developments of the Critical Action Learning Exchange (Carvalho et al., 2021), an international community of educators who seek to respond to social and environmental issues that affect their students.We report on an international design workshop that engaged a cohort of teachers in designing Critical Action Learning activities for their students in the Summer of 2023.Participants (n=39) completed 16 curriculum designs for grade levels from kindergarten to university, addressing a broad range of socio-environmental issues and adopting diverse approaches, such as Arts-Based Critical Action, Community Engagement, Critical Making, Games for Critical Action, and Storytelling.This paper examines our Professional Development model, together with an analysis of teacher participants' ideas and their design products.We investigate what forms of scaffolding can facilitate the changes of practice needed for teachers to become critical action educators and support their Critical Action Learning designs.

ABSTRACTIn completing an action learning facilitation qualification in 2012, I documented an account of practice during the first year of my experience as a facilitator. The main areas of my learning related to four themes: fear of rejection, using and abusing power, content versus process and critical action learning. These learnings are linked to descriptions of five facilitation episodes during that formative first year, each surfacing a significant new challenge, question or realisation. Looking back seven years later, most of my early learnings about action learning facilitation (and myself) still resonate. With seven years’ more experience, it is now the less visible aspects of the facilitator's role that seem more important and hold the most need for my continued learning.

The history of Oscarville, Georgia, nestled within the Lake Lanier region of North Georgia, remains both known and unknown, existing as a significant yet elusive part of local lore and historical retellings. This article delves into the innovative approach of a place-based critical participatory action research program, "Historicizing Oscarville," which engaged teacher candidates and educators in exploring the obscured history of Oscarville. The narrative uncovers the complex layers of settler colonialism, slavery, racial cleansing, and subsequent erasure that characterize Oscarville's past. By employing the framework of Learning Teaching as an Interpretive Process (LTIP) within a place-based education model, the project aimed to disrupt racial inequities within education by (a) integrating transdisciplinary knowledges, (b) leveraging transdisciplinary ways of knowing, and (c) conceptualizing teacher education as a lifelong, collaborative guided practice. The findings underscore the importance of acknowledging and addressing historical erasures in shaping a more inclusive and equitable educational landscape in Georgia and beyond.

Leadership skills are embedded in the undergraduate nursing curriculum and are essential for post-registration nurses. One way to support the development of these skills is to use the action learning and critical action learning approaches, which can be implemented in both the academic environment and the clinical setting. The process of action learning promotes collaborative multidisciplinary working and affords time for reflection and professional development, in turn supporting the process of applying for revalidation. Developing a nursing workforce with a high level of emotional intelligence can support decision-making, resilience and build confidence. These qualities are crucial not only for delivering safe patient care and promoting innovation in quality improvement, but are essential for personal development and individual career progression.

A pragmatic way of achieving Highly Sustainable Organisation: Governance and organisational learning in action in the public French sector

The transformative potential of integrating African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) into contemporary research practices. It highlights the limitations of traditional text-based methods and argues for the value of Action Research and Learning (AR/AL) methodologies as a framework for fostering collaboration between researchers and African communities. The paper examines how AR/AL and technology can bridge the gap between embodied knowledge and digital representation, fostering knowledge co-creation and empowering African communities. Ethical considerations are highlighted, ensuring cultural sensitivity and respect for intellectual property rights. The paper concludes by discussing the broader impact of AR/AL on African communities, including fostering knowledge sharing, building research skills, and advocating for policy change. This approach empowers African communities to become stewards of their sustainable development.

Reflects on the practical experience of the author in introducing competency‐based action learning into Australian public and private sector organizations. Contains a series of interviews with graduates of an action learning Masters programme in the Health industry. Suggests that early and consistent focus on participants′ self‐knowledge and self‐management significantly improves their learning ability, personal growth and management competence. Linkage between the project‐based experimental journey and with the consequent learning journey is both illustrated and discussed.

A Unique Opportunity for Education Policy Makers Jenna Conway (bio) When it comes to solving problems and measuring impact, public education organizations primarily rely on two approaches—using civil service to hire personnel directly or using competitive procurement to hire outside experts on contract. These two approaches can limit such organizations' efforts to gain insights, to incorporate cutting-edge research into policy and practice, and to develop innovative solutions quickly, nimbly and affordably. In this commentary, I discuss how public education organizations can use research-practice partnerships (RPPs), especially partnerships with public higher education institutions, to tackle new, unique, and complicated education problems and thereby help children. Consider how traditional approaches can inadvertently limit public education organizations. In civil service, most jobs are full-time, classified positions with very specific descriptions that are subject to a range of restrictions to protect the rights of employees. It can be hard to gain new insights without procuring outside experts whose rates are significantly higher than most government pay scales. Similarly, public education organizations may have a research director or team, but they usually don't have the capacity to analyze all the available data or measure the impact of everything the organization does. For new initiatives or pilot programs, public education organizations rarely have the internal research or analytical capacity to conduct rigorous, real-time research on interventions as they are implementing them. Instead, they typically rely on outside research. Doing so entails a lengthy grant application or procurement process and requires an extended time period to collect and analyze data and produce findings. Finally, with procurement, a public organization must specify both the problem and proposed solution up front, establish constraints, and require bidders to define precisely what they will do and provide and how much it will cost. This can inhibit an iterative design process where prototypes can be tested and improved. To top it off, the procurement process itself can take a year or more. Procurement may work well for well-established projects and services, but it proves more challenging when a state is [End Page 157] designing a new service, intervention, or tool, especially one that will be used by a large and diverse set of users. In contrast, RPPs, particularly those involving public higher education institutions, offer a unique opportunity for policy makers to expediently and cost-effectively gain expertise, integrate real-time research into their policies and practices, and design and build innovative solutions in an iterative manner that better meets their needs. First, RPPs allow public education organizations to gain cutting-edge expertise without having to hire full-time staff or procure expensive consultants, which may not be economically feasible. When I was assistant superintendent of early childhood for the Louisiana Department of Education, we established a multi-year partnership with Daphna Bassok at the University of Virginia School of Education. In an ambitious transformation of its birth-to-five early childhood system, Louisiana unified its child care, Head Start, and school-based prekindergarten systems. Specifically, over five years, Louisiana established uniform expectations across programs, supported local networks in every community, measured interactions in every classroom, offered incentives for quality improvement at the classroom level, and coordinated enrollment locally to make it easier for families to choose the best option for their children. Louisiana's approach, which was different from that of most other states, entailed significant change for early childhood educators and for the department. Operating from the hypothesis that teacher-child interactions are what matters most for child outcomes, Louisiana rapidly gathered classroom data from thousands of child care, Head Start, and school sites across the state. It would have been hard to hire staff or craft a contract with specific targets when we were unsure what the data would reveal and when no other state or entity had done what we were doing. In exchange for our collaborating on research projects (and the grant proposals that preceded them), helping them safely and securely access appropriate data, and offering their graduate students valuable internship opportunities, UVA helped Louisiana make sense of large volumes of new classroom data, offered insights on how to encourage improvement, designed new approaches to engage families through enrollment, and...

ABSTRACTThis account of practice details how an action learning methodology was successfully implemented within a corporate business environment in order to aid its emergence from bankruptcy. The need to quickly develop and adopt new knowledge and business practices was critically important to the survival of the business. The business had been underperforming for several years and was in the process of emerging from bankruptcy. An action learning methodology was implemented to enable an accelerated process of organizational learning and business process transformation. Ultimately, action learning proved to be critically important for the adoption of the new approach to the business. The action learning process was responsible for tailoring the new approach to fit within the already established operating framework of the business. The new knowledge and processes that resulted from action learning were also central to an improvement in the performance of the business and a successful emergence from bankruptcy.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has grown rapidly since independence in 1971, but much of this growth has been fuelled by expatriates. The UAE’s workforce now totals c.4.2 million, of which only 225,000 are Emiratis. Of more concern, just 10% of these are employed in the private sector (UAE Ministry of Labour cited by Salama, 2013). With 150,000 Emirati workers entering the job market by 2020 (Salama, 2013), this over reliance on public sector employment is not sustainable (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2012). The private sector employment of Emiratis however, has proved problematic. Private sector employers have traditionally perceived Emiratis as unattractive employees and Nationals are not generally attracted to the sector. Nevertheless, there are Emiratis who have succeeded outside the government. Developing an in-depth understanding of why they engaged with the sector and how they succeeded within their organisation is critical to address the current challenge and attract more to do the same. We currently know little about the motivations and factors that influenced the career choice of Emiratis who joined the private sector and their subsequent experience. This study considers these questions and utilises the concept of employee engagement to frame the Emirati employee experience. The UAE’s banking sector is by far the largest employer of private sector based Emiratis. This research, therefore, explores the situation through the perspectives of Emirati employees that have joined a mid-sized local bank in the last three years. It is the first study of its kind and makes a three-fold contribution to producing actionable knowledge. Firstly, the findings will help the UAE private sector to attract new Emirati employees and strengthen existing engagement efforts to address the status quo and achieve, inter alia, a more effective Emirati workforce. Secondly, it explores the applicability of employee engagement in the UAE’s banking sector. Thirdly, it contributes towards the current public policy debate about how to encourage greater Emirati participation in the private sector. The study was shaped by the social constructionist philosophy and used mixed methods and an emergent approach to study the phenomenon in depth. Data was collected through; semi-structured interviews with 15 Emiratis, 5 formal group discussions in the form of action learning based sets, and an organisation wide quantitative survey. The research specifically adopted the principles of Action Research including iterative cycles of reflection and experiment/action and case study research. Significant issues were found for Emirati employees, including; challenges in building Meaningfulness, finding a trustworthy working environment, developing a career path, learning from colleagues and coping with significant social pressures. These challenges were explored in action learning sets where a collaborative effort was made to address the problems surfaced. The research confirmed the relevance of the employee engagement model but highlights the importance of a contextual perspective in order to surface the priority areas for action. It also moves the debate away from the overwhelming focus on pay and working hours, to much more subtle considerations that will need to be addressed by individual organisations.

This paper reflects on the failure of a recent action learning intervention with a UK television company. The aim of the project was to gain insight into the reasons why the viewing figures of their factual programming channels were in decline and to develop a new strategy enabled by the action learning methodology. Unfortunately, this intervention was not successful and resulted in the project being cancelled after only one set meeting. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the reasons for this failure and to share my thoughts with others in the action learning community. The paper concludes that the reasons for this failed intervention were due to: my presence being considered by some set members as a threat to their credibility; a resistance to engage in the process of assumption breaking and reflective practice; and due to the perceived time it takes to apply the action learning methodology.

Good medical leadership is vital in delivering high-quality healthcare, and yet medical career progression has traditionally seen leadership lack credence in comparison with technical and academic ability. Individual standards have...