Julia Mahfouz

University of Colorado | UCD

Playful pedagogies, rooted in experiential learning, integrate play, humor, spontaneity, and levity to create engaging educational experiences. Playful pedagogies have been shown to support adults' emotional resilience and sense of belonging while reducing stress and anxiety. Despite these benefits, their use in education preparation programs (EPPs...

Early childhood teachers are instrumental in creating cognitively, emotionally, and socially supportive environments for their students and an ethic of care is an integral part fostering such an environment. One possible way to redesign schools is to integrate an ethic of care with the tenets of social and emotional learning (SEL). Although SEL pra...

Research has emphasized that SEL program implementation in preschool settings not only merits special consideration regarding content, instructional approaches, and opportunities to practice skills (Bierman & Motamedi, 2015; Denham, 2018; Jones & Doolittle, 2017; Mahoney et al., 2021), but also should be implemented using a culturally relevant and...

In this chapter, the authors take a more macro view and consider some of the challenges and promises of some of the current trends the authors have observed in the ELA field in the MENA region based on the chapters that have important implications for systemic improvement. Consistently changing political influences on educational policies and insti...

This volume explores how educational leadership and administration (ELA) is constructed in the Middle East and North African region (MENA), and charts the development of ELA as a discipline. Against the backdrop of rapid growth and interest in the educational restructuring, educational reforms, policy and leadership landscape of the region, chapter...

This chapter maps pictographically the main educational reforms and policy development in the MENA region in the last half century. It also explores the pendulum of internationalization versus localization and contextualization of educational policy, reforms, and leadership in the region. Hence, there is rapid growth and interest in educational res...

According to the 2018 Immigration Policy Institute report, the number of refugees reached 281 million in the world. In academic settings, refugee students strive to find ways to locate themselves within a new cultural, social space to belong while bearing the nightmares of past experiences and facing the adversities of the sociopolitical climate of...

This article is concerned with considerations for conducting comparative analyses, with a focus on the process of creating a diverse international research team committed to investigating equity issues in education and society. Following brief background information on the International School Leadership Development Network (ISLDN), provided to con...

This chapter explores Amina Wadud’s life, particularly her formative work, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (Wadud, 1999). This chapter will illustrate how Wadud’s intellectual and academic movement could be considered an example of invitational leadership. Wadud’s work provides an alternate perspective on Isla...

In the last 15 years, mindfulness programs have become more popular in schools. However, bringing mindfulness into schools involves more than selecting a curriculum. It entails creating the conditions for mindfulness that requires a particular kind of leadership: the capacity to lead for and with mindfulness. Authors Deborah L. Schussler, Karen Kri...

The education system in Lebanon has experienced governmental negligence for years that any attempt for reform will require an overhaul of the whole foundations that the Lebanese education sector is based upon. One of the most overlooked domains is principalship. However, principals have managed to find ways to cultivate their own leadership skills...

Individuals with disabilities often find themselves in situations where decisions are made for them by others on their behalf. To put decision-making power in the hands of individuals with disabilities themselves, school-based special education services should feature instruction and training in self-determination skills. Doing so provides greater...

Drawing together diverse research perspectives and theoretical underpinnings, this handbook explores gender as a social category and examines cultural and social differences. Bringing together diverse perspectives from around the world, including from Africa, Europe, the Middle East, the UK and the USA, the volume sets out the gender and educationa...

When inequitable situations arise, principals with strong SEL skills have a clear understanding of social emotional learning implementation to support teachers and are prepared to expose implicit bias with difficult conversations that allow teachers to examine personal beliefs and behaviors. In this article, we outline how to support SEL learning w...

Objective Little is known about the process by which teachers learn the skills necessary to teach a school-based mindfulness program (SBMP), including how they come to understand and embody mindfulness. The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to explore how teachers experienced implementing an SBMP over time, including their embodiment of...

This case study focuses on an online interviewing approach within an international context. We discuss the process of data collection and data analysis highlighting the processes and mechanisms that supported the research study and enabled it to be effective and successful. We also discuss the challenges and what we did to address these issues. We...

Social in/justice and double marginality in educational leadership: Trajectories of three female school principals from Palestine, Turkey and Lebanon

Emotions influence the cognition, motivation, and behavior of an individual. However, the role of leaders’ emotions in navigating organizational change remains relatively underexplored. This study examines the role of emotions in educational leadership during a period of organizational crisis through a case study analysis of an assistant superinten...

Objectives The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a manualized mindfulness-based program for adolescents, Learning to Breathe (L2B), on indicators of adolescent social-emotional well-being, mental health, substance use, and executive function. Methods Participants included 251 high school students attending an urban school di...

Research on mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) for adolescents suggests improvements in stress, emotion regulation, and ability to perform some cognitive tasks. However, there is little research examining the contextual factors impacting why specific students experience particular changes and the process by which these changes occur. Responding to t...

This article seeks to compare and analyze school-level challenges for school leaders and their responses to Syrian refugee education in Turkey, Lebanon, and Germany, drawing on the post-migration ecology framework developed and sensemaking processes in leadership. We utilized a comparative qualitative design within the realm of qualitative research...

As an economic, political, and cultural project, neoliberalism offers a set of reproducible discourses and practices. However, neoliberalism is not politically neutral–it has strong distributive effects on many aspects of society, including education. On the surface, neoliberalism embraces the universal values of individual liberty and free choice....

In this chapter, we seek to examine and compare the meanings and praxis of SJ leadership of school principals in three high needs schools in the ME, based on three case studies in Turkey, in the divided city of Jerusalem, and in Lebanon. Taking a comparative stance, we believe, will contribute to how SJ is understood and implemented by school princ...

During the COVID-19 crisis, it has become clear how unprepared our educational systems are to provide social and emotional support through distance learning. Despite the demands for teachers to support the social and emotional development of their students, our universities are behind the curve in providing coursework to develop their knowledge and...

The aim of the present article is to review literature on mentoring of school principals. The review focuses on the importance of mentoring in fostering effective leadership as a principal by presenting the pervasive definitions and perspectives on mentoring in the field. Second, based upon predefined selection criteria, we present empirical eviden...

This article discusses the efforts of the Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program (IKEEP), at the University of Idaho, a predominately white institution (PWI) of higher education, and its struggle to create space in higher education for intentional support of Indigenous self-determination, sovereignty, and Tribal nation building throug...

The purpose of this article is to articulate how principals’ social emotional competencies (SECs), and wellbeing form the foundation that influences the overall school climate. Principals with strong SECs can cope with stress effectively and are able to practice responsive and prosocial leadership that result in building healthy relationships, effe...

This study was designed to gain a baseline understanding of how future K-12 building leaders in pre-service principal preparation programs address their own wellbeing. In this exploratory study, pre-service school leaders across the United States self-assessed their levels of stress and social–emotional competencies. Students from 30 pre-service pr...

Principals in the United States are responsible for creating educational environments that enable students, including those with disabilities, to achieve both academic and post-school goals. Unfortunately, many principals lack the preparation necessary to effectively lead special education programs. To support principals and ensure that students wi...

Syrian War is the most significant recent phenomenon shaping the global migration picture, which has placed the World nations in critical state in carrying out their humanitarian responsibility. In this respect, we aim to compare and analyze policy outlines, challenges and school leadership responses to Syrian refugee education in 3 different count...

https://www.bankstreet.edu/research-publications-policy/occasional-paper-series/ops-43/ Social, emotional, and affective experiences are impossible to separate from thinking, doing, and being in the world. Increasingly, schools and community-based organizations are recognizing this truth through the adoption of programs that focus on the emotiona...

With regard to efforts to imagine more equitable spaces of learning for all students, we are compelled to ask: How can SEL programs address the needs of marginalized, minoritized, and/or historically under-resourced students without deeply considering the cultured context of social interaction and school learning? Although evidence shows SEL progra...

The Middle East (ME) is a region characterized by diverse languages, dialects, cultures, religions and political unpheaval; where the context is turbulent with the influx of refugees and economic problems and the region’s delicate balance in terms of wars and conflicts (Arar, Brooks & Bogotch, 2019). Given such features of traditional societies (Op...

This policy brief, created by The Pennsylvania State University, is one of a series of briefs that addresses the future needs and challenges for research, practice, and policy on social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL is defined as the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills nec...

Since 2011, an influx of Syrian refugees has put a massive strain on Lebanon’s educational public system, which was already stretched before the humanitarian crisis. In an already stressful profession, this unprecedented crisis is testing the limits of principals’ management and leadership capacities. Our qualitative study explores how principals a...

Purpose Emotions of school leaders influence school culture and structure. Understanding emotions is under-researched and under-theorized in non-western contexts, especially during educational change. The purpose of this paper is to understand the nature of the leadership team’s (LT’s) emotional responses to change, their coping strategies and cond...

As interest increases in mindfulness in education programs for youth, there is a need to develop reliable measures of the quality of program implementation. This paper describes the development and psychometric properties of a measure that can be used to assess and monitor quality of implementation of mindfulness programs/curricula in typical class...

Various job demands continue to be very stressing and exhausting for school administrators who have to work under unprecedented pressure. This qualitative study explores the various stressors school administrators experience and the coping strategies they utilize to manage their stress. Findings show that the various stressors experienced by the sc...

In this article, we examine a qualitative interview and analytical technique for exploring the influences of identities on an individual's experiences. The technique, pragmatic identity analysis (PIA), relies upon a collaborative, reflective, contextually oriented, and relational approach to interviewing. For the purposes of this technique, "identi...

Purpose Based on a need to utilize strategies and develop social-emotional competency skills of school administrators, the purpose of this paper is to explore the influence of Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE), a mindfulness-based professional development program, on the leadership and well-being of 13 school administrators....

This qualitative study of U.S. international schools overseas explores the implementation of the Common Core State Standards in six U.S. international schools overseas (The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Kuwait). The Common Core was introduced in 2009 in the U.S. as a national (not federal) ‘standards-based reform’. Such re...

Between 2014 and 2017, an interdisciplinary group of researchers examined whether a high school health class that incorporated mindfulness techniques lowered students’ stress and improved their wellbeing. We received a grant from the Institute of Educational Sciences from the United States Department of Education to (1) train high school health tea...

In this study, we investigate the experiences of first-year college students with Just BREATHE (JB), an eight-session voluntary mindfulness-based wellness program. We collected qualitative interview data from 26 participants selected as a convenience sample from the larger quantitative study at three points in time: pre-implementation, post-impleme...

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (Common Core) was spearheaded by policy entrepreneurs, unveiled nationally in 2010, and initially received strong support from leaders in state and federal government, philanthropic foundations, the business sector, and teacher unions. However, the reform came into the crosshairs of an ideologically wide s...

This qualitative study focuses on school administrators’ understandings and actions as leaders of the Common Core reform. In interviews with eight school and district leaders from five diverse districts in Pennsylvania, several aspects of Common Core, or PA Core, implementation were consistent across regardless of student population demographics an...

nearly one in three students in the united States today is negatively impacted by bullying. Teachers can play a critical role in stopping bullying-related violence, but many struggle with how to engage students in difficult conversations. Traditional classroom-based pedagogy used to teach communication skills (e.g., modeling & role-play) is ineffic...

As national borders dissipate and technology allows different cultures and nationalities to communicate on a regular basis, more individuals are self-identifying as a global citizen. Using Social Network Analysis and multi-level modelling, this study explores factors associated with global citizen affinity and finds that education plays an importan...