Note: You will find the option to vote below, after the statements. When prompted, please log in to your ICSEI member account first.
Each person standing for election was asked to provide a 300-word statement (without citations or references) detailing their motivation and contributions to school effectiveness, improvement, innovation and ICSEI, including their vision for ICSEI.
The statements are listed in the same order as nominees are listed on the ballot paper.
Professor Dr Pierre Tulowitzki, PhD
Matters of educational change have been close to my heart ever since I first got to visit a laboratory school 15 years ago. Since then, I have researched facets of innovation in education and often worked with schools to make sure that our research meets their needs. This led me to ICSEI in 2011. Ever since, it has been a professional home and community for me. Over time, I have had the pleasure to serve as a network coordinator, head of a standing committee and Board Member. I’m now honored to run for re-election as a Board Member. If elected, I will try to strengthen ICSEI along the following lines:
- Make ICSEI a congress and community for all. Whether you’re a practitioner, policy maker or researcher, whether you’re a first-timer or an ICSEI veteran, whether you’re an early career person or one with plenty of experience, whether you’re from the Global North or Global South – ICSEI should be the place for you! Despite major developments, I believe there is more that we can do to ensure that everyone has a voice and a chance to be a part of our community.
- Strengthen the value-proposition of ICSEI. ICSEI’s congresses are often beloved but it can sometimes be challenging to see the value of ICSEI outside of them. I believe that there is potential to develop attractive and helpful offers for our ICSEI members that complement providing excellent congresses.
I believe that education is key to fostering growth and prosperity, not just in a single country, but globally. To me, ICSEI represents a gathering of smart people who are passionate about education and want to move it forward. It is my hope that I can continue to cultivate this spirit of innovation, respect, and generosity as a re-elected Board Member.
Dr Christine Grice, PhD
My motivation is to connect with educators committed to building scholarship that connects research and practice to collectively nurture ICSEI’s global community. I have demonstrated research and practice experience with substantial collaborations across sectors and jurisdictions, initiating co-designed, collaborative research to practice partnerships with schools and system leaders, including Social Ventures Australia, NSW Department of Education, AIS (Association of Independent Schools) Australia and Catholic Education. I have 25 years of professional and research experience in educational leadership as a school leader and I am currently coordinator of Master of Educational Leadership, University of Sydney. ICSEI provides opportunities to share community-connected research for effective innovation and improvement. Effective schools make a difference to students and communities. Evidence of active improvement includes shared understanding through co-created evidence and articulated, lived values. Innovation aligns values through listening and voice with new action, promoting wellbeing. These ideas align with my educational leadership research as a practice theorist focussed on leading learning together. My recent contribution to ICSEI 2022 congress relayed my work on salvaging as a leading practice for sustainability and hope. My vision for ICSEI is to nurture an inclusive global learning community that:
- enables equity of voice
- connects educators globally
- mentors educators through strategically planned forums, and local and international collaborations that support educational improvement
- contributes expertise in public forums, impacting policy and practice
- governs sustainably
My service to ICSEI Board in 2023 demonstrates enactment of these values through my global engagement in Board meetings with colleagues, through a commitment to furthering our social media presence in a changing landscape, and through my substantial service to the Finance, Risk, Audit and Governance (FRAG) committee which seeks to ensure ICSEI governs sustainably. I seek to extend these contributions with a 3 year position.
Professor Dr Melanie Ehren, PhD
I’m a professor in educational governance at the Free University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and director of research institute LEARN! I have worked in the field of school effectiveness of school improvement for more than 25 years and specialized in governance of education and schools. My current academic work is informed by using a comparative approach to understanding and improving outcomes of education systems, including projects in the EU, Africa, Asia and the U.S. I have worked in various policy and research roles which aimed to improve schools and education systems and feel at home with ICSEI where both policy, practice and research meet in our joint efforts to improve education. It has been an honour and pleasure to serve on the ICSEI board this past year and in co-leading the Crisis Response in Education network (CREN) and research labs in the past four years. I would like to continue my work with the board in maintaining and enhancing a viable, inclusive and diverse membership and ICSEI network. My priorities on the board would be to grow our international membership with more opportunities for members from low and middle income countries to join our community and conferences (e.g. by finding diverse income streams to continue our fellowship programme); secondly, I would hope to support the diversification of the types of activities within ICSEI to allow easier access for a larger membership; e.g. through the organization of online research labs and smaller regional face to face events. The real value of ICSEI is the commitment of our members; as a board member I aim to meet our priorities through wide collaboration with our networks and individual members.
Dr Trista Hollweck, PhD
ICSEI has been an integral part of my professional life since I first joined in 2016 as a graduate student. As an experienced Canadian educator at the University of Ottawa, working at the intersection of practice, policy and research, the ICSEI community afforded me valuable opportunities to learn with and from other members, collaborate on exciting international projects, and strengthen my own thinking and work. If elected as an ICSEI board member, I will work hard to engage and support ICSEI members, provide opportunities to amplify new ideas and perspectives, and commit to ensuring ICSEI remains a dynamic, inspiring and welcoming international community for practitioners, researchers and policymakers. I am an active ICSEI member and have established a strong network across the ICSEI community. From 2017-2020, I served on the board as the graduate student representative, where I organized and led early career pre-conference events and mentoring sessions at three ICSEI congresses. Interested in finding meaningful ways to engage and connect new members with the wider ICSEI community as well as create spaces that amplify voices traditionally marginalized or underrepresented, I was co-founder and co-chair of ICSEI’s Generational Renewal, Inclusion and Diversity (GRID) Standing Committee and remain a committed member. I also continue to be a member of the Communications and Knowledge Sharing Standing Committee and have been co-editor of the ICSEI Dialogic since its inception in 2020. As a board member, I will continue to be an active ICSEI member and look forward to being a bridge between the ICSEI board and the Standing Committees. I am also eager to support ICSEI networks in designing ways to sustain activities between congresses that foster inclusion, engagement and collaboration as well as the circulation of ideas, research and practice.
Professor Dr Kristin Vanlommel, PhD
With a strong intrinsic motivation to understand and strengthen the effectiveness and sustainability of educational change, and support teachers and leaders in doing so, I found a home in ICSEI. ICSEI is both an inspiring community of researchers, practitioners and policymakers and a professional organization with strong governance shared through standing committees and networks. I have been participating in ICSEI conferences for over ten years now, and I have actively helped prepare ICSEI for the future in the board and as data use network coordinator. I feel highly engaged to continue my commitment towards the organization and above all, the people within the organization. One thing that makes ICSEI unique is how its culture and mission create an environment of safe and open exchange between members in all phases of their career. It feels like family. As an early career academic, I experienced the familial culture of accessibility and openness, where academics from different backgrounds, cultures or stages in their career can openly engage in academic discussions. Another thing that makes it unique is the shared development of the organization through powerful networks. The networks provide high-level, challenging and inspiring environments for a diverse group of education professionals. The diversity between the networks and within the networks makes ICSEI a rich context for professional learning. The strategy for the future should, for example, try to find ways to engage the next generation. We should also explore how other activities can help us keep the ties more connected in-between conferences, and can help us to provide a more spread income. The characteristics and history of ICSEI provide chances but also challenges for the future. It takes organizational knowledge and commitment to find that balance. I believe I bring both.
Professor Dr Michelle Jones, PhD
I have been fortunate throughout my career to work in all three areas that ICSEI represents. As a practitioner, I have worked abroad in an International School and held leadership positions as Head of Department in a Secondary School and Headteacher of a Primary School. It was my position as Headteacher of a school in highly challenging circumstances that led me to engage with the school effectiveness and improvement research and the ICSEI community. I have supported ICSEI since 2009 when I first attended the Congress in Vancouver with colleagues from the Welsh Government presenting our then vision for School Effectiveness. At that time, as a practitioner engaged in research and seconded to the Welsh Government, the ICSEI community opened a world of collaboration with like-minded educators, researchers and policymakers who shared the same vision: to improve educational outcomes for all learners. My secondment to the Welsh Government challenged me to think about policy implementation and how initiatives could be scaled up from the few to the many. Subsequently, my research has focused on issues of equity, leadership, and professional learning as key drivers of school effectiveness and school improvement. I have held academic positions at four universities and am currently Professor of Education at Cardiff Metropolitan University. To date, I have presented at 9 ICSEI Conferences and assisted the organising teams at Yogyakarta and Cincinnati. Most recently, in my role as Co-Editor of the School Leadership & Management, I have encouraged the ICSEI Leadership Network to publish a Special Edition. Finally, I am coordinating the development of a proposed Regional ICSEI to be held in Cardiff in 2024. In summary, being appointed as an ICSEI Board Member would allow me to continue to realise my vision of working towards improving educational outcomes for all learner.
Associate Professor Rebecca Lowenhaupt, PhD
I am pursuing the opportunity for board service with ICSEI because I deeply value the unique opportunity the organization provides to bridge research, policy and practice through active conversation and collaboration about school improvement globally. I believe one of the great strengths of ICSEI is that the organization not only fosters innovation in education systems around the world, but it also walks the walk of engaging directly in ongoing improvement as an organization. In recent years, I have been inspired by the nimble ways in which ICSEI has adapted to address emerging challenges in the field such as new initiatives in technology, disaster, and climate change. In addition, while other professional organizations I work with tend to focus solely on sharing knowledge, ICSEI has shown its commitment to building knowledge across systems through research-policy-practice partnerships. As a mid-career scholar, I have found an intellectual community and sustaining professional partnerships through my engagement at ICSEI. My own research contributes to our understanding of educational leadership and school improvement in the context of immigration. While my research has centered primarily on the context of the United States, global migration has emerged as a major influence on educational systems internationally as well. Although my primary role as a university-based scholar of educational leadership has led me to conduct empirical studies of educational leadership, my commitment to the field has also led me to seek ways to influence policy and practice directly. My vision for ICSEI is that we continue to lead as a professional association that brings partners together across contexts and systems to create meaningful opportunities for knowledge sharing and development. With shared commitments to youth flourishing, equitable educational opportunity, and an understanding of how contextual differences shape the possibilities and focus of education systems across our distinct geographies, we are well-positioned to expand our reach and impact globally.