Three Buckets and Eight Strategies: Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining a Racially Diverse Special Education Teacher Workforce

Cultivating a racially diverse special education teacher workforce is critical to the success of students with disabilities, particularly students of color with disabilities. We examine the literature and provide suggestions for recruiting, supporting, and retaining special education teacher candidates of color. Specifically, we present a vignette that highlights the decision-making process of a Black male on a journey to become a special education teacher. We propose recruitment strategies (e.g., anti-racist mission and vision statements), support strategies (e.g., racial affinity groups), and retention strategies (e.g., adopting anti-racist curriculum) that Institutions of Higher Education must consider to promote efforts to diversify the special education teacher workforce.

Can you Find Yourself in the Stacks?

The past year has brought renewed attention to the need for academic library collections to support an emphasis on diversity, equity, and inclusivity (DEI) in the curriculum and to reflect the increasing diversity among students and faculty. The urgent calls for maximum inclusivity and diversity in all aspects of theological education have led collection development librarians to re-examine and re-calibrate their collecting practices. Three librarians offer practical suggestions on how to approach the challenges of developing diverse collections by engaging with key stakeholders, aligning collecting with the institution’s mission and/or vision statements, utilizing approval plans, and promoting collections through outreach and diversity programming.

Focus of societal responsibility in the vision and mission statements of the United States pharmacy schools/ colleges

Objective: To assess the prevalence of societal responsibility languages and themes on education, research, and professional service in pharmacy programmes’ vision and mission statements. Methods: The authors collected the vision and mission statements of 142 pharmacy programmes by visiting each programme’s website. The statements were compiled and uploaded in NVivo 12. Deductive qualitative analysis and a topic extraction method with embedded principal component analysis (WordStat 8) were used to identify thematic dimensions of the statements. The number of programmes citing the respective themes were recorded. A Chi-square test was used to statistically analyse the prevalence of themes between the programme categories. Results: Education, research, professional practice, and societal service emerged as prominent themes. The prevalence of research, professional practice, and leadership themes was significantly higher in the vision statements of public programmes than private programmes. In the mission statements, the citation of a research theme was significantly higher in public programmes than private programmes. The citations of serving the diverse population and underserved population were very limited in the vision (6% and 5%) and mission statements (11% and 6%). Topic analysis conformed to the identified prominent themes and lack of societal responsibility theme in the mission statements. Conclusions: The prominent themes included education, research, and professional service to society at large. There is a distinctive lack of citations of societal responsibility towards underserved populations in the vision and mission statements.

Sustainability in the mission and vision statements of Colombian Universities

Purpose This paper aims to analyze how Colombian Universities have incorporated the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development goals (SDGs) into their missions and visions. Design/methodology/approach The study used a documentary design to analyze the content of the missions and visions of the 86 Colombian Universities registered with the Ministry of National Education (MEN). Findings The study shows that universities are primarily aligned with Goal 13 as follows: climate action and this alignment is carried out to a great extent by the university’s governance, culture and activities. In contrast, there was a predominance of intentions to address the social dimension of sustainable development (SD). Research limitations/implications The study focused on examining universities’ missions and visions, which leaves out other sources of information that could account for university practices linked to the SDGs and sustainability. Practical implications The study’s results reveal the degree to which the universities are aligned with the SDGs in Colombia, which serves as a basis for the formulation of guidelines by the MEN and other organizations to strengthen the processes that contribute to the 2030 Agenda. Originality/value Research on how universities align with the SDGs is not a new topic, but it is scarce in the Colombian context. This research contributes to this gap by addressing the topic from a holistic and comparative perspective of SD education.

National archives’ priorities: an international overview

This discussion of national archives’ present priorities affords an overview of the areas meriting their greatest attention. It is based on an analysis of 18 strategic plans and 41 vision statements found for the 159 national archives affiliated with the International Council on Archives’ regional branches that provide public access to these documents on their websites. Improvement in access to and conservation and digitisation of the respective collections are convergent items in such plans and statements. Other strategies including protection for the national heritage and collective memory are also identified in some developing countries where the national archive is the mainstay of cultural and intellectual life. Strengthening national archive authority as the governing institution that guides a country’s archival policy, another issue found in both plans and statements, infers the need to heighten archives’ social and institutional role in their respective countries. The article identifies what is deemed good practice in cultural institution transparency management by describing what these institutions do and how. The scant presence of strategic plans on national archives’ websites is regretted, however, for it deprives citizens of information on the action planned for the years to come and precludes any international extrapolation of the present findings.

The importance of vision statements for human resource management – functions of human resource management in creating and leveraging vision statements

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the connections between vision statements, leadership and human resource management (HRM) to clarify what contribution HRM has to make in translating an organizational goal into a vision statement. Design/methodology/approach The importance of vision statements is explained. Empirical data are used to illustrate the failure of many companies to exploit the potential of a vision statement. Finally, the role of HRM in formulating a vision statement is discussed. Findings “Vision statement” is another term for primary organizational goal. Setting this primary goal is an indispensable task of leadership. If the vision statement is missing, HRM should remedy the situation. Originality/value The added value of this paper lies in explaining why vision statements are relevant for both leadership and HRM and the functions and leading role of HRM in actualizing the vision statement.

Promotional practices in mission and vision statements of corporate companies: A systemic functional linguistic analysis

Promotional strategies have become discursive practices in corporate companies’ mission and vision statements. However, less focus was given to the role of grammar in shaping this text type as part of promotional discourse. Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is arguably the most definite and certain linguistic analysis as a meaning-making resource. Hence, the purpose of this study was to use transitivity grammar theory in SFL to analyse the use of experiential processes in enacting promotional rhetorical moves. Following purposive sampling, mission and vision statements of hundred international companies, which were ranked by current market capitalization, were selected. Using textual analysis, we applied transitivity grammar theory to manually analyse promotional rhetorical moves. The results were quantified and presented in tabulation form. The findings revealed that mental and relational processes are favoured grammatical patterns used by corporate firms to write mission statements that focus on building public image and establish self-concept. The findings of this research can prove helpful for other corporate companies to use similar grammatical patterns to develop mission and vision statements.