Message from the 2025 LSI SIG Chair

 On behalf of the LSI Executive Committee, welcome to the Fall 2025 newsletter issue and thank you for being part of our SIG community! We look forward to seeing many of you at the upcoming 2025 UCEA Annual Convention in Puerto Rico and learning from one another’s scholarship around the theme “Fostering Leadership Resilience Through Collaboration and Community.” We hope you will join us for our annual LSI lunch event on Friday, November 21 from 12:00-1:30pm, which is a great opportunity to reconnect, build community, and make connections across scholarship and practice. We recognize that collaboration and community are more important than ever in the face of mounting political efforts to undermine equitable and socially just education, and that leaders across higher education and PK-12 have an important role to play in challenging unjust policies. To this end, we continue to prioritize our existing community-building initiatives while considering new ways to collaborate, learn from, and support the work of our higher ed and practitioner colleagues who are navigating heightened political challenges.

In addition to our annual LSI lunch event at UCEA, we will continue to focus on building community across SIGs by hosting a joint reception at AERA with the Educational Change, Systems Thinking, and Organizational Theory SIGs. We also hope to engage SIGs that share our interests, values, and commitments to expand our programming around current issues and challenges relevant to equitable and socially just school improvement work across teaching, scholarship, policy, and practice.

Our graduate student support network, led by the Researcher Development Program (RDP) team of graduate students and faculty advisors, continues to grow and provide impactful publication and presentation opportunities through a year-long mentorship model that matches faculty mentors with graduate student mentees. The RDP team has recently expanded their graduate student support initiatives by hosting webinars on important topics related to scholarship development. These initiatives, co-sponsored with the UCEA Graduate Student Council, serve as an important model highlighting the importance and potential of collaboration across organizations. 

Another initiative that highlights the influential work of our SIG community is the LSI book series, which recently moved publishers from IAP to Emerald. As the book series expands – with eight books published to date, one forthcoming, and several more under review or development – we are also expanding our editorial board. We hope you will engage with this growing body of scholarship, as it highlights the meaningful work being done within our SIG community, and consider developing a proposal to continue to diversify the scope of this work.

As we move through this academic year, we remain committed to expanding the perspectives and scope of leadership for school improvement, and welcome new and diverse voices to these efforts. If you have ideas or would like to be involved in this work, we would love to hear from you! Please reach out to any of the officers, join us at our upcoming in-person events, and bring colleagues and students who might be interested in this work as well. Finally, I’d like to close with a note of thanks. Thank you to our members for your participation and support, which keep these initiatives going. I would also like to thank the LSI Executive Committee for their hard work and dedication to keeping our SIG community active, growing, and committed to improvement towards equity and social justice.

Alison Wilson, Ph.D. 

LSI Chair, 2025-2026

Assistant Professor

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 

University of Houston

aswilso6@cougarnet.uh.edu