DR GLENYS WOODS FRSA
Glenys, a Fellow of the RSA and member of the US-based New DEEL (Democratic Ethical Educational Leadership) network, has been an independent researcher for over 20 years, mainly as a member of various university teams on funded educational projects. Prior to this, she undertook a variety of market research work, on issues such as housing, race relations work policies, miners’ views of the 1980s’ strike, and consumer topics (e.g. choice of services and products and shopping trends through the use of diaries). She gained her PhD through the Open University, UK, studying spirituality and educational policy and leadership. Whilst studying part-time for her doctorate, Glenys gave research assistant support to a number of research teams and projects, including a longitudinal study of parental choice of schooling, an investigation of competition between schools, analysis of students’ homework diaries, and research into school inspection reports. An interest in modernising leadership led her to work on projects that examined how leadership was changing in the context of educational reforms: one was a study of the effects of outsourcing local authority school services to a private company; the other involved the study of a new Inner City Academy located in a deprived urban area with one of the highest unemployment rates in the UK.
Glenys is particularly interested in spiritual development, as well as alternative forms of education, and is an advocate of open-minded, open-hearted holistic education. She was co-author of the Steiner Schools in England report, commissioned by the UK Government, which led to acquiring funding from the British Academy to study collegial leadership in Steiner schools. These research studies sparked a deeper interest in alternative types of education, which resulted in her co-editing Alternative Education for the 21st Century: Philosophies, approaches, visions, published by Palgrave in 2009.
Glenys has been a main organiser for a number of successful conferences, including A Day of Dialogue (bringing together mainstream and Steiner educators), culminating in a report (Building Bridges Conference: Summary of Outcomes – Towards a Wider Sense of Community?), and The Researching Academies Conference, culminating in a special issue of Management in Education in 2009 which she co-edited. She has been a clerk to a school governing body, a county Forum Chair for clerks’ meetings, a parent teacher representative and regional representative for the Welsh Parent Teachers Association. As well as her spiritual work (see Spiritual) and advancing holistic democracy, Glenys reviews books and articles for a variety of journals and is open and supportive in response to queries from students working on masters and doctoral level research.
