Leithwood Award: Dr. Sheena Bell, from the United Nations to Ghana’s education system

For the first time since 2015, the Leithwood Award for Outstanding Thesis of the Year has named co-recipients.

The award, usually presented to one recipient annually in recognition of exceptional, cutting-edge research conducted by an OISE student in the last phase of their doctoral work, is being shared by Dr. Sheena Bell and Dr. Dylan Johnson – from the Departments of Leadership, Higher and Adult Learning and Applied Psychology and Human Development, respectively.

“To select two winners for the award is unusual but to see that it’s a shared honour speaks to the tremendous breadth of research being undertaken by our OISE community members,” said Professor Becky Chen, Associate Dean, Research, Partnership and Innovation. “On behalf of OISE, I wish to congratulate Dr. Bell and Dr. Johnson for this tremendous honour.”

Established in 2003, the award was named in honour of Dr. Kenneth Leithwood, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Leadership, Higher & Adult Education and former Associate Dean, Research. His research on educational leadership and educational change contributed to shaping theory, policy and practice in most jurisdictions in Canada, England, the United States, and Australia.

Dr. Sheena Bell is, at the heart of her scholarship, cares about how policies affect people.

After earning two political science degrees, researching second generation Canadian immigrants and their sense of belonging, she found herself working for the United Nations – supporting education systems through UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in Montreal, and an eventually for UNICEF Europe and Central Asia.

“I cared about how policies made people feel welcome,” said Bell, about pursuing education research specifically. “It wasn't [the education field] until I got that job at UNESCO, and then that job grew with me.”

That work began with calculating education indicators to monitor the UN’s Global Development Goals – officially known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – but it went further, she was supporting policies and projects focused  on marginalized and out-of-school children. Yet she often found that policy plans did not translate into practice on the ground.

That curiosity led Bell to shift – she quit her role at the United Nations and was naturally drawn to OISE’s intensive education research lens. 

For her, she wanted to understand policy implementation. “I really wanted to take a step back to ponder the questions that I had encountered in my policy work and then take a leap forward and re-engage with it – as a scholar-practioner” said Bell, currently a postdoctoral fellow at OISE.

A deep dive into Ghana’s educational leadership

Her winning three-paper thesis, “The Middle Tier of Education Delivery: An Exploratory Study of District Support to Schools in Ghana,” was a great “landing place” for puzzles she wanted to solve, she says. In reality, Ghana’s education system was incredibly challenged, yet it aimed to deliver quality education for all children.

Apart from linguistic, ethnic, and religious diversity of Ghana, the education system was greatly underfunded, she says.

“Districts often went six months without any operational budget. Yet, they showed great dedication to their job, “ she said, “In all the districts I interviewed, school inspectors paid out of pocket for the fuel they needed visit their schools.”

For Bell, district education offices are critical intermediaries translating policy into practice, yet little is known about their role in improving instructional support in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her thesis drew on a nationally representative district survey, policy analysis, and over 75 interviews and focus groups to get answers. 

Bell visited Ghana and three specific education districts frequently for this work, and connected with educators on the ground, doing the hard work each day. “There's so much diversity across the three districts, so much agency and leadership skill that these different directors showed and different strategies they took,” she said. 

She found that district staff are not passive cogs in the service delivery machine but actors navigating multiple, often competing expectations under conditions of extreme resource scarcity. “That combination of low resource context and the coping strategies that district directors adopt to navigate – there's just so much we can learn from these examples of district leaders who've been able to improve practices and improve school performance,” she said.

For example, Bell recalled interacting with staff at a seaside district – the director had joined two years prior, and she self-identified as a school inspector – and she still carried that as part of her identity. 

Government expected this district to improve. It had about an average poverty level for the country, but it didn't perform at what would be expected for that. “She brought her deputy directors together, and then she brought some schools together, and they discussed the problems, and then – together as a team – they decided that they were going to create a kind of school adoption program,” Bell recalled. 

“This wasn’t what they were expected to do . They created their own way of supporting schools.‘

Within the very small, limited discretion that this director had, she figured out a way to reorient the whole mission of her district around school improvement and school support. Many district staff, themselves former classroom teachers, would step in and provide lessons, for example. “I just thought, ‘This is amazing,’” said Bell. “She was a hybrid leader, which is trying to at least satisfy or meet these different demands – from the bureaucracy, teachers, politicians and the community at the same time, not avoiding them.”

Bell’s thesis has had an impact

Professor Karen Mundy, Bell’s doctoral supervisor, says that thesis and Bell’s scholarship combines humility and deep curiosity with an astounding level of ambition. 

“During her doctoral course work, she really dug into theoretical and historical literatures on educational policy, decentralization and governance reforms,” said Mundy, who is based in the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education. 

Mundy adds Bell wrote the equivalent of at least two complete literature reviews before landing on her dissertation topic – a study of district leadership in Ghana. “That work was part of a larger study we both contributed to, which allowed me to see Sheena in action in an international setting,” she said. 

“It was amazing to experience her dedication and persistence in setting up fieldwork including in remote geographies. She also has amazing listening and observation skills, and made friends and colleagues wherever she conducted research. I've learned a lot from her!

Defended last summer, the work has already had an impact – Bell presented this framework at a conference at The University of Oxford, and she was tapped to undertake similar work for the Gates Foundation in Senegal and Rwanda.

“I see Sheena’s work laying the foundations for a new generation of scholarship that draws on sociology and education to develop deeper understanding of educational leadership in Sub-Saharan Africa and other international settings,” said Mundy. 

Research on how to make organizations work – including through relational trust and distributed leadership – is especially important during times of radical transformation, which we are experiencing in education today, says Mundy. 

“Today, Sheena is a recognized international expert on applied leadership and I’m confident she will be actively engaged not only in world-class research, but also in designing interventions for education policy makers in the middle tier of education systems.”

Bell is making an impact, and this Leithwood Award a deserved honour. Bell is grateful for Mundy’s guidance, but also the expertise and dedication from her research collaborators at the Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (IEPA) at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. 

“It's a long-term research relationship now,” said Bell, about her research partners. “We drove the entire length of Ghana during the fieldwork. I invited one of my Ghanaian colleagues, Dr. Christopher Mensah-Adosi to guest lecture in my class. We're always looking for ways to keep working together.”

Click here to learn more about Dr. Bell’s work in Rwanda and Senegal.