During the 2025 BELMAS Annual Conference, Professor Megan Crawford will be hosting a special People’s Panel, which will take place at 2.15pm on Friday 4th July in the Renaissance Suite at the Leonardo Royal Waterfront Hotel, Brighton.
The discussion panel will touch both on the conference theme, Turbulence, Reform and Development in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration’, and other ‘hot topics’ in International Educational Leadership.
We’re delighted to announce that the panellists for this session will be:
Read more about our Panel below.
Please note, you must have a conference ticket to attend this event. You can purchase your ticket to the 2025 Annual Conference here.
Dr. Charles F. Webber is a teacher and researcher who served for the first half of his career as a classroom teacher and school principal in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. Following a move to higher education, he has held appointments as a professor and dean in Alberta and British Columbia, Canada. He now holds positions as Professor at Mount Royal University and Professor Emeritus with the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary.
Recent honors include selection for Buitengewone Professor, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa; Guest Professor, Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, Merida, Mexico; and the Dr. Truman L. Kelley Award for Scholarship Excellence, Kappa Delta Pi, International Honor Society in Education, Indianapolis, Indiana, United States.
His teaching and research interests focus on teacher leadership, the principalship, student assessment, and higher education administration and leadership. He currently leads the International Study of Teacher Leadership (www.mru.ca/istl). He has published over 100 chapters and articles, seven edited books, and multiple organizational reports. He regularly shares his work as a keynote presenter, visiting scholar, and workshop leader.
Dr Meng Tian is an Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her teaching and research interests include distributed leadership, social justice leadership, professional development for leaders and teachers, education policies, and comparative education.
Meng has an extensive international research profile and supervises several PhD students. Before joining the University of Birmingham, she studied and worked in China, Finland, and Switzerland and has contributed to numerous international and EU-funded projects. In recent years, she has served as the Principal Investigator for several research projects, including:
Beyond her research, Meng serves as the Director of Global Engagement for the College of Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham.
Mike Bottery is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Hull, UK. Mike gained his first degree at University College, Oxford, and gained his MEd and PhD at the University of Hull. He spent the early part of his educational career teaching in Primary Schools in England and Australia, before moving to a lecturing position at the University of Hull.
Mike has written and published extensively in international peer-refereed journals and written many books with major publishing houses. He became full professor at Hull in 2000. His interests include educational management, educational policy, and the leadership of an education for sustainable development. He is particularly concerned with the values underpinning educational decisions.
Mike has published eight books on issues of educational leadership, values and sustainability, including The Challenges of Educational Leadership (2004) and Educational Leadership for a More Sustainable World (2016) and The Educational Leader in a Word of Covert Threats(2022).
Dr Judy Chandler is the Programme Lead for the MA Education and MA Childhood and Youth at the Open University. Her experience working in education started in 2006 when she was first appointed as a Secondary schoolteacher. Over 19 years, Judy worked in Secondary education, Further (post-16) education, and since 2018 Higher Education. Her specialism and research interests lie in Educational Leadership in Higher Education and Schools, particularly exploring where research meets practice.
Judy is also currently engaged in scholarship research exploring the experiences of minoritised students in Taught Postgraduate assessment. She is Vice Chair of trustees at a small Academy Trust and a Chair of governors, which enables her to contribute to school governance informed by her knowledge of educational leadership research. As a local leader of governance, Judy chairs a Borough-wide SEND governor forum.
As an early career researcher, and co-convenor of the BELMAS Emergent Researcher RIG, Judy is particularly keen to build on research that explores the concept of ‘Third Space professionals’, which looks at the nexus between academic and professional services roles, with a view to exploring what this might mean for future educational leadership and management in terms of professional identity, learning, development and collaboration.
