Wei Wei is a PhD Candidate in the Critical Policy, Equity, and Leadership Studies stream, working under the supervision of Dr. Marianne Larsen. Her research interests include educational administration, school leadership, education policy analysis, and comparative and international education. She has received the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS) (2017) to support her study.

Wei has been working on various research projects with faculty professors and researchers both within Western University and across institutions. As a Research Assistant, she has worked on several research projects funded by SSHRC, the Ontario Principal Council, and the Ontario Ministry of Education. These projects include suspension/expulsion evaluation (with Dr. Katina Pollock and Dr. Brenton Faubert), principals’ and vice-principals’ work in Ontario (with Dr. Katina Pollock and Dr. Fei Wang), the translation of leadership standards across Canada (with Dr. Augusto Riveros), and policy layer enactment (with Dr. Katina Pollock and Dr. Sue Winton).

Adopting a lens of policy transfer, Wei’s PhD thesis looks at the enactment of leadership standards in China. Under a global policy convergence, one dominant register is the standardization of school leadership through education policies that regulate school leaders’ responsibilities. Recognizing this global trend, China introduced the Professional Standards for Compulsory Schools Principals (hereafter the Standards) (Ministry of Education, 2013). Interested in the global flows of education policy ideas, Wei attempts to explore how the Standards is translated and put into practice by Chinese principals in real school contexts. Her work also contributes to the literature on the politics of educational transfer, and the adaptation and recontextualization of global policy agenda.

Marianne Larsen, PhD

Supervisor