This paper critiques generative AI in leadership education as an instrument of optimization, where summarizing, coaching, and personalizing risk producing fluent, compliant leadership subjects while narrowing ethical inquiry. It develops Trickster AI, a speculative pedagogical framework informed by Ananse, Èṣù, and Māui, where contradiction, delay, reversal, humor, and refusal expose hidden premises of authority. The paper reframes friction as culturally situated and politically consequential; develops refusal as epistemic, procedural, and care-based practice; and proposes Leadership Through Rupture, where contradiction becomes information. It also addresses cultural extraction through consent, co-design and Indigenous data governance. A companion paper details implementation.
This qualitative case study examines how associate deans at a medium-sized Catholic university respond to the rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI). Guided by decolonial and feminist frameworks, the study analyzes survey data from seven academic leaders to understand their concerns, decision-making processes, and emerging practices. Our findings reveal uneven adoption, limited institutional guidance, and ongoing concerns about academic integrity, equity, and bias. The study also highlights the often-unseen relational and emotional labor involved in supporting faculty and students. We conclude by recommending flexible, collaborative approaches to AI governance that attend to context, care, and diverse ways of knowing.
This article presents a technical architecture and classroom protocols for Trickster AI, an approach to generative AI in leadership education that prioritizes epistemic friction over optimization. Building on a companion paper, it operationalizes trickster pedagogy through a five-layer system: pedagogical policy, cultural logic, contradiction engine, rupture scheduler, and debrief-evidence layers. It presents four protocols: the contradiction clinic, refusal studio, delay device, and relational accountability simulation, guiding interaction, debriefing, accessibility, trauma-informed care, and relational assessment. The central contribution is a bridge between decolonial theory and educational design practice, showing epistemic friction can be specified as a design problem, ethically governed and translated into pedagogical protocols.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping decision-making and organizational life, yet leadership development in higher education has not evolved at the same pace. To address this gap, the article proposes the concept of the "augmented leader" and develops a four-competency framework for AI-integrated leadership: algorithmic literacy, strategic use of AI, ethical leadership and governance, and culture and adoption. Based on an integrative literature review and expert-informed thematic synthesis, the framework offers a structured perspective on leadership in AI-mediated environments. The article argues that higher education must embed AI as a core leadership capability, preparing students to lead effectively and responsibly in human-AI systems.
This case study investigates "The Worldbuilding Project," a collaborative initiative between two diverse San Diego high schools that offers a model for AI leadership development grounded in critical pedagogy. Utilizing a six-step worldbuilding methodology, students prototyped socio-technical futures and authored a collective social contract to reclaim human agency over automated cognition. Findings suggest this cross-institutional partnership fosters a "Post-Digital Leadership" paradigm, prioritizing civic responsibility over technical proficiency. By centering student voices, this study provides a blueprint for educational institutions to transition from reactive prohibition toward humanizing, future-oriented digital governance.
This article presents an organizational reflection on how the non-profit Jacobs Institute for Innovation in Education (JI) navigates the intricacies of innovation and leadership in the time of generative AI. By examining JI's multi-stage initiatives, through relational and collaborative leadership lenses, we illustrate how teamwork and the mobilization of partnerships foster an equity-centered approach to educational innovation. This reflection highlights how JI moves beyond the leader-centric model of educational change, building and nurturing leadership mechanisms that bring teachers, education researchers, and education leaders together to engage in innovative co-creation of AI-supported educational practices to bring positive change and impact to society.
Artificial intelligence is already transforming contemporary education. Besides revolutionizing how students learn and educators teach it is also challenging the frameworks of knowledge and power that underpin leadership. Unfortunately, and because of an imposed discourse of urgency spread from big AI corporations and economic and political interests, AI has been rapidly integrated into educational settings without a profound and critical evaluation of its assumptions and consequences. This is the main reason why leadership educators need to move beyond understanding AI's technical capacity to a deeper engagement with its impact on the meaning, practice and power of leadership.
This article examines how AI technologies are being intentionally and thoughtfully integrated into nonprofit leadership and management undergraduate and graduate programs at a southwestern university. Drawing from curriculum design and instructional practices in the Nonprofit Leadership and Management Department at Arizona State University, we highlight the design and implementation of pedagogical strategies balancing technical skill-building with critical engagement around AI's ethical and intercultural implications. We also explore how AI tools and their current use by nonprofits are introduced in coursework and how current and future nonprofit leaders are encouraged to critically examine algorithmic bias, underlying power structures, and the broader social implications of AI within the nonprofit sector and beyond.
The arrival of generative artificial intelligence in learning environments has created an urgent question for leadership educators: what remains distinctly ours to think in the act of learning to lead? This article proposes a third orientation beyond the familiar poles of embrace and resistance, centering the reciprocal holding environment as the condition under which genuine formation can occur. Drawing on developmental theory, transformative learning, and epistemic justice frameworks, it examines what is lost cognitively, neurologically, and ethically when AI thinks first, and offers a conceptual framework, pedagogical pathways, and strategies for reclaiming critical thinking and human authorship in the AI-augmented classroom.
This article describes findings from a mixed-methods study analyzing undergraduate student ePortfolios to examine how community-engaged learning supports socially responsible leadership development. Results highlight ePortfolios as an effective tool for assessing and facilitating student learning. The author advocates for integration of leadership education with community engagement efforts to foster personal transformation and social change.
Amid rising anti-DEI pressures and increasing programmatic instability in higher education, leadership programs grounded in critical and equity-centered frameworks face heightened vulnerability. This article uses critical collaborative autoethnography to explore how two faculty members navigate these uncertainties through active waiting, a strategic and reflective practice for curricular decision-making. Through dialogic engagement, we identify dimensions of active waiting to support leadership educators working within contested institutional environments.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming higher education, yet student leadership programs have failed to engage this transformation. This article examines four imperatives for integrating AI into leadership education: AI as pedagogy, AI literacy as leadership competency, student agency in institutional AI transformation, and AI-enhanced assessment of leadership development. I argue leadership educators have opportunities and responsibilities to lead, not only react to, higher education's AI engagement. A framework spanning educator actions, programmatic redesign, institutional transformation, and field-level initiatives is offered as a response. By embracing these imperatives, leadership development can responsibly integrate AI while preparing students for future AI-driven challenges.
This article examines the association between perceived social sisterhood and alcohol consumption, binge drinking, hazing tolerance, and hazing rationale among sorority members at a large public university in the Southeast. It provides implications for leadership educators and organizational advisors, focusing on the essential nature of leadership education as a tool for prevention education. The study used a repeated cross-sectional design across four academic years (2021-2024), pooled ordinary least squares regression models with chapter fixed effects were estimated for a sample of 11,832 sorority members across 25 chapters. Findings support the theoretical argument that shared social sisterhood functions as a double-edge sword; a sisterhood that fosters connection and community while increasing behavioral risk.
Exposure to dynamics and cultures that reveal and challenge students' settler-colonial mindset is essential-not only for disrupting dominant narratives but also for interrogating foundational assumptions about how concepts like power and leadership operate. To cultivate this awareness, encountering other ways of being, particularly those rooted in cultures that enact shared leadership as lived praxis, requires sustained reflection on the self, the institution, and society. This article examines the impact of a doctoral study abroad course in New Zealand that explored the concepts of decolonization and leadership through students' narratives.
Despite overlap in intended learning outcomes between education abroad (also known as study abroad) and leadership education, and comparable research agendas, findings about the relationship between education abroad and leadership, or the impact of education abroad on leadership competencies, is limited. However, existing research on education abroad shows how many intentionally designed programmatic outcomes match well with those documented by leadership educators and vice versa, offering fresh insight into the impact on leadership from education abroad. This article addresses how leadership development can be an educational outcome of an education abroad experience, even if the program is not a leadership course.
This article explores the conceptualization, design, and implementation of the University of Michigan's inaugural Leadership and Technology Global Course in Cape Town, South Africa. This 3-week study abroad experience centered the perspectives of gender-minoritized leaders in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to demonstrate the importance of diversity, inclusion, and cultural competency for effective leadership practice. The values of Ubuntu (i.e., interconnectedness, community, compassion/empathy, responsibility, reconciliation/healing) frame the themes that emerged each week of the course and illuminate leadership best practices. With the voices of the 12 participants foregrounded, this article presents counternarratives, to disrupt both leadership and study abroad stories most often told.
This article poses questions about the ethical considerations of international service-learning as a component of leadership education programs. The author draws on historical critiques from a 1960s address by Monsignor Ivan Illich to US volunteers and Richard Slimbach's framework for global citizenship to offer a lens through which to understand international service-learning. Leadership education administrators are implicated in how educational institutions share American values, export ideals and ideas of democracy, leadership, and values, under the guise of service. This work explores the risks and responsibilities educators and administrators have to international partners and for the development of students prepared to participate in a complex global community. The author advances critical service-learning as a pathway forward for international service-learning in leadership education.
Creating a comprehensive, thoughtfully designed, and impactful learning experience abroad can be an overwhelming and uncertain undertaking. This article focuses on how leadership educators can address challenges, anticipate barriers, and design a leadership learning abroad course that powerfully supports student learning and avoids excess stress in the process. This article explores leadership learning in short-term study abroad programs through the lens of adaptive leadership. Using reflective narrative and practice-based examples, I examine the opportunities (the good), barriers (the bad), and ethical tensions (the uncertain) that arise when designing and facilitating leadership learning abroad. The article highlights faculty preparation and learning as a critical and often overlooked outcome of education abroad and situates leadership learning as a shared, relational process among students, educators, institutions, and community partners. I offer recommendations for leadership educators, institutions, and the field to support ethically grounded, developmentally appropriate, and adaptive leadership learning in global contexts.
Since 2019, the University of Denver has facilitated short-term travel courses in Ireland and Northern Ireland on an annual basis. The six courses epitomized emergent learning experiences where students and faculty co-created learning that connected leadership theory with Irish history. The Irish struggle for independence from British colonial rule and the peace process in Northern Ireland provided fertile ground for sense making related to complexity leadership theory, ambiguity, adaptive leadership, and intentional emergence.
