The excerpt below and attached document lays the ELADIN future plans for continuing to share our experience. The proposed leadership learning module template, offers a useful breakdown of activities and learning objectives that are based on our project: Leading as an Educational Disruptive Transformer. An essential part of the ELADIN project was to develop a values-based leadership framework to guide leaders across various societal spheres to deal with the historical and contemporary challenges they confront as part of their leadership practice. The ELADIN team has converted this framework into a module in its draft form to be piloted in partnership with the Faculty of Education and EDULEAD. A workshop held with seven schools from Gqeberha confirmed the importance of both the framework and module, named the leader as an Educational Disruptive Transformer (LEDT).
The Leader as an Educational Disruptive Transformer (LEDT)
The Leader as an Educational Disruptive Transformer (LEDT) is based on a comparative exploration of the leadership praxes of four individuals in an educational pipeline (ELADIN website). It recognises that value-based leadership can be explored across different leadership spheres that are interdependent and interrelated. It is intended to help leaders adopt and understand the values required to provide efficient and effective leadership in their different spheres of leadership, especially during times of turmoil and upheaval, while striving to be in service to society. From this understanding, leaders will be provided with practical exercises to consider the theorisation of a contemporary value-based leadership framework and how this theorisation could translate into practice-based models that can strengthen their leadership practice.
Following on what the UNESCO Futures of Education Report (2019) proposes for education sustainability, the LEDT module attempts to develop leaders by fostering principles of cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity while recognising their intellectual, social and moral capabilities. Furthermore, the module intends to capacitate leaders with knowledge, skills, and values that will help them develop their capacity to reflect on and critique their leadership practice for educational and social transformation.
For this module, leadership is understood as the ability to develop a value-based approach to guide leadership praxes. The LEDT module focuses on creating a pipeline and expanding a diverse leadership pool by advancing and supporting leaders across the various spheres of society. It prepares value-driven leaders to deal with a complex and changing world characterised by growing inequality and systemic complexity. The LEDT helps leaders understand the core values that inform good leaders’ decisions, practices, and behaviours to move beyond checklists and definitions of “values” towards deep understanding and concrete practices that promote these values. LEDT, through a value-based leadership framework, allows the leader to understand the importance of placing people and the community at the centre of their leadership. The values-based understanding is natured by dialogical reflection on critical incidents (both positive and negative experiences) to discuss how values shape the work of leaders.
The linked article describes the evolution of this work into our broader South African community.
A list of projects that evolved from ELADIN:
ELADIN workshop with NMU education faculty
Research project with CELL
Ed Leadership Module and manual for leadership
Reimagining Schools publication and colloquium
EDULEAD WORKSHOP AND PARTNERSHIP
MOU – NYU CA visiting faculty appointment
Charles Duna – quality teaching and learning process
Proposed CoP
Skills development/transfer opportunity Taffie HOC/ELADIN