Leadership is widely acknowledged as central to school improvement (Louis et al., 2010), yet within Initial Teacher Education (ITE) it is frequently introduced late, implicitly, or through abstract frameworks, standards, and competency models. Such approaches risk positioning leadership as a distant, hierarchical role rather than a formative professional practice embedded in the everyday work of teaching (Acquaro, 2019; Aliu & Kaçaniku, 2023). In contemporary schooling contexts characterised by ethical complexity, organisational constraint, and workforce instability, this framing limits early career teachers’ capacity to exercise judgment, agency, and relational responsibility. 

This paper investigates a distinctive pedagogical design in which practising school leaders (Assistant Principals, Leading Teachers, and Coordinators) serve as university tutors in a final-semester Master of Teaching subject. Rather than teaching leadership as content alone, these tutors embody leadership through narrative, decision-making, and relational engagement in the university classroom. The study asks: 

How is leadership literacy enacted and learned when leadership is modelled, witnessed, and interrogated in situ by practising school leaders within Initial Teacher Education? 

We conceptualise leadership literacy as an educative process rather than a technical skillset. Leadership literacy is understood as the cultivation of professional judgment, ethical orientation, relational sensibility, and systems understanding capacities that enable teachers to respond thoughtfully to the demands of schooling rather than merely comply with prescribed roles or standards (Samson & Acquaro, 2024; Samson & Acquaro, 2025). 

The theoretical framework draws on Gert Biesta’s critique of “learnification” and his articulation of education as encompassing qualification, socialisation, and subjectification (Biesta, 2010, 2022). While leadership education in ITE often prioritises qualification (knowledge of roles, policies, and structures) and socialisation (alignment with professional norms), this paper foregrounds subjectification: the emergence of the professional as an ethically responsive subject capable of judgment and action. 

From this perspective, leadership is not something to be mastered after competence is achieved, but a way of coming into presence as a professional. Leadership literacy becomes a form of knowing-in-action, where understanding develops through engagement with uncertainty, moral tension, and relational responsibility. Biesta’s notion of world-centred education further informs this framing by positioning education as an encounter with the world as it is complex, constrained, and demanding of thoughtful response (Biesta, 2022). Applied to leadership education, this requires engagement with the lived realities of schools rather than idealised or procedural models of leadership. 

Within this framework, the presence of school leaders as tutors, functions as a pedagogical catalyst. Their narratives of constraint, ethical trade-offs, and incomplete solutions interrupt students’ assumptions about leadership as managerial, distant, or aspirational. Leadership literacy, in this sense, is enacted through encounter: students witness leadership being lived, questioned, and negotiated, and are invited to consider their own emerging professional identities in relation to these practices. 

By bringing together leadership identity formation and embodied pedagogy, this paper responds directly to the ECER 2026 theme Knowing and Acting. It positions leadership literacy as a site where knowing emerges through acting, and where research can illuminate new possibilities for professional formation under changing educational conditions. 

The study adopts a qualitative-dominant mixed methods design to explore how leadership literacy is enacted and experienced when practising school leaders serve as university tutors. Two complementary datasets were generated within the Leadership in Schools subject at a large Australian research-intensive university. The first dataset comprises student survey data collected from 44 final-year Master of Teaching students. The survey included Likert-scale items and open-ended questions examining students’ understandings of leadership, confidence in professional voice, perceptions of school structures, and openness to leadership pathways. This dataset provides insight into how students experienced leadership literacy as part of their professional formation. The second dataset consists of reflexive practitioner inquiry conducted by the school leaders who served as subject tutors. Drawing on the reflective practitioner tradition (Schön,1983), data sources included tutor reflective journals, annotated teaching artefacts, and collaborative debrief discussions. These materials captured how tutors enacted leadership pedagogically through storytelling, decision-making narratives, ethical dilemmas, and relational engagement with students. Data analysis followed Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis, with coding conducted inductively and iteratively across both datasets. Biesta’s concepts of subjectification and world-centred education informed interpretation at the latent level, enabling analysis of how leadership was framed, disrupted, and reconstituted through pedagogical encounter. Analytic trustworthiness was enhanced through collaborative coding, reflexive memo-writing, and triangulation between student and tutor perspectives. This design enabled examination not only of what students reported learning about leadership, but how leadership literacy was enacted, modelled, and made pedagogically visible through the hybrid role of school leader–tutor.

Findings indicate that when leadership is embodied by practising school leaders in the ITE classroom, leadership literacy is experienced as relational, ethical, and situated, rather than hierarchical or abstract. Across both datasets, leadership emerged as a way of being and responding, not merely a future role. Three key contributions of the school leader–tutor role were identified. First, authentic visibility of leadership work enabled students to engage with the realities of leadership, including constraints, moral trade-offs, and uncertainty. Second, tutors modelled leadership dispositions such as listening, coaching, vulnerability, and care which reframed leadership as relational practice rather than positional authority. Third, these encounters activated leadership identity, with students increasingly articulating leadership as “how I show up” rather than “something I might do later.” These findings suggest that leadership literacy functions as identity work catalysed through pedagogical encounter. Rather than learning about leadership, students begin to rehearse possible professional selves capable of ethical judgment and relational responsibility within complex systems (Ibarra, 2005; Mockler, 2011). The paper concludes by arguing that leadership education in ITE should move beyond frameworks and standards toward embodied, dialogic, and world-centred pedagogies. It highlights implications for ITE staffing models, institutional recognition of hybrid educator roles, and curriculum designs that treat leadership literacy as foundational professional formation. In doing so, the study offers a research-informed response to the changing conditions of teacher education and the need to democratise leadership as everyday professional practice (Acquaro & Gurr, 2022).

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