Imagination as a Catalyst for Relational Leadership: Educational Leaders' Perspectives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines the role of imagination in relational leadership. Specifically, through a case study of a unique offering of an imagination-focused MEd program in Educational Leadership in a large, public research institution in British Columbia, Canada, the following question was explored: How do participants understand imagination’s role in leadership after completing a two-year imagination-focused MEd leadership program? The 13 participants—all aspiring and emerging leaders in their professional settings—shared their developing conceptions of leadership, imagination, and the role of imagination in educational leadership. Participants articulated how imagination contributes to understanding of themselves as leaders, engaging others with empathy, and building connections. The relational role of imagination was a dominant theme. According to participants, imagination is necessary for forming and enriching relationships, and reciprocally, relationships enhance imagination. Participants indicated how imagination supports their sense of belonging; imagination allowed participants to see themselves as potential leaders, and to feel they belonged “at the leadership table”. According to these preliminary findings, imagination may also create more opportunity in leadership. Overall, imagination emerges in this study as promoting not only relational, but humanizing leadership practices. This research contributes to understandings of relational leadership and highlights directions for future research. It identifies new directions for supporting equity and diversity in educational leadership and has clear implications for leadership education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".