Leading Change: Administrative Imaginings for a Decolonial Education

Abstract

AbstractThis article follows the movements of educational imagination articulated by the late scholar of religious education Maria Harris to offer musings on academic leadership that attempts a decolonial turn for enduring change in theological education. With stylistic and thought experimentations, the essay identifies challenges besieging administrative leadership amid a global pandemic, shifting institutional and cultural landscapes, and enduring legacies of colonial, racial, and gendered regimes. Harris’s educational esthetic and theories of learning and change leadership frame insights for a decolonizing and diasporic consciousness for today’s religious educator who administers and leads with educational imagination.Keywords: Change leadershipdecolonial theological educationMaria Harriseducational imaginationseminaryreligious educationacademic dean Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 These imagined entries—symbolizing an internal and internalized dialogue that constantly replays in the mind of a decanal administrator—are based on actual events, conversations, and email exchanges. This section and the stylistic representation of section headings in this essay take after the form experimented with by Clelia O. Rodríguez (Citation2018) in her book Decolonizing Academia. Experimental exercises of this kind have been taken up by scholars who seek “decolonizing ways of expression” (2018, 2), who beg the question in their genre-breaking defiance, can we write outside the lines of academic intelligibility? Explaining her approach, Rodríguez suggests that her “text is like peeling an onion” (2018, 2). The invitation to the reader is not simply to remove the “layers” in the attempt to comprehend, but rather to “feel” the “tension” of a “fluidity” that defies rigid logics of thinking and writing (2018, 2).2 Sense-filled meaning-making is purposefully invoked in this expression, to remind us that “making sense” is an activity of the whole body, not a mind-body split. Thus, high stakes executive functioning is fundamentally a full bodily exercise, as much a leadership is always an active of embodiment.3 It has been noted that within the North American context, this style of alternating capitalization is a convention used in online spaces or on social media to signal mockery, especially among younger generations, who are creative producers of culture. I use it here not in the same tradition or meaning, but more simply in the manner of language poets and writers such as Rodríguez, whose whimsy also evoke and provoke, perhaps not unlike the language tricks of young people.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMai-Anh Le TranMai-Anh Le Tran is Associate Professor of Religious Education and Practical Theology, and was Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, USA. E-mail: maianh.tran@garrett.edu