Educational Change and the Future of Leadership: Embracing Tensions, Complexity, and Collective Agency
A special issue of Education Sciences (ISSN 2227-7102).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 18 May 2026 | Viewed by 608
Special Issue Editors
Interests: leadership; paradoxes; innovative capacity HEIs; educational change
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The world is changing rapidly and education is one of the main institutions society is looking at to address the resulting challenges. It is often expected that education will implement systemic changes to constantly improve learning to prepare our students to be able to respond and drive future societal change. Sustainable educational change, however, has proven to be difficult and is often unsuccessful, especially in terms of sustainable or systemic change. Leadership undoubtedly plays a central role in fostering educational change. Yet, the dynamics of change are far from straightforward. Educational change is shaped by contradictory goals, diverse actors, entrenched structures, and conflicting norms and beliefs. These interwoven factors generate inevitable tensions that cannot simply be solved, but rather need to be navigated and worked with productively. At the same time, the very process of educational change is increasingly recognized as non-linear, cyclical, and emergent, requiring adaptability rather than fixed blueprints.
Within this landscape of complexity and tension, leadership can no longer be conceived solely as the task of individual leaders. Instead, teacher leadership, shared leadership, and collective sense-making come to the fore. What is at stake is not just the ability to manage change, but to cultivate capacities and practices that enable collaboration, resilience, and sustainable innovation.
This special issue therefore seeks to advance our understanding of how leadership—in its multiple and distributed forms—engages with the complexities of educational change. We aim to explore the tensions, practices, and capacities that allow educational actors to not only respond to, but also shape, meaningful and sustainable change, with a particular emphasis on the how.
Manuscripts with an emphasis on the following themes are invited:
- Paradoxical tensions and leadership
- Complexity/system thinking and leadership
- Non-linear change processes and leadership
- Sense-making and Collective Agency
- Leadership in Innovation Networks
Dr. Lydia Schaap
Prof. Dr. Kristin Vanlommel
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Education Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- educational change
- educational reform
- complexity thinking
- leadership
- paradoxical tensions
- system thinking
- collective agency
- innovation networks
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