Abstract

Educators are socialized into ‘commonsense’ ways of seeing the world that support rational, humanistic, anthropocentric thinking. The U.S. schooling system further reinforces these perspectives by defining education in quantitative terms, turning teachers, students, and learning processes into numerical data points. These perspectives tend to shape educational leaders’ understandings of leadership and research. As they enter professional doctorate, or three year Ed.D. programmes, many educational leaders bring with them entrenched views of objectivity and linearity, as well as a view of leadership as enacted by individual human actors. This chapter discusses ways to disrupt commonsense thinking reinforcing individualistic, representational, and human-centered worldviews by drawing on pedagogies informed by posthuman thinkers to reframe practice and educational research in more affirmative, connected, multiplistic terms that emphasise productive difference and relations with the more-than-human world. Both authors teach courses in three-year professional doctorate programmes in educational leadership, and provide examples of instruction that put to work these ideas in our classes. The chapter concludes with suggestions and connections for imagining how such pedagogical projects may be useful to other educators in higher education settings.