He is also the assistant director for Associated Students Administration at UC San Diego where he serves as a higher education leader overseeing a portfolio of student-initiated programs. Evident through his professional affiliations, he is a scholar practitioner who is excited about scholarship and uses research-informed practices in his coaching, teaching, and administrative work. His research focuses on group dynamics, group relations, and leadership development.

This article is an exploration into the purpose of leadership education and leadership learning in higher education. It will simultaneously explore who leadership education is for and investigate privilege, identities, class, and the intersecting impact on access to these programs and content.

This article examines how dialogue and a liberatory pedagogical approach can work in concert with one another to expand the opportunity for transformative leadership practice. Personal accounts are shared of how the events of the pandemic and beyond continue to shape our perspectives as leadership educators.

From the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to the attack on Asian Americans in Georgia to the police shooting of Daunte Wright, the instances of traumatic events recently are too long to list, but the almost daily trauma is impacting our classrooms through the lived experiences of those who are a part of this living, dynamic system. Within this article we explore how we, as educators, have more responsibility than ever to acknowledge this trauma and work to support students bringing their whole selves to our classrooms.

This article dives into the complexity of managing our "self" and our "roles," and how we can acknowledge the vast multitudes contained in each of our identities in our work as leadership educators. We wanted to incorporate a more conversational format to this article by highlighting the different ways ideas can be expressed and the gifts of the co-inquiry discussion model for gleaning deeper insights into a topic. HOW EDUCATORS SEPARATE THEMSELVES FROM THEIR ROLEHistorically, teaching implied a focus on the mind, without consideration of the body; a somehow "objective" knowledge that could be taught to students as receivers of this knowledge (Freire et al., 2018; hooks, 1994). However, hooks (1994) wrote about how her teaching could not be separated from her body, and how all of her lessons came through her body and identity and to the students, who received them through filters of their own identities. Framing teaching as separating the body and mind treated the body as this neutral, assumed default-a white male default of rationalism and objectivity in knowing. However, as we have come to realize, our identities are an inextricably connected part of how we experience our content and are important to acknowledge in our work with students, each other, and in the field. So, it is critical to recognize the role of having our full selves in the work as educators, as much as students have been encouraged to bring their whole selves to the classroom. Relationships as a basis for holistic knowledge-buildingAs Chung et al. wrote about in article 2 of this issue, our co-inquiry group met each week to discuss ripe issues on our hearts and minds, the evolution of our relationships and shared commitment to making a meaningful contribution to the field has been a gift to each of us. Notably, these relationships allowed us to share more of how we were feeling as people and educators in a period of intense uncertainty, tumult, reckoning, and complexity.