The prefigurative politics of leadership education: Connecting our practice to broader movements

Abstract

Why develop leaders? What politics are implicit in our practice? This paper uses the history and practice of Popular Education as a comparative framework to survey the politics of intentional emergence leadership pedagogy, surfacing potential alliances for building social change movements. Using a case analysis, the article elucidates the ways the classroom embodies an opportunity to explore and enact a prefigurative politics of significant social change that upends traditional relationships to authority, hierarchy, and decision‐making. Exploring the opportunities and dangers of connecting the classroom to broader social movements, the article concludes by advocating that such connections could offer a firmer and more explicit stance to the question: why develop leaders?