Following the glows: Noticing what's missing in the mapping of a leadership philosophy

An undercurrent of my PhD research has been an interest in affective, emotional, imaginal, creative, spiritual and sensory dimensions of learning that are powerful, agentic and often mysterious forces shaping our pedagogical practices. As educators, whose work intrinsically involves leadership, our response-abilities to kin in these times must include commitments to becoming more ethical in our pedagogical practices. I have been exploring what is involved in enacting ethical and regenerative leadership in my PhD research, which responds to a recognised need to transform approaches to education for sustainability. In this chapter I experiment with Maggie MacLure’s work on wonder, including following the glows, to enact a different reading of interviews performed in an early wave of selfstudy. With this approach I explore what I might be missing in mapping a leadership philosophy for planetary wellbeing, and in my articulation of principles to attend to in enacting more ethical and regenerative pedagogical practices. This different reading involves reflecting on embodied, affective intensities that surfaced when I returned to interviews, and reading them diffractively through ‘constitutive denials of modernity’. Allowing glows to lead the way, I learn with ghosts and hauntings that capture my attention in relation to reimagining my approach to leadership. I began by noticing that patterns emerging in multiple waves of self-study inquiry were also present in the stories my peers shared with me about what has shaped their climate change activism, community environmental education and sustainability leadership pedagogies.