Contracts—even social ones—imply more or less fixed rules and regulations, stability, highly specialized language, and bureaucratic mechanisms officializing their status, binding the actors involved. A “new social contract for education”, however, requires a more targeted focus and the adoption of a humanistic perspective on education governance in order to serve a future education sector that honors diversity, complexity, fluidity, and authenticity. Policies, mechanisms, and frameworks embedded, especially in the recent half-century, in neoliberal, market-oriented principles and philosophies have been unsuitable to adequately capture rapid societal changes, technological advances, and serious ecological challenges, and, perhaps more importantly, to equitably reflect (post)humanity’s wide diversity of ways of knowing, living, being, and becoming. Such multiplicitous knowing(s) would instead be better served by alternative governance thinking based on rhizomatic, horizontal, and dynamic leadership assemblages starting from school leaders who are prepared and willing to become-with (Haraway, 1991).

Educational leadership should consider how knowledge and learning can initiate and shape educational processes toward a more equitable and sustainable future for everyone. We find particular salience in the notion of educational leaders, notably those with positional, personal, expert, and/or coercive power within educational organizations, becoming—or, more broadly and inclusively expressed, educational leadership becoming—to locate, or imagine, educational leaders as catalysts for changing the social contract(s) within their school organization(s) or system(s) in collaboration with the greater community (Magno & Becker, 2022). In this contribution we ask how educational leaders, especially those based in schools, might open spaces of response-ability and intra-action (Barad, 2007, 2010) in their immediate contexts and potentially beyond, in ways that they are not currently prepared for nor necessarily expected to do by their constituents but that are essential for a new—less materialist, more neomaterialist—social contract. Terminology in the field of educational leadership and governance is replete with mangled and troublesome connotations and discrete referents regarding who is/might be, or not, an “educational leader”.

We focus in this piece on those with primary responsibility (and response-ability; Barad, 2010) for educational outcomes in, especially, formal schools. While wishing to crumble or at least problematize particular labels, we lean on them as recognizable role-bearing indicators. For the purposes of this piece, school leaders are meant to include those called “directors”, “head teachers”, and “principals”, as well as “assistant directors”, “vice principals”, and so on, varyingly described based on historical use of terms and positions in particular geographical or political contexts. We prefer the term “leader” because of its more visionary, less management-oriented, and less position-determined orientation. We also therefore include individuals and groups who “lead” in a school without necessarily having a particular leadership title, such as teachers, parents, school board members, program coordinators, etc. In addition to human actors, we see new social contracts as assemblages of non-human technological and nature-based elements entangled and co-constituting among individuals and actors in educational settings.

Reframing educational leadership as becoming requires moving away from hierarchical, unidirectional (top-down) governance strategies and unmutable institutional positions and instead engaging in shared visions, cooperation, and trust among all actors involved in shaping the future of education. This requires the deconstruction of existing institutional, ideological, and professional hierarchical structures often based on undemocratic, power-laden governing norms. In line with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) assemblage theory, the future of education can be viewed as a complex, rhizomatic system influencing and influenced by a myriad of diverse variables including human and nonhuman entities embedded in a heterogeneous, dynamic time-space. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 7) put it, “a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles”. Within this complex, rapidly changing, and self-generating system, modes, models, and mechanisms of governance become re-territorialized, constantly forming new assemblages consisting of new structures, actors, and context-dependent educational landscapes. The inherent dynamic, heterogeneity, and reorganization make a static understanding of governance not only superfluous; they make it impossible. Letting go of (perceived) power and stability and breaking down structures is needed, however, to generate new forms of participative leadership characterized by cooperation, solidarity, trust, and justice.

Rather than simply asking the question of what educational governance should look like in the future, it is indispensable to also inquire who these individuals—educational leaders—are. We consider this to be at the core of the challenge since the educational leadership and management literature has been overly concerned with developing appropriate leadership strategies and their impact on the education system and the information and knowledge commons to the neglect of leaders’ own positionalities, identities, emotions, and needs and—further—consideration of those positionalities in social relations. (It might be important to clarify that we are not referring to “traits”, and we do not want to conflate this approach with trait theories of leadership, but rather the recognition of subjectivity, reflexivity, and positionality any leader would possess and work with/within in concert with others.)

Typically, in the West and increasingly in other parts of the world (Bush, 2007; Dimmock, 2020; Magno, 2013), formal school leader preparation includes introduction to twentieth century, business-oriented organizational theory along with exposure to current trends in learning theory, curriculum design, finance, and law. As noted in international literature, educational leadership theory and empiricism has been dominated by Anglophone and Northern/Western settings, scholars, and paradigms (Oplatka & Arar, 2015). Although attempts have been made to expose and highlight non-Western knowledges and approaches (Hamid & Paredes-Canilao, 2014; Magno et al., 2022; Wei, 2017), the challenges to decolonial thinking in this area are many, with lower-income countries facing considerable pressure to borrow policy and adopt Western content and techniques, and little acknowledgment by Northern/Western scholars of Indigenous knowledge and practice (Hallinger & Bryant, 2013; Moorosi, 2021). Further, the school leadership literature, with few exceptions, presupposes contexts of stability, continuity, and predictability. Leadership models have leaned heavily on managerial outlooks with matching skill sets; indeed, “educational administration and leadership is essentially an obedient discipline” (Samier, 2013, p. 237).

Even transformative, instructional, distributed, and critical leadership has taken for granted or simply ignored the very human needs and positionalities underlying the leadership paradigm. (See, for further elaboration, the 2013 Special Issue of the International Journal of Leadership in Education for several articles focused on critical leadership and advocating for postcritical leadership, as well as the 2017 volume Educational Leadership as a Culturally-Constructed Process, edited by Wilkinson & Bristol, 2017, with chapters recasting essentializing discourses of diversity toward leadership hybridity and questioning leadership as a singular construct).

Explained by Blackmore (2013), the evolution of leadership theory has yet to move beyond distributed or transformational forms which critique managerialism. We need leadership informed by critical feminists, for example, to actively work toward social justice principles through recognition, redistribution, and representation (Fraser, 1997). We need leadership understood as a relational, iterative process. We need an “urgent change in thinking” toward intersubjectivity, interdependence, global-mindedness, and communicative action (Gardner-McTaggart, 2020). All of these approaches echo the main dimensions of educational leadership—setting expectations, focusing on learning, fostering collaboration, and developing people (UNESCO, 2023)—and they all can interrogate the role of various forms and roles of leadership within a school or educational institution.

An overlooked aspect of educational leadership is that it is never static. Whether faced with rapidly shifting linguistic and demographic heterogeneity owing to migration, or society-wide disruptions such as the sudden Covid-19 pandemic, leaders must know themselves, know their communities, and be more aware than ever of how educational space is constructed through myriad, fluctuating, and temperamental relations among people and artifacts in their midst. The prospective school leader’s own subjectivity rarely plays a role in traditional leadership preparation; indeed the educational leadership “student” as sentient, feeling, and worldview-holding is seldom or minimally considered. Introspection, therefore, through self-analysis and processing of self-in-context, is necessary to equip leaders to thrive in increasingly complex educational spaces. Such introspection, in turn, must be supported through new support for leaders in situ, with leadership partnering, mentoring, risk-taking, creative exploration, and other approaches, which also require the (partial) dismantling of existing structural and cultural barriers and must acknowledge the school leader’s place in collaboration/entanglement with others. We acknowledge a certain paradox in our proposition: namely, that we urge introspection and a certain questioning of school leaders’ “selves” while also suggesting that any actor is not a priori individually/distinctly constituted. We see “possible possibilities” (Nakata, 2007) here, to both support leaders’ recognition of their own humanity and their inherent entangled (posthuman) emergence. We echo Kuokkanen’s (2007) and Higgins’s (2014) insistence on working simultaneously within and against current structures and processes in order to engage in decolonial response-ability. Put another way, agency is not foreclosed, but rather framed by possibilities; as stated by Nakata (2007), “People’s lived experience…is the point of entry for investigation, not the case under investigation. It is to find a way to explore the actualities of the everyday and discover how to express them conceptually from within that experience, rather than depend on or deploy predetermined concepts and categories for explaining experience” (p. 10). We therefore suggest that school leaders start from who and where they are but do not end there.

To ensure effective social contracts, trusting and co-constitutive relationships must exist—or be built—among all stakeholders. School leaders can build the kind of relationships required for trust only by also knowing (and continually learning about/[re]inventing) themselves in-relation—not only their identities (fixed, fluid, or other) but also their biases and predilections in relation to others. Such others would consist primarily of actors in the school community (e.g., teachers, students, parents, school board/committee members, supervisors) but would extend to the wider community in which they interact directly or indirectly, including government ministries, corporations, aid agencies, the digital environment, the natural environment, policies and documents, and countless other context-specific elements. As succinctly put by Gramsci (1971, p. 324), “the starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of...‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory”. One approach to strengthening school leaders’ capacity is the use of critical—or even postcritical—leadership theory, through which existing notions of self and structures are exposed, examined, then moved past, toward more authentic (re)construction. Postcritical leadership allows for self and context to be analyzed, but rather than stopping at critical theory’s “againstness” it continues toward hope and positivity—crucial for future-thinking and future-acting.

Consequently, a theorization of a new social contract for education could function similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) “pedagogy of the concept”; that is, self-generating and adaptive to situated stories or “situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1991) in a heterogeneous, dynamic time-space. Combining postcritical examination of self and structures of the present with a future-oriented attitude can help project and design worlds with new practices, theories, methodologies, and systems while embracing unknown potentialities, complexities, and (re-)conceptualizations of leadership. Education in general—and schooling more specifically—can only evolve if those leading the design and/or implementation of social contracts for the future are open to vulnerability, power-sharing, and innovative imagining. In closing, we argue that a new social contract for education and thus new governance arrangements should center on all actors’ hybridized self-awareness/connectivity and on engaging—especially—educational leaders in this fabulation quest.