The Emergence of Formalized Educational Leadership in Higher Education

In Canada, educational leadership is a term often used to describe specific types of academic and scholarly work in universities, colleges, CEGEPs, other post-secondary institutions (and in K-12 contexts, where the term’s usage is entirely distinct). Our interest is in how educational leadership is framed in the specific context of Canadian universities. While most universities recognize exemplary teachers through promotional criteria and often through awards, the academic literature provides little guidance on what exactly constitutes educational leadership in university settings. To trace the emergence of educational leadership as a formalized construct, we gathered data from Collective Agreements and other public-facing resources such as awards criteria from 48 Canadian universities to examine ways in which educational leadership was defined and/or enacted. Our national review identified several categories of activities commonly cited as examples of educational leadership, including significant forms of curricular development, formal leadership initiatives, the dissemination of public forms of teaching-related research or teaching-based resources, engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and the carrying out of various forms of mentorship. Our review also found that educational leadership is constituted not only by these types of activities, but also by the capacity to demonstrate impact of these activities beyond the classroom. In addition to examples of ways to illustrate impact, we offer a working definition of educational leadership that reflects how it is emerging within the specific context of contemporary Canadian universities.