Do Academics' Views on Leadership Align with the Literature, and How Does This Impact Their Teaching of Widening Participation Students?

This article offers an interpretative reading of research interview data gathered with seven academics in a small English university that caters predominantly to widening participation students. The original interviews aimed to explore the most effective ways academics can support students in developing leadership capability. For this article, the author revisited the digital recordings of those original interviews and conducted an interpretive reanalysis of the data. This reanalysis aimed to ascertain the extent to which the conceptions of leadership that the academics hold align with the academic literature on the concept. Leadership is notoriously an ill-defined concept, and so, for this article, the author used Yukl’s (2012) taxonomy of leadership behaviours drawn from a systematic review of the literature as the basis for comparative analysis. The literature indicates that developing students’ leadership capability is a desirable educational outcome, but this presupposes that academics understand what the term leadership means. This article explores this by evaluating how well the academics' understanding of the concept of leadership aligned with the literature presented in Yukl’s (2012) taxonomy and considers the implications of this for their teaching. The article concludes with recommendations for adopting a coherent framework for academics to work within, especially for institutions that serve widening participation students. This article contributes to the knowledge of teaching practice by evaluating how well academics understand a concept they are (implicitly or explicitly) expected to teach and recommends further research to develop the scholarship.