Webinar description

If we are to move away from traditional, 'heroic' kinds of top-down leadership, innovative ways are needed to support all kinds of people in exploring how they can play an active part in leadership that is distributed and collaborative. Learning and awareness generated by arts-based and embodied activity have an invaluable role in meeting this need and recasting how leadership is understood and practised – by putting affective, aesthetic, ethical, creative and interpersonal awareness and reflexivity at the centre of collaborative distributed leadership practice. 

This experiential webinar offers insights into how arts-based and embodied activities can support development of awareness and capabilities important for collaborative distributed leadership. We share what research tells us about arts-based and embodied methods of leadership development and what has been learnt from the ENABLES (European Arts-Based Development of Distributed Leadership and Innovation in Schools) project. The project's aim is to strengthen collaborative distributed leadership of innovation in schools by developing and disseminating innovative methods of arts-based and embodied leadership development. To do this, action research trials have been carried out by teams in Austria, Finland, Latvia, Romania and the United Kingdom and online resources created to support anyone interested in using arts-based and embodied methods for collaborative distributed leadership development in schools and beyond. The project has explored the use of:

·      collage & embodied movement

·      drama & improvisation

·      narrative techniques

·      vignette reading & design thinking approaches

·      visual imagery.

The webinar mixes presentation, experiential activity and reflection. We explain what we mean by distributed leadership and how we have sought to theorise what occurs in arts-based and embodied methods – highlighting processes such as surfacing, reflexivity, reframing and collaborative learning. The changes that participants themselves feel result from these processes are presented. We invite attendees to the webinar to take part in a guided activity based on one of the arts-based (collage) and one of the embodied (gesture/posture response) activities explored in the project.

The webinar will be of interest to anyone who wants to find out more about how arts-based and embodied methods can nurture the kinds of affective, aesthetic, ethical, creative and interpersonal capabilities necessary for leadership that is distributed and collaborative.