ABSTRACT
The higher education sector faces the challenge of ongoing educational and cultural change. At the same time, the academic workforce, too, has changed with an increased reliance on a sessional (adjunct, casual, part-time) teaching workforce. With sessional staff responsible for the majority of teaching in many countries, it is time for the sector to be proactive in acknowledging, supporting, and developing them as educational leaders.
A distributed, or shared, leadership approach offers an effective way for engaging both traditional and non-traditional leaders (such as sessional staff) in bringing about change.
This chapter aims to present a new model of academic leadership based on a hybrid of distributed leadership with sessional staff standards. The empirically and evidence-based model illustrates how the workforce of sessional staff can be engaged as leaders of educational change.
