Enacting distributed leadership for educational transformation: a seven-year study of academic development in higher education

Distributed leadership provides a robust framework for navigating the complexity of educational change in higher education. This paper presents a reflective, practice-based analytic case examining how distributed leadership was enacted and sustained over seven years within the School of Information Technology at an Australian university. Drawing on retrospective narrative reflections from the Associate Head of School (Teaching and Learning) and the Academic Developer, the study explores how leadership was shared and negotiated across formal and informal roles to support assessment and learning design innovation. Through thematic analysis of these reflective accounts, we identify the interdependent leadership practices, such as co-design, peer championing, and adaptive governance, that were interpreted as supporting the sustainability of change. The findings extend distributed leadership theory by interpreting how strategic, relational, and adaptive practices operate over time, illuminating mechanisms through which innovation was pursued within a complex institutional system. This study thus offers an analytical account of distributed leadership as an evolving, longitudinal process that bridges conceptual frameworks and reflective accounts of enactment in university settings.