Reframing Educational Leadership as Experiential Ecology: An Integrated Model for Artificial Intelligence, Embodiment, Well-Being, and Inclusion

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_26How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Educational Leadership; Embodied Cognition; Learning Ecologies

Abstract

Contemporary educational leadership is increasingly mobilized to address digital transformation, student and teacher well-being, and inclusive education. Yet, these domains are predominantly operationalized as parallel and additive agendas, resulting in fragmented interventions that fail to reconfigure learning environments at a systemic level. A critical gap emerges in leadership studies: the absence of integrative models capable of accounting for the co-constitutive nature of cognitive, technological, and socio-emotional processes in contemporary education.

Grounded in Embodied Cognition (Varela et al., 1991; Shapiro, 2019) and ecological approaches to learning, the paper proposes the Embodied Ecological Leadership Model (EELM). The model conceptualizes leadership as a design-oriented function that operates through the orchestration of four interdependent dimensions: embodied experience, artificial intelligence as adaptive mediation, systemic well-being, and ecological inclusion.

Within this model, artificial intelligence is reframed as a relational and adaptive infrastructure shaping learning processes (Holmes et al., 2022), while well-being is treated as a structural indicator of system sustainability rather than an ancillary outcome (OECD, 2021). Inclusion is conceptualized as an emergent property of responsive and accessible environments, in alignment with European policy priorities on equity and participation (European Commission, 2020, 2022).

By shifting leadership from managerial coordination to ecological design, the EELM offers a theoretically grounded and operationalizable model for reconfiguring educational systems. The paper contributes to international debates by advancing a systemic perspective that enables replicable analysis and intervention across micro, meso, and macro levels of educational practice.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Francesca Finestrone
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/31
TI  - Reframing Educational Leadership as Experiential Ecology: An Integrated Model for Artificial Intelligence, Embodiment, Well-Being, and Inclusion
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Management and Entrepreneurial Leadership for K-12 Education Excellence (LEADK12 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 419
EP  - 427
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_26
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-599-7_26
ID  - Finestrone2026
ER  -