Supriyono, Sumintono, B., & Hakim, L. N. (2025). Critical Islamic educational leadership: investigating how Islamic pedagogic models shape leadership practices. British Journal of Religious Education, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01416200.2025.2542225

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing scholarly interest in Islamic educational leadership across diverse global contexts, studies in this area are noted to lack a critical approach. Guided by a critical transformative paradigm, this study seeks to address the gap by exploring the potential of adopting certain Islamic pedagogic models in shaping leadership practices. This qualitative case study delves into two Islamic boarding schools with different education models in East Java, Indonesia. This research utilises documents, focus group discussions, interviews, and observations for data collection, subjecting the data to thematic analysis. The findings demonstrate that adopting different pedagogical models indicatively yields distinct leadership practices. The school with a moral disciplining model (ta’dib) generates strong patriarchal tendency, fostering an authoritative leadership style with an exclusive school culture and autocratic decision-making. Conversely, the school with a critical pedagogic model (tarbiyah) creates a balanced power dynamic, facilitated by critical thinking and critical dialogue between leader and followers, further supporting the transformative leadership practices with an inclusive school culture and deliberative decision-making. The findings indicate a reciprocal connection between education model and leadership, signifying the need to reform the school’s education system – by employing a critical pedagogic model – to enhance the critical transformative leadership practices.