Troubling leadership in the interdisciplinary challenge-based classroom

Leadership is an elusive and widely debated concept across disciplinary boundaries and is often contested in scholarship of learning and teaching. This article troubles models and conceptualisations of leadership in Students as Change Agents (SACHA), an interdisciplinary challenge-based course offered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. “Troubling” is understood as the unearthing or undermining of existing hegemonic assumptions about a concept. Through an analysis of survey data and qualitative interviews with students and staff on the course, along with group dynamic analysis, we explore a case of an interdisciplinary, challenge-based classroom as a space for, and of, contestation of leadership. In this paper we trouble leadership by (1) highlighting how the role of the coach and the interdisciplinary, challenge-based course design destabilize familiar patterns of teamwork and leadership and (2) emphasizing how notions of leadership are rooted in subtle disciplinary commitments. This analysis leads us to characterize “interdisciplinary leadership” as a temporal sensibility where interdisciplinary teamwork requires a high degree of flexibility and responsiveness. This research contributes to the practical facilitation of teamwork in these contexts where leadership can be better learnt and taught if understood as a temporal sensibility that can be taken up, put down, passed around, and shared by any and all members.