From “They are Just Teachers” to Teacher Leaders: A Transformative Faculty Development Experience in Sudan Using Vignettes Pedagogy

Introduction

Across global education systems, teacher leadership has emerged as a cornerstone for sustainable school improvement and pedagogical innovation. Research consistently demonstrates that when teachers are empowered as leaders, they are more likely to foster collaborative cultures, influence instructional practices, and advocate for meaningful learning reforms within their schools (Wenner & Campbell, 2017; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). Rather than functioning solely as recipients of top-down mandates, teacher leaders shape curricular decisions, mentor peers, and drive instructional improvement in ways that are contextually grounded and professionally informed (Ghamrawi & Abu-Tineh, 2023; Ghamrawi et al., 2024; Shal et al., 2024). This distributed approach to leadership has proven critical in achieving whole-school transformation, particularly in environments grappling with complex systemic challenges (Harris & DeFlaminis, 2016).

In the context of educational reform, teacher leadership holds even greater potential. As systems around the world pursue equity-driven and future-oriented transformations, the involvement of teachers as agents of change becomes essential (Ghamrawi, 2016). Their lived classroom experience positions them to interpret reform goals meaningfully and mediate between policy expectations and student realities (Liu et al., 2025). However, many reform efforts continue to marginalize teacher voices, positioning them as passive implementers of predesigned solutions (Ghamrawi et al., 2025a). In highly centralized or postcolonial systems, in particular, teachers are often viewed as “instruments of compliance” rather than as intellectual actors capable of shaping reform (Moorosi, 2021; Tikly, 2019).This enduring compliance narrative narrows both the imagined and actual space for teacher leadership.

Within this landscape, a core tension persists: teacher leadership is framed as relational, distributed, and inquiry-driven, yet professional development and policy architectures in many contexts still position teachers as implementers rather than leaders (Meidelina et al., 2023). Existing research has examined how teachers enact leadership, but far fewer studies consider how those who prepare teachers—faculty in colleges of education—recast the role from “just a teacher” to potential leader, or how specific pedagogical interventions might trigger such shifts (Carver, 2016; Muijs et al., 2013; Jenkins & Owen, 2016; Robinson & McMillan, 2006). Sudan provides a critical yet under-examined case: its education system, shaped by centralized control, economic fragility, recurrent political crisis, and recent conflict, is marked by top-down regulation, uneven resourcing, and weak support for teacher education, reinforcing hierarchical cultures and constraining professional agency (Republic of Sudan, 2018; UNESCO, 2019; World Bank, 2012). Within this context, teacher education programs tend to produce loyal implementers of centrally prescribed curricula rather than critical professionals who interpret, adapt, and lead (Suarez & McGrath, 2022). Faculty in colleges of education thus act as gatekeepers of professional identity whose conceptions of what teachers are—and are not—shape how pre-service teachers understand leadership, responsibility, and agency, yet their own beliefs and capacity for transformation remain largely invisible in the literature (Li & Ruppar, 2021; Suarez & McGrath, 2022).

Drawing on Mezirow (1991, 1994) and Hoggan (2016), transformative learning in this setting involves epistemic shifts (how teacher leadership is understood), ontological shifts (how teachers and faculty see themselves in relation to power and change), and behavioral shifts (how they act to cultivate leadership in practice). In a constrained system such as Sudan’s, inviting faculty to reimagine teachers as leaders requires not only new knowledge but a reconfiguration of entrenched professional norms organized around obedience and hierarchy (Carducci et al., 2024). Identifying pedagogical approaches that can productively unsettle these norms, while remaining sensitive to context, is therefore central to advancing transformative education and teacher leadership.

This study addressed a critical gap in the literature by examining the power of vignettes as a transformative pedagogical tool in shifting conceptions of teacher leadership among education faculty. While much of the existing research focuses on teacher leadership as enacted by teachers themselves, far less is known about how faculty members—who play a pivotal role in shaping teacher identity—undergo transformational change in their own understandings of leadership. This study was conducted as part of a faculty training initiative mandated by a donor-funded reform program in Sudan, aimed at building local capacity for pre-service teacher development. Framed within the lens of transformative learning theory (Hogan, 2016), this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the pedagogical conditions and reflective tools that foster such identity shifts in faculty working within historically hierarchical and compliance-oriented systems. It was guided by the following research questions:

(1) How do faculty members’ conceptualizations of teacher leadership evolve following their participation in a leadership development module delivered through different pedagogical modalities?

Drawing on Hoggan’s (2016) multidimensional framing of transformation, the study thus examines shifts in how faculty define teacher leadership, how they imagine teachers’ professional agency within Sudan’s centralized system, and how they understand their own responsibility in cultivating pre-service teachers as leaders.

Literature Review

Theoretical Framework

This study is grounded at the intersection of teacher leadership, transformative learning theory, and vignette pedagogy, focusing on how teacher educators reconstruct their conceptualizations of pre-service teachers as potential leaders. Teacher leadership scholarship highlights teachers’ capacity as instructional innovators, peer mentors, and contributors to school decision-making when afforded agency (Wenner & Campbell, 2017; York-Barr & Duke, 2004), yet in centralized, compliance-driven systems faculty may inadvertently reproduce narratives of teachers as implementers rather than intellectual agents (Moorosi, 2021; Tikly, 2019). Accordingly, the study examines shifts in how faculty perceive, represent, and cultivate leadership potential in pre-service teachers (Robinson & McMillan, 2006; Palmer, 2017), treating faculty conceptions as a critical locus of change.

Transformative learning theory (TLT) provides the overarching interpretive lens. Mezirow (1991, 1994) conceptualizes transformation as the reconstitution of meaning perspectives through critical reflection, while Hoggan (2016) reframes TLT as a metatheory, distinguishing epistemic (how a phenomenon is understood), ontological (sense of self and being), and behavioral (action) outcomes. Illeris (2014) further emphasizes that transformative learning is inseparable from identity, implying that shifts in faculty conceptions of teacher leadership are entangled with values and imagined relations of authority and agency.

Within this framework, vignette pedagogy is treated as a potential catalyst rather than a guaranteed trigger of transformation. Vignettes—context-rich narrative depictions of professional dilemmas—aim to surface assumptions, evoke emotional and ethical engagement, and stimulate dialogic reflection (Myers & Alvermann, 2013; Skilling & Stylianides, 2020; Crafter et al., 2015; Carlson et al., 2019), potentially generating experiences of dissonance without presuming uniform “disorienting dilemmas.” Analytically, pre- and post-intervention interviews are read through Hoggan’s (2016) three domains, informed by Illeris's (2014) focus on identity: epistemic shifts in how faculty define and value teacher leadership; ontological shifts in how they position teachers in relation to power and change; and behavioral-intentional shifts in how they understand their own role in modeling and cultivating leadership. The comparative design—vignette-based versus traditional presentation-based instruction—then allows examination of whether vignette pedagogy is associated with more robust transformative outcomes in faculty conceptions.

Method

Leadership Development Module

Both groups completed a 42-h leadership development module within a donor-funded capacity-building program for Sudanese higher education faculty. The module addressed contemporary educational leadership, with emphasis on teacher leadership, distributed leadership, and teachers as agents of change. Content, readings, and intended learning outcomes were identical; only the pedagogy differed (session structure in Appendix B).

Group A experienced vignette pedagogy: contextually grounded vignettes on classroom, school, and policy dilemmas in Sudanese schooling were used to prompt small-group discussion, written reflection, and whole-group dialogue, inviting participants to surface assumptions about teachers’ roles and consider leaderly alternatives (illustrative vignettes in Appendix A). Group B engaged with the same themes through facilitator-led presentations, guided discussions, and Q&A without narrative vignettes. In both groups, the facilitator introduced teacher leadership concepts, shared research and practice examples, and prompted links to pre-service teacher preparation, enabling comparison of how the two modalities shaped faculty conceptualizations.

Participants

Two groups of educational sciences faculty members (N = 26) participating in a donor-funded capacity-building program in Sudan were initially recruited for this study. The program aimed to strengthen higher education teaching capacity and included a leadership development module focused on contemporary conceptions of educational leadership and teacher leadership. Group A was assigned to the vignette-based modality and Group B to the traditional presentation-and-discussion modality. One of the researchers facilitated the module; to minimize bias, data collection was conducted by two other team members. Institutional approval and informed consent were obtained prior to participation.

All participants were faculty members in Sudanese higher education institutions involved in pre-service teacher education (colleges of education and education faculties within universities). Their responsibilities included teaching disciplinary and pedagogical courses, supervising practicum, and contributing to curriculum and assessment decisions—positions that locate them as key actors in shaping prospective teachers’ understandings of professionalism and leadership.

Due to conflict-related and logistical constraints, not all initially consenting participants completed both interview rounds. Nine participants from Group A and eight from Group B completed pre- and post-interviews and form the analytic sample (N = 17). Table 1 summarizes the characteristics of this final sample.

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Table 1.

Characteristics of the Sample

Characteristic	Group A: Vignette pedagogy (n = 9)	Group B: Traditional instruction (n = 8)	Total (N = 17)
Gender – Men	5	5	10
Gender – Women	4	3	7
Age range (years)	35–55	35–56	35–56
Years of experience	5–23	5–23	5–23

Findings

Guided by Hoggan’s (2016) framework, in Table 2, the findings are organized comparatively across three interrelated domains of transformation: (1) epistemic shifts in how faculty conceptualized teacher leadership and teachers’ roles; (2) ontological shifts in how they positioned teachers—and themselves—in relation to agency and authority; and (3) behavioral-intentional shifts in how they envisioned their role in cultivating teacher leadership among pre-service teachers. Within each domain, we contrast trajectories in Group A (vignette pedagogy) and Group B (traditional instruction). Detailed thematic frequencies are available in the supplementary tables (Appendix D); here we focus on the most salient patterns. Table 2 provides a synthesized overview of the major shifts across both groups.

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Table 2.

Summary of Conceptual Shifts by Group and Transformative Domain

Domain	Group A: Vignette pedagogy	Group B: Traditional instruction
Epistemic (knowledge)	Clear movement from “just implementers” to relational, distributed, change-oriented conceptions of teacher leadership; stronger articulation of teachers’ roles in governance and policy mediation	Partial broadening of views (e.g., teachers as ethical/classroom leaders), but leadership largely confined to classroom management and moral example; limited recognition of systemic influence
Ontological (being/identity)	Teachers increasingly described as agents of change and potential leaders; faculty language shifts from deficit/compliance framings to seeing “great potential” in teacher leadership	Teachers affirmed as role models and moral leaders, but seldom constructed as systemic or political actors; compliance narratives largely intact
Behavioral-intentional (action)	Faculty report concrete intentions to embed leadership discourse, vignette-based reflection, and leadership-oriented tasks into coursework	Some intention to “encourage initiative” and “support efficacy,” but changes remain modest and focused on classroom practice

Discussion

This study examined how faculty members in Sudanese pre-service teacher education programs conceptualized teacher leadership and how these conceptions evolved following participation in a leadership development module delivered via either vignette pedagogy or traditional instruction. Situated within the framework of transformative learning (Hoggan, 2016; Mezirow, 1991), the study aimed to explore the potential of pedagogical intervention to reframe deeply held assumptions about teaching, leadership, and teacher identity in a centralized, compliance-driven education system. Interpreting the findings through Hoggan’s (2016) epistemic, ontological, and behavioral dimensions allowed us to move beyond surface-level attitude change and identify patterned shifts in how faculty understood teachers’ roles, who they believed teachers could be, and how they intended to act differently as teacher educators.

Two major contributions emerge from this work. First, the study offers rare empirical insight into faculty understandings of teacher leadership in Sudan—a national context largely absent from existing teacher leadership literature, which is predominantly shaped by research from Western and high-income education systems. Participants’ pre-intervention narratives revealed dominant constructions of teachers as moral custodians, classroom managers, and passive executors of top-down policies—conceptions that align with what Ejjebli (2023) has termed “role-bound professionalism” in Arab-majority education systems. Teachers were described as peripheral to school governance and policy reform, echoing broader regional critiques of centralized educational structures that marginalize practitioner agency (Ghamrawi, 2016, 2023; Ghamrawi et al., 2025a; Moorosi, 2021). By documenting how these narratives are both reproduced and disrupted among Sudanese faculty themselves, the study foregrounds teacher educators—not only teachers—as critical subjects of transformative learning in fragile and postcolonial systems.

Second, the study provides evidence for the transformative potential of vignette pedagogy in professional learning. In contrast to the group taught through traditional methods, participants who engaged with vignettes exhibited multidimensional shifts in their conceptualizations of both teacher leadership and their role as teacher educators. These shifts included epistemic reframing of leadership as relational and distributed, ontological reimagining of teachers as agents of change, and practical reconsideration of how to foster leadership among pre-service teachers. These changes closely mirror Hoggan’s (2016) typology of transformative outcomes, which includes expanded self-understanding, greater awareness of one’s professional roles, and increased capacity for critical reflection. Notably, the comparative design indicates that exposure to leadership concepts alone (as in the traditional group) yielded only modest broadening, whereas vignette-based engagement was more consistently associated with integrated shifts across the three domains—suggesting that how professional learning is mediated matters for transformation.

The vignette-based group’s reflections exemplified what Mezirow (1994) called “disorienting dilemmas”—experiences that catalyze critical reflection and potential identity transformation. Participants frequently described the scenarios as emotionally engaging, contextually rich, and disruptive of habitual thinking—characteristics aligned with what Myers and Alvermann (2013) term “problematizing texts.” These conditions enabled faculty to move beyond abstract notions of leadership toward more situated, practice-based understandings. Carlson et al. (2019) similarly found that vignettes can effectively surface the interpretive complexity of teaching, prompting dialogic exploration of value-laden decisions. However, consistent with critiques of overly linear interpretations of transformative learning, our findings also support a more nuanced view: not every vignette functioned as a disorienting dilemma for every participant, and transformative shifts appeared uneven and contingent. Vignette pedagogy is better understood here as a plausible catalyst and structured opportunity space for disorientation and re-meaning-making, rather than as a deterministic trigger of transformation.

By contrast, participants in the traditionally taught group showed more limited shifts. While there was some discursive movement toward broader notions of teacher agency, these remained largely constrained within managerial or moralistic framings of the teacher’s role. This difference underscores the importance of pedagogical modality in shaping conceptual outcomes, reinforcing the argument by Jenkins and Owen (2016) that professional learning tools must explicitly challenge deficit-based or hierarchical views of teacher leadership to yield substantive change. Our findings thus contribute to ongoing debates in transformative learning by illustrating how carefully designed, contextually grounded narrative pedagogy can support deeper shifts in constrained environments, without assuming dramatic biographical rupture as a necessary condition.

The findings also lend empirical weight to calls for embedding teacher leadership more centrally in teacher education curricula across the Arab region. As Ghamrawi (2013b) and Tikly (2019) have argued, preparing teachers to act as knowledge producers, policy mediators, and professional innovators requires a deliberate departure from traditional transmission models of teacher preparation. This study suggests that such a departure begins with transforming the mental models of those who train future teachers. Unless faculty members themselves adopt more expansive visions of leadership, efforts to democratize school leadership and empower teachers are likely to falter. In the Sudanese case, even incremental shifts—from viewing teachers as “just implementers” to recognizing their leadership potential within and beyond the classroom—signal an important reorientation of the professional imaginary in a system marked by hierarchy and political volatility.

Finally, this study affirms the viability of vignette pedagogy as a tool for faculty development, particularly in under-resourced and politically fragile contexts like Sudan. Vignettes can be deployed at low cost, adapted to reflect localized dilemmas, and scaled across institutions. They offer a culturally sensitive and emotionally resonant means of engaging faculty in critical reflection, and as this study demonstrates, they can support the kinds of perspective transformation necessary for meaningful educational reform. At the same time, the unevenness of reported change underscores important limitations: vignette-based work does not guarantee transformation, may resonate more with some participants than others, and is itself mediated by institutional cultures, power relations, and time constraints. Recognizing this complexity is crucial for avoiding instrumentalized claims about “transformative” methods and for designing supports—such as follow-up communities of practice, curriculum revision, and leadership recognition structures—that can help translate emerging insights into sustained practice.

Taken together, the study’s contributions are threefold: (a) empirically, it illuminates how Sudanese teacher educators negotiate and, in some cases, reconstruct conceptions of teacher leadership within a highly centralized system; (b) theoretically, it extends transformative learning scholarship by operationalizing Hoggan’s multidimensional framework in the analysis of faculty belief change and by offering a cautious, context-attentive account of disorienting experiences; and (c) pedagogically and policy-wise, it demonstrates that structured, narrative-rich professional development can open spaces for teacher leadership imaginaries in constrained systems, offering actionable insights for faculties, donors, and ministries seeking to foster leadership without ignoring the political and institutional conditions in which teachers work.

Implications

This study calls for rethinking professional development in postcolonial, compliance-driven systems: rather than importing abstract teacher leadership models, faculty development must engage the cognitive, emotional, and cultural dimensions of belief change. Transformative learning emerges less from more content and more from pedagogies that unsettle assumptions and invite ethical, dialogic reflection, prompting faculty to reimagine what teaching itself entails.

Vignette pedagogy, in this context, operates not as illustration but as disruption—surfacing hidden professional scripts, interrogating identity, and re-centering the moral purposes of education. In systems constrained by hierarchy, faculty transformation is therefore foundational to reform, and institutions need to embed pedagogies that make identity, agency, and context explicit in preparing those who shape future teachers.

Limitations and Future Research

Despite its contributions, this study has limitations. First, the sample size was relatively small and limited to a single national context undergoing acute political and institutional disruption. The findings may not be generalizable to other systems, particularly those with different governance structures or cultural understandings of leadership. The analytic insights are therefore best understood as contextually situated and transferable by analogy rather than statistically generalizable.

Second, the data relied exclusively on self-reported perceptions, which may be subject to social desirability bias or influenced by the donor-driven nature of the intervention. Participants’ accounts may overstate intended changes or understate tensions, and the study did not include complementary data sources such as classroom observations, curriculum documents, or student perspectives that could corroborate or nuance reported shifts. Future research should include longitudinal follow-up to assess whether the conceptual shifts identified here lead to sustained changes in instructional practices or pre-service teacher outcomes. Mixed-methods designs that combine interviews with observation of faculty teaching, analysis of course materials, and, where feasible, follow-up with pre-service teachers would provide a more robust picture of enacted change.

Third, the leadership development module was of limited duration, and no systematic tracking of participants’ practices beyond the immediate post-intervention interviews was undertaken. As such, the study cannot claim enduring transformation of identities or behaviors; it documents evidence of emergent shifts in meaning-making and intention at a particular moment in time.

Fourth, in line with contemporary critiques of Transformative Learning Theory, the study does not assume that vignette pedagogy produced uniform or definitive “disorienting dilemmas” for all participants. Vignettes were conceptualized and experienced as structured invitations to critical questioning rather than deterministic triggers of transformation, and any inferred moments of disorientation are interpreted cautiously from participants’ narratives. Future studies might more explicitly investigate how individuals experience, resist, or reinterpret such pedagogical prompts, and under what conditions they contribute to deeper perspective change.

Moreover, further exploration is also needed into how vignettes might support reflexivity and critical consciousness around power, equity, and cultural politics in leadership, particularly in postcolonial education systems. Subsequent research could examine how structural conditions—such as institutional autonomy, leadership cultures, and policy environments—mediate the extent to which transformed conceptions of teacher leadership can be translated into practice.

Finally, phenomenographic approaches (Marton, 1981) might also offer a promising avenue for future inquiry. Phenomenography could be used to map the qualitatively different ways faculty conceptualize teacher leadership and their own roles in cultivating it, and to construct hierarchical “outcome spaces” that capture shifts from narrow, compliance-oriented understandings toward more expansive, agentic conceptions. Such work could be extended to include both teacher educators and pre-service teachers, providing a more fine-grained account of how leadership imaginaries are constructed and reconstructed across the teacher education continuum.

Conclusion

This study demonstrates that shifting Sudanese faculty perceptions from seeing teachers as “just implementers” to recognizing them as leaders is both possible and powerfully enabled by pedagogical design. Across both groups, the leadership module disrupted purely compliance-based images of teachers, but it was vignette pedagogy that most clearly fostered deeper epistemic, ontological, and behavioral shifts: faculty exposed to context-rich dilemmas began to describe teachers as relational change agents, to locate leadership within everyday practice rather than formal titles, and to assume greater responsibility for cultivating leadership identities in their pre-service students. These changes, while uneven and emergent rather than universal or permanent, show that professional learning in postcolonial, centralized systems cannot remain content-driven or technocratic; it must deliberately unsettle ingrained scripts about authority, agency, and what it means to teach. Vignettes functioned here not as illustrative add-ons but as structured invitations to critical reflection, empathy, and moral questioning that opened up new leadership imaginaries in a fragile, hierarchy-bound context. In reorienting faculty from “they are just teachers” to “teachers hold unrealized leadership potential,” this study positions faculty transformation as a precondition—not a by-product—of meaningful teacher leadership reform and underscores the value of narrative, contextually grounded pedagogies in rebuilding teacher education around agency, professionalism, and change.

Supplemental Material