Transforming Approaches to Reconciliation in Higher Education and Leadership through an Inclusive Practice of Indigenist Social-Ecological Resilience

Today universities and higher education institutions are increasingly grappling with the thorny reality of simultaneously standing for values such as “public good and social progress” whilst being progenitors of mind sets and conditions that significantly contribute to contemporary global crises. In response to these conditions in recent years transformative leadership and reconciliation in higher education have become more prominent. Using an Indigenous environmental justice and based on findings arising out of the application of community-university methodology to a series of intergenerational wisdom councils this paper this paper advances two key propositions for advancing transformative leadership and reconciliation in Higher Education. These are: • Transformative leadership in higher education is inclusive of the agency of all beings – those within roles within the organization such as administrators, educators, and students as well as the human and more than human communities that constitute the vibrant relations of place. Reconciliation at epistemological, relational, and material levels is not only integral to transformative leadership in higher education but also critical to tackling urgent and interconnected cultural-ecological global challenges; and • The implementation of transformative leadership through reconciliation requires “big thinking” that includes fundamental cultural shifts towards an ethics of care for all beings, strategies for affecting widespread impacts as well as fundamental changes to public policy and organizational practices. An Indigenist approach to social-ecological resilience and the Community-University Wisdom Council methodology articulated here are two methodologies which can assist higher education leaders and organizations to play a stronger role in addressing pressing global challenges.