Reimagining Innovation Through Relational Leadership: A Collaborative Autoethnography of Curriculum Reform in Initial Teacher Education

This chapter explores educational innovation and leadership through a collaborative autoethnographic lens, focusing on mandated curriculum reform in Australian Bachelor of Education programmes. Drawing on the authors’ lived experiences as academic leaders navigating policy shifts, accreditation demands, and institutional tensions, this chapter reconceptualizes innovation not as a top-down directive but as a relational, emergent, and contextually embedded process. The reflections reveal how leadership practices can foster adaptive responses to policy frameworks, enabling innovation through professional agency, collaboration, and critical engagement with socio-political contexts. The work proposes a model of innovative leadership that challenges traditional organizational development paradigms and foregrounds embodied, situated practices in initial teacher education (ITE). This chapter contributes to global conversations on how educational policies and leadership practices can both constrain and catalyze meaningful change, offering insights into the role of collaborative engagement and reflective practice in sustaining innovation.