11 Leading and Practising GenAI Care-fully

How to cite this chapter:

Vallis, C. (2025). Leading and practising GenAI, Care-fully. In R. Fitzgerald (Ed.), Inquiry in action: Using AI to reimagine learning and teaching. The University of Queensland. https://doi.org/10.14264/e17d757

Abstract

This thought piece explores how the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) can guide educators to lead with curiosity, collaboration, and care in the age of generative AI. Here we reframe leadership as relational rather than hierarchical, anchored in inquiry, reflection, and shared learning. The chapter traces a co-designed research project that used metaphors to explore how educators and students conceptualise GenAI’s role in higher education. This creative and critical approach foregrounded the ethical, pedagogical, and emotional dimensions of AI while amplifying diverse voices through collective authorship. Framed by contemporary SoTL research, echoing calls for pedagogically grounded and ethically aware AI practice (Fitzgerald & Curtis, 2025), the piece positions care-based leadership as central to shared understanding in times of technological disruption. Leading and practising GenAI care-fully means moving beyond control and certainty to cultivate inclusive, reflective spaces for inquiry and educational transformation.

Introduction

As an educational developer, I lead multidisciplinary teaching and learning projects without formal authority. This work is relational, boundary crossing and often invisible, travelling “under, over, and through institutional fences, to cross professional and academic, technological, and educational boundaries” (Taleo & Vallis, 2022, p. 312). In other words, it is complex work that relies on connection rather than hierarchy.

Yet in times of technological crisis, whether the rapid ‘pivot’ to online learning during the pandemic (Vallis, 2021), or the advent of generative AI (GenAI) in 2023, university colleagues naturally turn to educational developers for guidance. My experience in educational technology offered a headstart, but like others, I was learning how to teach with large language models without fully understanding their inner workings (Bearman & Ajjawi, 2023). This uncertainty became a starting point for inquiry rather than anxiety, guiding me toward the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) as a way to lead through disruption.

I chose not to listen to the mansplaining of ChatGPT (Jackson, 2025) or to add my own voice to that chorus. Instead, I turned to SoTL as a framework for leading through uncertainty. By treating my own teaching as a site of systematic inquiry, and by documenting, analysing, and sharing that creative inquiry with others, I could transform personal experimentation into collective knowledge-building. This approach situates GenAI within a broader educational context, part of a bigger picture that considers how technology reshapes learning and assessment and student experience, beyond seeing it as a technical solution or threat. It also repositions leadership as curiosity over control.

SoTL as Leadership Practice

Leading through SoTL means experimenting with GenAI in my own teaching and learning, reflecting critically on the process, and using that experience to inform educational design. This learning cycle of moving through experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation (Kolb, 2015), becomes a form of relational leadership grounded in scholarly inquiry. Such relational leadership resonates with Fitzgerald et al.’s (2025) call to move SoTL beyond tool-centric innovation toward ethically grounded inquiry into how GenAI reshapes teaching, assessment, and educational relationships.

Across disciplines, academic colleagues face similar challenges integrating GenAI in assessment. SoTL offers both a mindset and methodology for working through complexity. Leading conversations with a combination of lived experience and evidence helps demystify the process and the technology. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I am willing to deep-dive into problems with colleagues; to experiment, document, analyse, and learn from those shared experiences. Making that learning public and subjecting it to critical reflection helps others do the same. Building trust is often a natural outcome of this collaborative sensemaking, opening new pathways for connection, collaboration and innovation.

In this way, I follow in the footsteps of women in SoTL who have enacted change through practice rather than proclamation. This form of leadership is especially valuable during technological disruption (Brown et al., 2024). These women tend to lead by doing rather than declaring, initiating collaborative projects, creating inclusive research spaces, and legitimising practitioner knowledge. My own practice has been enabled by women SoTL leaders who have actively created opportunities for me to contribute and lead.

But what does this SoTL leadership look like in practice?

Practising Generative AI in Higher Education: A SoTL Story

One example of leading and practising GenAI is an educational research project I initiated. In this project, I designed and developed with colleagues a creative and critical approach to GenAI using metaphors; one that intentionally steered away from technical explanations and prompt engineering exercises and avoided framing GenAI as a software problem to overcome.

Drawing on co-design principles, we brought together educators, researchers, professional staff, and students to question what GenAI means through playful, reflective activities in a series of workshops. Thinking with and through metaphor helped us to surface assumptions, concerns, and hopes about GenAI’s role in teaching and learning. One student group chose water as their metaphor: GenAI as abundant, adaptable, capable of nourishing or destroying. They then questioned whether this all-encompassing metaphor could capture GenAI’s specificity, exemplifying the critical reflexivity we sought to develop.

Workshops were held across varied educational settings and at international conferences. The metaphor artefacts generated were analysed to understand what participants thought of GenAI’s agency, risks, and potential. We invited participants to extend their thinking in a collaborative writing project: a student, a media producer, four learning designers, and six academics contributed written reflections. Their ideas were synthesised into themes and shared, with contributors reviewing and refining the final analysis.

The result is a co-authored chapter with different disciplinary, cultural and professional perspectives from as far and wide as Perth, Alice Springs and Sydney, Australia (Vallis et al., 2025). Many of our contributors were publishing in academia for the first time. We demonstrate the value of working together and sharing individual and collective understandings as we make sense of GenAI together in higher education. This collaborative spirit sits at the heart of this Inquiry in Action collection, where educators translate experimentation into scholarship and uncertainty into shared understanding.

Leading Care-fully with SoTL

The metaphor project exemplifies leading care-fully: creating space for all voices, supporting scholarly growth, while mindfully probing the ethical, pedagogical, and emotional dimensions of GenAI collectively. In this sense, multiple lived experiences are more powerful than notions of gate-keeping individual expertise. This work requires patience. Some colleagues questioned whether metaphors constituted ‘serious’ learning, the workshops were declined by two educational technology conferences, and participation rates reflected the reality that creative inquiry sits uncomfortably alongside institutional demands for efficiency and certainty.

Yet women leading SoTL projects continue to open doors and build capacity. Like others, I have strong opinions about educational technology, but I prioritised creating conditions for collective inquiry and scaffolded pathways for first-time authors, rather than announcing my position on GenAI in education. This honours what women in SoTL have long practised: leadership that recognises expertise as relational and distributed, not a heroic individual achievement. Learning with GenAI, then, is less about certainty or control and more about staying open to the entangled realities of emerging technology within a wider relational and ethical landscape (Gravett, 2025). Leaders can ground their own learning in this curiosity, collaboration, and care.

AI Use Declaration

This chapter was prepared with assistance from Claude Sonnet 4.5, which supported aspects of writing and editing, including clarity, structure, and citation formatting. All ideas, findings, and interpretations are the authors’ own, and the AI did not generate or analyse primary data or replace academic judgement.

References

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Vallis, C., Wilson, S., Casey, A., Alderton, Z., Chandra, P., Chen, T., Galliano, C., Hole, J., Madhav, A., Nash, J., Ng, J. L., Rokvic, B., Taleo, W., Tibbs, A., van Diggele, C., & Wardak, D. (2025). Mapping Metaphors with Generative AI: Collective Perspectives in Higher Education. Rethinking Education and Agency in the Age of Human-Generative AI Interaction. (pp. 339-372). IGI Global Scientific Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3373-1195-1.ch011