In January’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun argues that academia must move away from speed and metric driven cultures and toward slow, engaged, and contextually grounded scholarship that prioritizes sustained transformation over superficial change. Dr. Adigun is an assistant professor of Educational Leadership at Oklahoma State University The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?
Dr. Olajumoke Beulah Adigun (OBA): There was a time when a researcher’s identity was defined not by a multiplicity of publications but by work that formatively altered the quality of life for communities. This is a historical dimension of our work that we need to ‘unforget,’ and it speaks directly to AERA’s 2026 theme. The reason this matters is simple: it is difficult to be preoccupied with hurried scholarship while being present with the slow and often-messy work of transformation. This is a salient point in Amutuhaire’s work (2022), which makes a compelling argument that the ‘publish or perish’ culture is perpetuating inequality in academia while undermining the potential generative impact of scholarship in resource-poor regions, where solutions to development problems matter more than publication counts. We have tried the hurried approach, and while it has produced more motion in the policy and politics of education, it has yielded less progress in sustaining outcomes. In the article “Over-Optimization of Academic Publishing Metrics,” Fire and Guestrin (2019) highlight that although publishing metrics continue to rise, their substantive value has significantly diminished. Drawing on Goodhart’s law, they illustrate how these metrics lose meaning when manipulated through practices such as self-citation and inflated reference lists. Furthermore, data show that in 2023 alone, over 10,000 research papers were retracted globally due to issues related to accuracy and integrity (Tran, 2025), underscoring how an emphasis on speed creates a metaphorical chasm that invites errors and potential gamification.
Boyer’s (1996) scholarship of engagement offers a useful frame for understanding the gap in the field of educational change: the problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality. This perspective resonates with the slow knowledge argument against the counterproductive acceleration of the process of inquiry (Berg & Seeber, 2016). In the realm of slow knowledge, the journey towards knowledge acquisition honors both the process and the outcome. It recognizes that it takes time to master the conditions within which knowledge can be successfully applied (Orr, 1996). When it’s all said and done, knowledge needs to be contextualized, adapted, and sustained long enough to produce enduring change (Adams et al., 2022). We can also think of this as an invitation to recenter the transformative focus of our change work. If transformation is defined by sustained change, we need to come to terms with the fact that sustaining change requires time for it to be tested, to mature, and to develop a life of its own, allowing its sustainability to become more autonomous than forced. This aligns with design-based implementation research, which emphasizes that knowledge should be generated within the contexts where it will be applied (Penuel et al., 2011).
“The problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the failure to translate knowledge into lived reality.”
My response to the AERA 2026 call has been to fundamentally rethink how I prepare educational leaders, challenging both myself and my students to move from propositions to praxis, from eloquent narratives to actual doing. In a recent course, Instructional Strategies for Adults, rather than requiring papers containing propositions of what well-designed adult instruction should be, my students used real data to design a professional development website, which we called a workshop-in-a-box. They spent each week developing sections grounded in scholarly evidence while applying them to real-world adult learning needs in their respective contexts. With this approach, rather than students telling me what they would do, they did it. At the end of this class, students reported feeling more prepared for real-world leadership challenges, with several already sharing their plans for implementing their designs in their districts. They felt proud of their work, saying they designed the kind of professional development they would want to attend, even though they lacked a frame for articulating it before the class.
This andragogical shift also mirrors my research process. My earlier work relied primarily on quantitative, ex post facto data to examine and understand patterns in various constructs of interest in education. This work has yielded important insights and continues to inform my scholarship. Somewhere along the way, as my colleagues and I began working on the Transformative Leadership Conversations framework (Adams et al., 2022), I became increasingly attentive to the value of applied research in the work we do. When I started my appointment as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University, the invitation to lead the existing ECHO Education Nigeria initiative emerged at a particularly timely moment, offering both a challenge and an opportunity to make my scholarly engagement more expansive through applied inquiry. Working alongside both scholar and practitioner colleagues, we are implementing and learning how sound theoretical propositions about virtual professional development transfer to those serving in under-resourced environments. ECHO Education Nigeria is a virtual professional development platform that supports educator learning and growth, while promoting collaboration among educators across Nigeria and neighboring African countries. This work, though slow, has been productive and has led to a feature on the Project ECHO website highlighting our efforts to expand the applicability of the framework in a new context.
This shift represents my commitment to unforgetting what education and education research once were: embedded processes of learning, doing, unlearning, relearning, and redoing. I am imagining a future where education research is an actual search process, a slow but deeply meaningful engagement with reality that bridges the gap between knowing and transformation.
Lead the Change (LtC): What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?
OBA: Three lessons emerge from this work that I believe can guide practitioners and scholars in the field of educational change. First, we must recalibrate our aim from change to transformation, which simply means enduring change. Educational systems are saturated with change initiatives, yet transformation remains elusive. The distinction matters because change can be episodic and surface-level, but transformation aims at well-saturated and sustained change that produces a new system of outcomes. In my work with teachers in Nigeria, I witnessed how professional development that merely introduced new practices faded quickly, while approaches that allowed time for adaptation, testing, and iteration became the lifeblood of the work. We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment. This requires us to resist the pressure for quick wins and instead invest in the slow, and often unsensational work.
“We can think of transformation as the unforced rhythms of change; it must be cultivated with patience and sustained through commitment.”
Second, the quality of our work matters more than the quantity. This is particularly challenging in an academic culture that rewards productivity metrics over meaningful impact. Yet when I observe my students designing professional development they themselves would want to attend, or when I see Nigerian teachers responding to our adaptation of the ECHO framework in ways we never imagined, I am reminded that one piece of deeply contextualized, genuinely useful work is worth the time and effort it takes. I see this same pattern in my work with one of the largest fatherhood support organizations in Oklahoma (Birthright Living Legacy), where a simple evidence-based curriculum I developed for a small network of fathers five years ago has now become a flagship programming element providing training and guided action for hundreds of fathers across the state (Adigun, 2020; 2022). I would argue that our institutions, promotion systems, and funding mechanisms need to be reimagined around permission structures that value depth, rigor, and impact over volume and speed.
Third, and most critically, learning is fundamentally reciprocal. As practitioners and scholars, we take learning to people, but we cannot successfully produce transfer without learning from those we serve about what makes knowledge work (or not) in each unique context. They have just as much to teach us as we have to teach them. My Nigerian colleagues taught me more about adaptive leadership, resourcefulness, and instructional creativity than any textbook could convey. They showed me which theoretical propositions held up under resource constraints, and which required radical reimagining. When we noticed a decline in attendance at our virtual sessions, we reached out to participants to understand the reasons behind this trend. We discovered that while interest remained high, many participants struggled with reliable internet connectivity. However, we also learned that connectivity was more affordable and dependable when they used specific platforms, such as WhatsApp. With this insight, we decided to break our live sessions into bite-sized, low-data video segments and upload them to the WhatsApp group. This adjustment led to a reassuring resurgence in participant attendance and engagement, bringing back a much-needed momentum to the work. This example makes clear that reciprocity is not just ethically right; it is methodologically essential. If we approach communities as recipients rather than co-creators of knowledge and the knowledge delivery process, we will continue to produce research that looks elegant on paper but fails in practice. These lessons converge on a call for patience, genuine partnership, and humility as we press towards educational change.
Lead the Change (LtC): What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?
OBA: I see the field of educational change heading toward a more transformational stance. What I mean by this is that the field will not only be about changing the formal systems of education, but also about the community-embedded reach of the work. Further, the accelerated pace of knowledge introduced by non-human automation, such as AI, obliges the field to move into innovative ways of doing what we do. With this reality at the forefront, we are compelled to dig deep rather than simply reach wide. We are compelled to rehumanize our work, making it an endeavor by humans, with humans, and for humans. Collaboration will become the new superpower, and contextual applicability will be the new genius.
I find hope in this field for the future because people are beginning to ask the right questions. It is no longer a secret that speed and volume are not producing the kinds of results we want; therefore, we are compelled to be open to other means. It is also no secret that the tyranny of performative scholarship (Fire & Guestrin, 2019) has created much unhealth in our profession. I see funding agencies beginning to value implementation science and community-partnered research. I see perspectives like slow knowledge gaining traction, and I see intentional collaborations that center reciprocity.
My deepest hope lies in the rising generation of scholar-practitioners who refuse to separate knowing from doing, who insist that research be accountable to the communities it claims to serve, and who are willing to do the slow, messy work of transformation. These emerging scholars understand that in an age of AI and information abundance, our unique contribution as humans is not speed, but wisdom. The kind that comes from sustained presence, deep listening, and genuine partnership. If we can create the conditions for this kind of work to flourish, the field of educational change will not only survive but thrive.
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