When the Present Crowds the Possible: Narrative Agency, Responsibility, and Imagining a Preferred Educational Future

Authors

  • Adelee Penner University of Calgary

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.55016/gwvepn03

Abstract

Abstract

This paper offers a hermeneutic reflection on a scenario-building exercise that invited doctoral students and practicing superintendents and senior leaders to imagine possible futures for assessment through four conditions of trust and disruption. Both groups identified high trust and high disruption as preferred futures, yet they did not narrate those futures in the same way. Drawing on Meretoja’s (2023) model of narrative agency and Gordon’s (2024) account of disciplinary decadence, I interpret the contrast as one between interpretive mobility and interpretive density. Students moved more readily among possibilities and perspectives; leaders’ institutional responsibility brought histories, constituencies, consequences, and enactment into the imagined future at once. I argue that responsibility can both enrich and constrain narrative agency by altering the conditions of awareness, imagination, and dialogicality. Preferred futures, therefore, are not imagined from neutral ground; they become narratable within unequal conditions of consequence.

 

Keywords: narrative agency; narrative hermeneutics; educational leadership; preferred futures; responsibility; interpretive density

Author Biography

  • Adelee Penner, University of Calgary

    Adelee Penner is a PhD candidate in Educational Research at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, and an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Alberta. Her research explores educational leadership, futures thinking, scenario planning, and innovation literacy, with particular attention to how leaders interpret complexity, make meaning, and imagine possible futures. Drawing on extensive experience in school and system leadership, she is interested in the relationship between interpretation, language, narrative, and leadership practice in times of change.

     

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Published

2026-09-27

Issue

2026: 2026

Section

Articles

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