Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Media Contact: Kirshi McDowell |Communications Coordinator | 405-744-8320 |Kirshi@okstate.edu
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the way people live, work, and learn.
For Dr. Beulah Adigun, assistant professor of educational leadership at Oklahoma State University, AI is also reshaping how current and future educational leaders prepare for success.
Adigun implements and observes AI in his work in educational leadership through three pillars: teaching, research, and service. She found innovative ways to integrate AI across each pillar while maintaining a careful, collaborative, and transparent approach.
“My goal as a scholar is to help prepare educational leaders for success,” Adigun said. “AI is just one of the things that has become a critical component of successful readiness, especially in this day and age.”
She emphasized the importance of implementing AI as an auxiliary tool, rather than a replacement, when approaching her work and research. She emphasized the need to keep human evaluation and critical thinking at the forefront of these practices.
Instruction: Leader Conversation Lab
In the classroom, Adigun’s goal is to help students grow as educational leaders and ensure their success by creating realistic, interactive learning experiences. With the help of AI tools, she designed what she calls a “Leader Conversation Lab” to enhance student learning.
This lab introduces new ways to develop future leaders by seamlessly integrating academic insights and interactive simulations. By inputting real-world cultural, demographic, and relationship context into a free AI tool, it generates diverse stakeholder personas that students engage in conversations that mimic realistic engagement scenarios in their schools and communities.
The purpose of this lab is to strengthen students’ sense-making abilities and help leaders navigate the creation of collaborative spaces and effectively understand stakeholder perspectives.
Students interact with a variety of characters, including politicians, parents, school principals, and school mental health counselors, each with their own challenges and issues. Through research, they seek to understand problems from a stakeholder perspective, consider collective implications and evaluate potential solutions.
From there, students move on to integrative questions, exploring how available ideas and resources can be combined to create achievable solutions.
“Our work moves us away from learning just to know what to do, to actually practicing how to have conversations that lead to collaborative action,” Adigun stressed.
Students are encouraged to share their experiences in the post-lab conversation thread, compare notes on AI reactions and deficiencies, and reflect on how they adapted their learning experience to achieve rich outcomes.
Beyond the lab, Adigun provides students with the opportunity to apply their skills in a real-world setting, engaging with visiting stakeholders and collaborators, including local education and career leaders and even elected officials. These opportunities allow students to gain practical experience in leadership and navigate complex dynamics.
“Educational leadership is one of those things that is not as tangible as pure science,” she said. “We still need to prepare our students as best as possible, and these methods allow us to do that.”
Research: Understanding AI in Leadership
Adigun brings his passion as an educational leader to his research. Her personal and collaborative research, both past and present, has focused on the psychosocial processes that influence student-teacher engagement and well-being.
She plans to synthesize her students’ experiences in the Leader Conversation Lab and conduct research evaluating the use of AI tools in education. Her goal is to publish insights into the values and processes of creating experiential and experimental spaces.
Adigun’s extensive research collaborations also explore how AI shapes educational leadership, from considering AI integration for educators in marginalized communities to investigating the impact of engaging with AI on the well-being of academic leaders.
Her research investigates whether educational leaders feel more autonomous in their work by engaging with AI, whether it makes them feel more competent and empowered, and whether it positively contributes to their sense of belonging.
When discussing the integration of AI into education for marginalized communities, Adigun emphasizes the importance of recognizing the inherent biases and disparities in access and utilization of AI between underserved communities and better-resourced regions of the world.
“We are working to bring the perspectives of marginalized educators into the larger conversation about the future of AI in education,” she said.
Services: Expanding Access
Adigun’s service work with AI tools takes into account the lack or reluctance to adopt AI resources in marginalized educational communities. Her service extends internationally, particularly to educational leaders in Nigeria, located in West Africa.
Adigun, in collaboration with one postdoctoral researcher and two postgraduate researchers, co-leads ECHO Nigeria, a virtual professional development platform for educators in Nigeria and neighboring regions. Their research was gradually adapted to draw on the experiences of educators as effectively as possible.
Feedback from participants revealed an interest in implementing and understanding AI tools, so Adigun and her team designed a training program for a population of Nigerian educators.
“But it wasn’t just about AI in general,” Adigun said. “We focused on aspects that are particularly relevant to the AI context.”
Her team recognized that many educators in these communities lacked funding and resources. It was therefore essential that we approached the training with careful research and sensemaking, aiming to develop practical and contextually meaningful solutions.
They introduced tools like Plotagon, which allows teachers to create animated lessons offline without paywalls, and CurriAI, a Nigerian development platform for building curriculum materials such as quizzes in the classroom. These resources provide educators with new ways to expand their educational tools while keeping costs low, making it clear that when applied thoughtfully, AI can be a powerful source of support in educational leadership.
collaborative future
Through his work, Adigun values collaboration and transparency at each stage of AI implementation. She encourages content to be peer-reviewed and evaluated by humans, and insists on clear disclaimers when AI is applied to content production, review, and analysis.
“AI is not going to replace what I need to do in terms of due diligence as an academic,” she said. “I still have to think, guess, and interpret.”
Ms. Adigun praises her colleagues and the GRA for their contributions to research, education, and service. She explained that work with AI is intentionally collaborative, fostering shared perspectives and accountability among colleagues.
“I want to pay tribute to the people who have been on this journey with me,” she said. “Their insight and involvement makes our work stronger and more meaningful.”
Adigun acknowledges that AI can perform incredible tasks, but emphasizes the need for caution and awareness of its limitations.
“The question is not how we feel about it,” she said. “It’s how we use it in a way that makes us feel good about it.”
Adigun’s work as an education leader includes proactively preparing future education leaders to approach AI thoughtfully and confidently. Her long-term hope is to develop leaders who can responsibly and creatively leverage AI, making it a tool to meaningfully improve education while thriving in a rapidly evolving world.
Story: Brittney Purcell | Aspire Magazine
