Dr. Beulah Adigun’s Work with AI in Educational Leadership
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Media Contact: Kirsi McDowell | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-8320 | kirsi@okstate.edu
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming 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 she prepares current and future educational leaders for success.
Adigun implements and observes AI within her work in educational leadership through three pillars: teaching, research and service. Across each pillar, she has found innovative ways to integrate AI, while maintaining a cautious, collaborative and transparent approach.
“My goal as an academic is to prepare educational leaders for success,” Adigun said. “AI is just one of the things that has become a significant part of successful preparation, especially in contemporary times.”
When addressing her work and research, she stressed the importance of implementing AI as a supportive tool, rather than a substitutional tool. She emphasized the need to keep human evaluation and critical thinking at the forefront of these practices.
Teaching: The Leader Conversation Lab
In the classroom, Adigun’s goal is to help students develop as educational leaders and ensure success by creating realistic interactive learning experiences. With the help of AI tools, she designed what she calls the Leader Conversation Lab to enhance her students’ learning.
The lab introduces a new way of preparing future leaders by seamlessly integrating scholarly insights with interactive simulations. By inputting real-world cultural, demographic and relational contexts into free AI tools, she generates diverse stakeholder personas that students engage with in conversations that mimic realistic school and community engagement scenarios.
The objective of the lab is to enhance students’ sense-making abilities and empower leaders to navigate the creation of collaborative spaces and effectively comprehend their stakeholders’ perspectives.
Students interact with various personas, such as politicians, parents, principals or school mental health counselors, each with their own unique challenges or problems. Through inquiry, they work to understand the problem from the stakeholder’s point of view and engage in collective sense-making to evaluate potential solutions.
From there, students move to integrative questions, exploring how they can create an attainable solution by combining the ideas and resources available.
“It takes our work away from just learning for the sake of knowing what to do, to actually practicing how to be in conversations that bring about collaborative action,” Adigun emphasized.
Students are encouraged to share their experiences in post-lab conversation threads, compare notes on AI responses and deficiencies and reflect on how they adapted their learning experience to achieve enriching outcomes.
Beyond the lab, Adigun provides students with opportunities to apply their skills in real-world settings by engaging with visiting stakeholders and collaborators, such as community 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 the pure sciences,” she said. “We still have to prepare our students the best way possible, and these methods allow us to do that.”
Research: Understanding AI in Leadership
Adigun applies her passion as an educational leader to her research as well. Both her individual and collaborative research, past and present, have centered on the psychosocial processes that affect student and teacher engagement and well-being.
She intends to conduct research that evaluates the use of AI tools in her teaching by synthesizing students' experiences with the Leader Conversation Lab. Her goal is to publish insights on the value and process of creating an experiential and experimental space.
Adigun’s broader collaborative research also explores how AI shapes educational leadership, from navigating the integration of AI for educators in marginalized communities to examining the implications of engaging with AI on the well-being of academic leaders.
Her research explores whether educational leaders feel more autonomous in their work when they engage with AI, whether they feel more competent and empowered, and whether it contributes positively to their sense of belonging.
When discussing the integration of AI into education for marginalized communities, Adigun highlights the significance of acknowledging inherent biases and disparities in AI access and utilization between underserved communities and more resourced regions of the world.
“We’re working to bring the perspectives of marginalized educators into the larger discourse of the future of AI in education,” she said.
Service: Expanding Access
Adigun’s service work with AI tools takes into account the lack of, or hesitation, in implementing AI resources in marginalized educational communities. Her service extends internationally, particularly to educational leaders in Nigeria, located in western Africa.
In partnership with a postdoctoral fellow and two graduate research associates, Adigun collaboratively leads ECHO Nigeria, a virtual professional development platform for educators in Nigeria and neighboring regions. Their work has gradually been adapted to be grounded in the context of those educators’ experience 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 cohort of Nigerian educators.
“But it wasn’t just AI in general,” Adigun said. “We looked at aspects of AI that were particularly relevant to their context.”
Her team recognized that many educators in these communities are underfunded and under-resourced, so it was essential that they approached the training with careful inquiry and sense-making, aiming to develop solutions that were practical and contextually meaningful.
They introduced tools such as Plotagon, which allows teachers to create animated lessons offline without paywalls, and CurriAI, a Nigerian-developed platform for building curriculum materials like classroom quizzes. These resources gave educators new ways to expand teaching tools while keeping costs low, revealing how AI can become a powerful source of support in educational leadership when thoughtfully applied.
A Collaborative Future
Through her work, Adigun emphasizes collaboration and transparency in each stage of AI implementation. She encourages content to be peer-reviewed and human-evaluated, and advocates for clear disclaimers when AI is applied to content production, review or analysis.
“AI is not replacing what I need to do in terms of my due diligence as a scholar,” she said. “I still need to think, deduce and interpret.”
Adigun credits her colleagues and GRAs for their contributions to her research, teaching and service. She explained that her work with AI is intentionally collaborative, fostering shared perspectives and accountability among peers.
“I want to honor the people that I've been on this journey with,” she said. “Their insights and engagement make the work stronger and more meaningful.”
While she acknowledges that AI performs phenomenal tasks, Adigun stresses the need for caution and awareness of its limitations.
“The question is not how we feel about it,” she said. “It’s how to use it so that we can feel good about it.”
Adigun’s work as an educational leader involves proactively preparing future educational leaders to approach AI thoughtfully and with confidence. Her long-term hope is to equip leaders who can harness AI responsibly and creatively, making it a tool for meaningful improvement in education while thriving in a rapidly evolving world.
Story by: Brittney Purcell | Aspire Magazine