Abstract
This qualitative study explores how school leaders and student teachers perceive the role of school leadership in facilitating the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in South African schools. Although AI-enhanced learning is expanding globally, many South African schools face infrastructural inequalities, uneven digital readiness, and limited leadership capacity. The study addresses how school leadership practices shape AI-supported ESD within historically unequal and resource-constrained contexts.
Grounded in a critical constructivist paradigm, the study draws on critical leadership and digital leadership scholarship as analytical lenses. The critical lens foregrounds issues of power, equity, and structural inequality, while the digital leadership lens examines leadership practices guiding technological change and capacity-building, school leadership remains the central construct.
Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with six school leaders and six final-year Bachelor of Education student teachers, alongside one focus group discussion with each group. Using Braun and Clarke’s reflexive thematic analysis, six interrelated themes were constructed.
Findings indicate that leadership vision, professional development support, ethical guidance, and policy alignment enable AI-supported ESD, while infrastructural deficits, digital inequities, limited technological competence, and a theory–practice divide constrain implementation. Ethical concerns, including plagiarism and learner overreliance on AI, also emerged.
The study concludes that AI-enhanced ESD can contribute to equitable and transformative educational development when guided by ethically grounded and contextually responsive school leadership.