**3.1 What do we mean by a Pra-colonialism perspective?**

Bai, Cohen, Culham, Park, Rabi, Scott, and Tait [49] write, "The greatest educational challenge today is not downloading more, better, sophisticated knowledge and skills into students but helping them to cultivate the unity of heart and mind …" (p. 289). In another publication [50], we outline a Pra[colonial] framework, intersecting with transformative leadership, that allows us to engage with students in ways that develop heart and mind and develop the full potential of humanity already present within the students.

*Pra* is a word from Sanskrit, and it may be called a contronym as it means both "before" and "forward, forth" [51]. Postcolonial theory and, even more so, decoloniality inspired the Pra perspective. We are offering it to recognize the epistemic diversity that was widely present and recognized before colonization and to explore ways forward now that we live with the remains of coloniality. Perhaps the most important aspect of Pra is that the word must be used with verbs to gain its contronymic meaning (before and forward), which is central to our aim. Therefore, the implication is that it calls for actions, perhaps an active position, continuous effort, and inner dive, without which any work of transformative leadership simply lacks in meaning.

We do not wish to present a post-postcolonial perspective; instead, we are referring to the ontology of such people before colonialism while also representing their ontological wholeness, completion, and excellence. The other possible contribution of our perspective builds on decoloniality, a concept and also praxis, and a call for action for those who were colonized or positioned and affected by colonization. The Pra perspective is a way to reorient the thinking and do some "inner diving" for those who represent the colonizer and the Eurocentric worldview and continue to recreate the practices we are trying to move away from. Ours is an ethical-ontoepistemological [52] perspective, embodying the moral obligations and relationality between humans, bodies, and places, reorienting our ways of being, doing, and thinking. It is a tool that hopes to contribute to the conversation, especially in education. It would also imply moving forward—away from and beyond or forward from colonial practices, worldviews, and hierarchies, where the power dynamics and mimicry [23] and the one [Eurocentric] "universal standard" would hopefully no longer exist.

Pra-colonialism and transformative leadership critique inequitable practices and offer the promise of greater individual achievement and a better life lived in common with others … transformative leadership, therefore, inextricably links education and education leadership with the wider social context within which it is embedded ([39], p. 559).

The Pra-colonial perspective acknowledges the importance of intersubjective encounters in the *Lebenswelt*, the "life world" [53], the "pool" of perception and experience generated in and between individual subjectivities. Encountering other subjectivities allows us to realize that there is more to the experience of the world

*A New Theoretical Approach to Enacting Transformative Leadership with International Students DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.109355*

than our own solitary perceptions can afford us. We are meeting, engaging, and encountering another human. There is at least the possibility of encountering the foundational human *qua* human. This, we maintain, is the Pra-colonial turn, the Pra-colonial move. Transformative leadership can serve as a means of enabling such a turn.
