Humanistic AI Transformation in Schools: Digital Leadership, Emotional Intelligence, and Data Ethics

Abstract

Humanistic AI transformation calls on schools to adopt artificial intelligence in ways that strengthen teaching quality while safeguarding the human, ethical, and privacy dimensions of school life, a balance that rests on three interlocking pillars: digital leadership, emotional intelligence, and data ethics. How these three pillars interact at the junior secondary level remains largely unexamined, particularly in settings where school level data governance capacity is still maturing and where the link between a principal's digital leadership style and teacher psychological well being has rarely been investigated. Addressing this gap, the study first develops the Integrative Digital Emotional Adaptive Leadership (IDEAL) model as an a priori conceptual framework, synthesized from digital leadership, emotional intelligence, and data governance theory before fieldwork began, and then examines how that framework plays out in practice through an in depth account of how the principal of an Islamic junior secondary school (SMP Islam Athirah Bone, Indonesia) integrates the three pillars while balancing rapid AI adoption with emotional attentiveness and compliance with personal data protection regulation. The site was purposively selected as a theoretically generative case: a value based Islamic school whose digital transformation has outpaced most of its peers, offering a rare test of whether leadership and data ethics frameworks built mainly in secular, Western, and higher education settings travel to a faith based, non Western, junior secondary context. A qualitative single instrumental case study design is employed, drawing on semi structured in depth interviews, participatory observation, and document analysis, with data analyzed through the Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña interactive model and validated through source and technique triangulation. Findings indicate a value based transformational digital leadership profile characterized by deliberate emotional mentoring during technology adoption, an emerging but not yet systematized data ethics regime, and support for the IDEAL model, in which Islamic institutional values shape and bridge the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and data governance effectiveness rather than operating as a statistically mediating variable. The study contributes theoretically by extending digital leadership constructs to value based Islamic schooling, and practically by informing capacity building policy for junior secondary principals navigating humanistic AI transformation.