Applying the Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning Model for Transformative Curriculum Design

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Short Description

Join this interactive session to learn about and apply the culturally relevant leadership learning (CRLL) model to the design and development of leadership education programs and course offerings. Co-led by a researcher, instructor, and practitioner, this workshop will include three sections: contextual experiences learning and teaching leadership; description of the model; and applications for practice. Grounded in the belief that culturally relevant leadership education in scholarship, teaching, and practice is critical to leading in turbulent times, this session will connect participants’ experiences learning, experiencing, and developing the leadership identity, capacity, and efficacy of themselves and others.

Detailed Abstract

The concept of culturally relevant leadership learning is a framework for transforming leadership programs to address the advantages and disadvantages difference creates. This new model incorporates efficacy and contextual dimensions of campus climate into individuals ‘capacity and identity to engage in the leadership process. Together, these ideas embody the critical domains of the Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning (CRLL) model. This model seeks to compel leadership educators to challenge old paradigms of leadership and learning, in order to consider new ways to educate students and develop leaders capable of challenging inequity to create social change. (Bertrand Jones, Guthrie, & Osteen, in press).

Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning incorporates Ladson-Billings’ (1995) notions of academic success by focusing on students’ capacity for leadership and cultural competence through students’ own identity development. Capacity and identity act as doorways into enactment, while leadership efficacy pushes students through the door and into the arena of change. Examining efficacy along with the concepts of capacity and identity re-conceptualizes our previous work by weaving ways of knowing with interpersonal and intrapersonal development (Abes, Jones, & McEwen, 2007). The combination of identity, capacity, and efficacy describes a student’s way of understanding self as an agent of change through interpersonal and intrapersonal development. (Osteen, Guthrie, & Bertrand Jones, in press).

As a collective set of states, identity, capacity, and efficacy are interconnected and motivate students to engage in the leadership process. And with the right environmental or contextual factors in place, a reciprocal influential relationship begins. As students engage in leadership, they can enhance their identity, capacity, and efficacy—further motivating more engagement in the leadership process. This environment is a result of complex and interconnected factors of a campus’ historical legacy, compositional diversity, and psychological, structural, behavioral dimensions. To the detriment of all students – underserving marginalized and overpromising majority students - leadership theory, practice, and education has ignored the informative and critical research on diversity and inclusive environments. The CRLL combines the research on leadership and diversity to conceptualize leadership education for the collective benefit of all.

This program relates to Leadership in Turbulent Times because it advocates for the needs of marginalized and underrepresented voices in their leadership learning process. CRLL validates the experiences of all students and immerses their stories into the leadership curriculum. In addition, the CRLL model awakens students to the detrimental underlying dominant assumptions built into most models. It encourages leadership educators to reevaluate their current leadership curriculum and look for ways it can be more inclusive of diverse experiences and backgrounds. The Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning model has the capability to rebuild community within and outside of the classroom. This practice will create more relationship based and validating experiences in which students have an opportunity to become social change agents.

Program outcomes include:

• Introduce the Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning model and explain how developing leader identity, leadership efficacy, and leadership capacity occur within the systemic context of historical legacy, compositional diversity, and psychological, structural, behavioral dimensions.

• Examine how bridging diversity and leadership helps leadership educators better understand the contribution of identity to leadership development, the leadership perspectives of individuals from diverse backgrounds, pluralistic engagement, and the programs and practices that are effective in developing future leaders (Guthrie, Bertrand Jones, Osteen, & Hu, 2013).

• Provide educators the opportunity to apply the CRLL model to their particular institutional and cultural contexts; and how we can transgress traditional ways of teaching leadership in order to truly seek liberation through leadership learning.
This session will be organized in three sections: participants’ contextual experiences learning and teaching leadership, description of the model, and applications for practice. Through an interactive methodology, we will connect with the audiences’ experiences learning, experiencing, and developing the leadership identity, capacity, and efficacy of self and others. Their reflections will be used to build from and describe the unique contribution of the CRLL model. After a brief description of the model, we will dive into applications of the model through experiential learning methods with the audience.

Sub Unit

• Leadership Education

Presenters

• Laura Osteen, Florida State University

• Kathy Guthrie, Florida State University

• Maritza Torres, Florida State University