Contextualizing Leadership Curricula for Sustainability

• In Event: Symposium | Enabling Non-Leadership Faculty to Teach Leadership Concepts to Address Complex Contextual Problems

Short Description

The presentation will highlight the development and implementation of a sustainable leadership methodology was produced through the Preparing Organizational Leaders in Agriculture Academy Fellows project through contextualized field experiences focused on leadership within climate-related disasters. Presenters will share the background and data produced from the contextualized experiences to share with the audience our approach to improved sustained leadership for community and organizational leaders. This cross-pollination of individual’s contexts and ideas encouraged deeper thought and reflection into how each Fellows’ discipline is developing the next generation of 21st century leaders to better prepared for responding to future climate-related disasters.

Detailed Abstract

Contextualized Learning
Context is critical for teaching leadership concepts (Erickson, 2014). The Preparing Organizational Leaders in Agriculture (POLA) project was justified by contextualizing learning through field experiences. Context provides a means for framing how faculty can teach leadership. Contextual setting is essential when teaching students how to use various leadership frames for problem solving (Kellerman, 2014). Contextually specific experiences, like talking with an agricultural producer impacted by hurricanes, are useful for illustrating the abstract concepts of leadership. Hurricane-related impacts on agriculture in Florida and Texas Florida provided numerous opportunities to provide real-world, contextualized examples of challenges faced by agricultural organizations.
The Context of Natural Disasters
There were 22 different billion-dollar climate disasters across the United States in 2020, breaking the previous annual record of 16 events (Smith, 2021). These disasters included 13 severe storms, seven tropical cyclones, one drought, and one wildfire, resulting in the deaths of 262 people and had significant economic effects on the areas impacted (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2021). Local communities rely on each other, their respective state and the federal government, and non-profit organizations to mitigate economic loss and solutions post-disaster.
Impact on Agriculture
Production agriculture is particularly susceptible to climate-related disasters; including drought, fires, flooding, freezes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Teaching students about the role of leadership in how individuals and organizations in production agriculture respond to these disasters will better prepare them for developing solutions for climate-related challenges. The project team contextualized the field experiences using current and emerging issues in agriculture as the component to address the importance of sustainable leadership and to develop sustainable leadership methodology. The contextualized leadership case studies POLA Fellows developed will increase students’ knowledge of how leadership influences real-world responses to climate-related disasters.
Contextual Field Experiences
An example of how to contextualize leadership through field experiences can be seen using the POLA project as a case study for sustainable leadership methodology and pedagogy. Hargreaves and Fink (2003) identified sustainable leadership as futuristic engagement with the circumstances constructing educational contexts for collaborative learning and development. Based on specific technical and geographic interest, POLA Fellows were divided into two teams (10-15 participants per team) to make site visits to learn more about specific impacts from weather-related disasters on agriculture and collect data for individual case studies. The field experiences were four to five days in length and included in-depth visits with a variety of purposively selected community and organizational leaders impacted by weather-related disasters. Three project team members travelled with each group of participants to help facilitate the experience, and consult on leadership concepts.
Results
Participants shared their perspectives of the extent contextualized field experiences enhanced their understanding of Bolman and Deal’s (2017) leadership frames to better prepare students as future leaders in natural disaster contexts. The two themes that emerged were attitudes toward leadership concepts and post-disaster contexts.
Attitudes Toward Leadership Concepts
One respondent reported, “I think I noticed as a way to integrate leadership, based on a topic that I'm trying to cover. I found a way that will make sense to my students without being a lot of resistance.” Another Fellow shared, “I think the one thing I've seen around here is you don't at times get a choice of being a leader or not, but instead this idea that leadership emerges out of times when you really just need it.” Finally, one participant shared, “I'm just thinking like, for me, the leadership piece is the capacity to see things from multiple perspectives, and then come to some sort of decision that is going to be helpful.”
Post-Disaster Contexts
A POLA Fellow added,
“The order of magnitude of this event, or this disaster it struck me. Especially the interviews with different folks when they mentioned that you cannot get ready for the event of this magnitude. I'm going to let my students know about this thing, and I to help them understand that if they ever faced this type of disaster, they need to be flexible, then they need to adapt to the situation.”
One participant included,
“Initially, driving from the airport over here, I didn't see a lot of impact from the hurricane that was left over. It looked okay and like a lot of stuff has been taken care of. Then, as we were talking to all the leaders in the community it became clearer and clearer on what was actually happening. The more we drove out into the countryside you saw more of the remnants of farm structures, still collapsed trees tumbled around stuff like that. So, the whole picture changed from my first impression in here and I better understood the damage firsthand.”
Conclusions
The field experiences offered Fellows opportunities to contextually learn the extent to which Bolman and Deal’s (2017) leadership frames connected to stakeholders experiencing natural disasters. The POLA contextualization was an innovative methodology to improve sustainable leadership and pedagogy. Climate-related disasters will continue occurring, and, therefore, the demand for the futuristic engagement of leaders (Hargreaves & Fink, 2003) in disaster susceptible communities will remain. Contextualizing the curricula will better prepare how individual and organizational leaders will respond to agricultural disasters. This cross-pollination of individual’s contexts and ideas encouraged deeper thought and reflection into how each Fellows’ discipline is developing the next generation of 21st century leaders to better prepared for responding to future agricultural disasters.

Participant

• Robert Strong, Texas A&M University
  Presenter