The Leadership Education Collaborative: An Alternative Campus-Wide Leadership Curriculum

• In Event: Innovative Collaborations: Photovoice, Service Learning, and Campus-Wide Leadership Curriculum

Short Description

Through the use of contemporary leadership theories, competencies, campus-wide collaboration, and pluralistic leadership philosophies, The Leadership Education Collaborative equips, empowers, and engages learners to navigate leadership experiences. The presentation will offer an overview of the Collaborative and explore case studies highlighting its curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular leadership experiences.

Detailed Abstract

In 2012, roughly 70% of Americans agreed or strongly agreed that “we have a leadership crisis” in this country and “unless we get better leaders, the United States will decline as a nation” (Rosenthal, 2012, p. 3). That same report found that more than 80% of Americans believe that our “nation’s problems can be solved with effective leadership,” despite the complexity of those problems (Rosenthal, 2012, p. 8). Boundary crossing scholars argue that leaders can learn necessary skills to deal with these complex problems, such as identification of new insights, coordination and communication across disciplines, reflection and learning from others, and transformation and decision making to implement changes in processes (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011).

Faculty and staff in higher education acknowledge the importance of boundary crossing leadership education. To this end, many higher education institutions have found success by developing offices or standards that define leadership for the entire university, and act as guidelines and manage widespread leadership programming and curricula across campus. Others highlight the value of pluralistic leadership philosophies dependent upon program and student goals. In this presentation, we will discuss a campus-wide collaboration across pluralistic leadership education programs that highlights the value of curricular, co-curricular, and extra-curricular experiences.

In leadership classrooms, educators often push students beyond the simplicity of the notion that ineffective leaders are to blame for our problems and effective leaders can save us all. Indeed, Peter Block (2008) suggests that we must leave the notion of leadership behind in favor of citizenship if we want to imagine successful alternative futures. This leads to a discussion of various frames surrounding the contexts, processes, missions, and values associated with defining leadership and measuring as well as developing leadership competencies. The Leadership Education Collaborative at Virginia Tech is committed to preserving a variety of leadership definitions and frameworks and equipping students with the tools to develop broad, flexible, and rich skillsets to work across boundaries to solve complex problems.

Background
The Leadership Education Collaborative seeks to inspire learners in developing their own leadership competence through a co-authored curriculum. Ultimately, instead of giving students several pathways for leadership development, there is a plan to survey the entire university landscape, identify the outcomes provided by each leadership education experience, and provide a map on which a student can plot his/her path. The model affords for this in three equally important ways. First equipping students with pertinent knowledge and technical, human, and conceptual skills will be discussed. Next empowering students to use their own gifts will be addressed. Finally, the manners by which students are encouraged to engage will be covered.
Ultimately, the Leadership Education Collaborative draws on a broad spectrum of historical and contemporary leadership theories. While the totality of trait, skill, style, contingent, and new periods of leadership studies surround the program to Equip, Empower, and Engage college students for life long leadership and citizenship, primary lenses for the program are drawn from Seemiller and Murray’s (2013) leadership learning outcomes, Strengths-based approaches (i.e. Gallup, 2015), and BreakAway’s (2012) Active Citizenship Continuum. Leadership Identity Development theory (Osteen et al., 2005) provides the theoretical framework for these conceptual lenses and serves as a common language for students as they make choices about their own journey of leadership development.

Equip – After examining the outcomes of 475 academic programs and 72 academic settings regarding student leadership development, Seemiller and Murray (2013) identified eight major competency areas: Learning and Reasoning, Self-Awareness and Development, Interpersonal Interaction, Group Dynamics, Civic Responsibility, Communication, Strategic Planning, Personal Behavior; each with a number of related competencies. By using these areas and their subordinate competencies to better understand each program/experience across the university, our students can construct, in collaboration with a peer advisor and a university administrator, a leadership curriculum that is not only complete, but connects to his/her interests, career path, goals, etc. Additionally, the Leadership Identity Development model (Osteen et al., 2005) will guide peer advisors and university administrators as they mentor each student through the available leadership programs and experiences on campus.

Empower – Utilizing positive psychology concepts, instruments are useful for developing a common language and point of departure for a student’s co-authored leadership curriculum. The Leadership Education Collaborative employs the StrengthsFinder assessment by Gallup (Asplund et al., 2007) to help a student identify their talents and discover how to make the most of them. Virginia Tech has a partnership with Gallup and the assessment is offered to all faculty, staff, and students at the institution.

Engage – Finally, a student’s ability to employ his or her talents in a meaningful and effective way with regards to community engagement and decision making will be discussed. BreakAway’s (2012) Active Citizenship Continuum describes progressively more engaged citizenship roles within organizations and communities, from member to volunteer to conscious and finally, active citizens.

Example of Practice and Further Discussion
The strategy developed by the Leadership Education Collaborative provides the point of departure (competency areas discussed above) and several measures of equipment, empowerment, and engagement, but allows the student to determine their own learning process. This presentation will highlight the introduction and mission of the program, briefly discuss the conceptual and theoretical framework, and spend the bulk of the time engaging dialogue regarding a case study of four students who have traveled a more traditional curriculum path at Virginia Tech, and how the emerging strategy - The Leadership Education Collaborative – enhances their individual learning. One case study could include a student who is a general engineering major (curricular) participating in a living learning community for leadership and social change (co-curricular). S/he has also expressed interest to enroll in the Business Leadership Minor (curricular) and participates in student government (extra-curricular). The experiences of four students will be discussed, analyzed, and evaluated according to the Equip, Empower, and Engage model to demonstrate how efficiently an individual leadership co-curriculum can be created and implemented by a student and supported by peer advisors and university administrators. Discussion will follow to further help participants adapt this strategy, more holistically, into their educational communities.

Participants

• Nicholas A. Clegorne, Virginia Tech

• Kimberly Carlson, Virginia Tech

• Heather Evans, Virginia Tech

• Denise Simmons, Virginia Tech