The last session of LEI kind of rocked my world. It was by the President and VP of LeaderShape which automatically made me a little skeptical. There is something about the corporation aspect of student affairs that just rubs me the wrong way. It is probably since I worry that an outside firm could just come in with a predetermined model and attempt to implement the concepts without much context about campus climate and culture. The session was titled "Making Dust and No Progress" and the first sentence of the program description was "Leadership education does not work." Consider me there! I realize a good portion of that was just to generate interest in the program, but it turned out to be really interesting and really got me thinking about leadership education.
They started by asking if we feel like there is an intense feel on our campuses to feel like we have to have leadership "mastered." That we are the experts and it is no one else's job to do leadership development. Then they went into some myths about leadership like leadership is accessible to everyone on campus, that everyone has the ability to be a leader etc. THEN they went into the major heresy that everyone thinks, but no one says and that is "Leadership educators are territorial and self-serving." This brought up a really good discussion in small groups about whether or not we are practicing what we preach to our students. The idea of "leading" vs. being a "leader" are two very different concepts. So I could lead a workshop or AB trip, but that wouldn't necessarily make me a leader. Too often we view the student in charge or in a position of power, but that this doesn't make them a leader. This can even be seen in our practices such as requiring a President and a Treasurer to start a club on campus when in reality, this is self-serving and helps us a administrators, but doesn't necessarily help our students. If we say that leadership is collaborative and group-oriented, then why couldn't a group of five students, with no prescribed positions start a club? The MBTI "J" in me holds my breath at this thought, but honestly, are we allowing our students to practice the type of leadership we attempt to teach them?
We went into further discussion and they had us all write a myth or heresy about leadership and then discuss in small groups. My thought was "all student leaders care about social justice." I'm totally blogging about this later! This then went into a larger group discussion about whether the Social Change Model, or more specifically, our narrow lens of the model is harmful to students. If administrators are conceptualizing "social change" as change agents or advocates or activists, then we automatically exclude the majority of students who aren't ready to hear that yet. If we (student affairs people) only think about change in terms of inspirational leaders like MLK or Mother Theresa, how are our 18-year-olds supposed to feel like they can latch onto those ideas when their knowledge and skill sets are so far removed from these people and their actions?
This then rolled into a TED Talk (if you haven't checked out TED talks yet, you HAVE to! They are 18-minute speeches from people who have excelled in all kinds of fields about what they are passionate about.) This TED talk was all about how small changes have the biggest impact and that we are setting ourselves up for failure if we only think that change has to be big. The pressure is simply too much and we crumble and then end up not doing anything. The example they used was a woman who is the leader in helping children in developing nations get inoculated against common diseases. You know what was most effective in getting they moms out to get the shots for their kids? Doing it all at the same time so all of the community moms were there at the same time so the fear factor was gone from bringing your child to strangers who spoke another language. The second part was that they each got a bag of lentils if they got their child caught up on immunizations. The speaker went on to say that people with the most power and the most money often want to have huge, life-changing ideas to start a change when all it may take is a bag of lentils and an afternoon at your local Mommy and Me club.
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