artifact 1 reflective leadership
DESCRIPTION
Artifact 1 Reflective LeadershipTRANSCRIPT
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Running head: LEADERSHIP EXPRESS PROJECT 1
Leadership Express Project
Brett Stachler
Loyola University Chicago
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LEADERSHIP EXPRESS PROJECT 2
For my express project, I decided to contrast two pictures. In one picture, our class is sitting
together in a circle after our leadership simulation presentations. The other picture is an empty
classroom, set up with each row of seats risen above the other, all pointed towards the front of
the room.
Using Komives, Longerbeam, Owen, Mainella, & Osteens (2006) Leadership Identity Model
(LID), it would be easy to say I have embarked on leadership differentiated, if not generativity.
After all leadership development in others is what I strive for, since it was someone else who
suggested I apply to be an Resident Assistant after seeing me potential, a boost of efficacy I had
never experienced up to that point which eventually led to my interest in a vocation of student
affairs. But it is important to remind myself of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies lesson of the
dangers of the single story. Although Adichie characterized the meaning though the lens of other
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peoples stories, our story is also not a linear, singular, and static. It is ever changing, personal,
traumatic, common, joyful, loving, and a multitude of other states of being all at the same time.
Coming back to the classroom, in another project I am tasked with writing critically
about educational pedagogy. In essence, I argue that educational systems dehumanize us, but
through reconstructing humanizing and liberatory practices, educators can humanize the
experiences of a community whether it is inside a classroom, in a leadership program, or with
our student interns. Critical to the humanization, is the concept of community, with is depicted
in the first picture. The concept of out community has also been interesting to me, since there
has been a developmental tract in our cohort from competition, towards community.
Competition dehumanizes us through the process of commodification, and turns other people and
ourselves into objects that are incapable of creating community by always vying for power and
positionality. In community, we seek to discover the humanization in others and ourselves. We
are able to share our own stories, in an effort to weave a common thread amongst a multitude of
differences. Although those differences exist and are often remarked through the lens of power,
privilege, and oppression, similarities are seen as more important to allow us to build efficacy as
a community, in an effort to sustain the multiple struggles we have.
Though speaking of struggles vaguely, as there are many from systemic to individual
ones, this community has been good company for what I thought was a unique struggle of mine.
In referencing the LID model, I have stayed comfortably in the area of leader identified in the
academic context, primarily due to my academic struggles in the past associated with two
learning disabilities that keep me from realizing my potential: attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder, and a reading comprehension learning disability. ADHD primarily affects my
executive function of my brain, leaving me poorly scheduling tasks such as large amounts of
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readings, and large papers. Anything I have low efficacy in completing gets substituted with
some impulsive behavior. Once I build the efficacy to even think I can accomplish something
my ADHD inhibits in the academic realm, my reading comprehension learning disability inhibits
me from making little meaning from reading passages for the project. Not only did I discover I
was not alone with these struggles, I was able to build community with others who have learning
differences.
Which brings me back to the second picture, both the physical space and concept of
relationships with the space. It reminds me of Freires (2008) concept of the baking model of
education, where the teacher the dualistically has all the knowledge, and the student is to be
filled up with that knowledge. Usually the demonstration of that knowledge is through a
presentation, test, paper, or combination of the three. But where is our voice and story in that
process? Can we truly tell our stories in banking model, where the model of expression is
regurgitation? My model of leadership stems from these questions of who is the teacher, who is
the student, and what role is education supposed to play? by understanding we have all been
socialized in a banking model of education and viewing fellow students as competition. What
kinds of critical lenses can we create to understand our stories, and how they may liberate us?
How can we seek to create community in lieu of looking for the leaders we always knew we
were? How will we as student affairs practitioners continue to analyze our own power and
privilege as we participate in the development of others? It is impossible to replicate the process
and the present state of our #ELPS419 community, but it has truly humanized me in many more
ways in addition to the one given above.
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References
Komives, S. R., Longerbeam, S., Owen, J. O., Mainella, F. C., & Osteen, L. (2006). A leadership
identity development model: Applications from a grounded theory. Journal of College
Student Development, 47, 401-418.
Freire, P. (2008). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum.