In Preparation for Creating a Servant Leadership Curriculum for Young Adults

Six Sections

A Leadership Disconnect

The Leadership We Have

Re-thinking the Leadership Lessons Young People Receive

Tenets of Servant Leadership Literacy

Interdisciplinary Insights for Servant Leadership

Design Questions For Developing a Servant Leadership Curriculum

A Leadership Disconnect

Prevailing leadership understandings and behaviors contribute to a global culture of economic and social dysfunction.

Catastrophe for Billions of people

Our education systems operate in support of prevailing leadership behaviors

The Leadership We Have

Current leadership understandings and practices are sourced in a pre-historic archetypal mythology of conflict and competition.

Re-thinking Leadership LessonsYoung People Receive

leadership is learned in a paradigm of market forces, transactional authority, competition, winners/losers.

Servant leadership is introduced as a modern alternative leadership paradigm

Tenets of Servant Leadership Literacy

Robert Greenleaf (1970) The Servant as Leader

“The servant-leader is servant first”

Larry Spears (1998) Insights on Leadership

Listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to growth, building community.

 

Listening, Empathy, Trust

Greenleaf describes a patient and empathetic style of listening:

“I have seen enough remarkable transformations in people who have been trained to listen to have some confidence in this approach.

It is because true listening builds strength in other people”

Interdisciplinary Insights forServant Leadership

Servant leadership curricula are being developed and included in regular coursework.

Literature, philosophy, the artsSteinbeck, DaoismPersonalism, Feminist ethicsMusic instruction, direction and performance

Design Questions For Developing a Servant Leadership Curriculum

Examples

How can we develop curricula that assists students in identifying the difference between parroting established norms and leadership.

How might young people’s experience of leadership be re-framed using principles of equity and justice in contrast to authoritative power and competition?

What are some examples of, as Boggs describes, “processes and practices of a disappearing industrial era” still being used in our schools and universities?

How does a focus on measures of economic success contribute to our current concepts of leadership? and the way (i.e. pedagogy) young people learn about leadership?

What are some current educational practices that “fix or remediate” students in order that they fit into the prevailing leadership paradigm of business?

What new practices could provide students the required skills to re-create the world they want from shared values of justice and equity?

Design questions continued

Greenleaf describes “true listening” as the singular key quality of a servant leader.

How are students currently taught about “listening”?

How might students be taught this empathetic and patient style of listening?

How might this understanding of listening, framed as a leadership skill, be incorporated into curricula and the daily activity of students?

If current curricula are seen to be structured in the context of productivity, how might curricula be re-framed in a context of student well-being?

Describe how traditional, authoritative educational settings and activities could be re-framed in the context of a servant leader approach.

How might athletics, student government, or club organizations, where student work together using a leadership framework, be envisioned as servant leadership led organizations?