From Command to Community: A New Approach to Leadership Education in Colleges and Universities

4: Public and Community-Based Leadership Education

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Stephanie Raill Jayanandhan, and Sarah Woiteshek Public and Community-Based Leadership Education � By “public leadership,” we mean the acts, great and small, of individuals and groups as they tackle challenges facing a community or society. (Gergen n.d.) At their best, community leaders create the social space in which citizens can recognize their own interests, assess the community’s needs and opportunities, share their beliefs and ideas, and create a pathway to put shared beliefs into action in pursuing the good. This understanding of leadership signals a “Copernican turn” from leadership revolving around the superiority of leaders to leadership revolving around the authoritative action of followers—in the exercise of their freedom and power. (Schweigert2007, p. 327) Leadership studies and leadership education, fields of research and practice in higher education since the mid-twentieth century, have recently evolved to encompass more collaborative, adaptive, and relational leadership practices. This evolution is a movement away from a singular focus on trait-based and positionbased theories of leadership, following Burns’s call (1978) for more compelling, creative, moral, and intellectual foundations for leadership theory and practice. Since that time, we have seen the proliferation of inclusive and process-oriented leadership models—what has been called the postindustrial paradigm—with an increasing emphasis on social responsibility and integrity, as a trend shaping leadership education programs in U.S. colleges and universities (Faris and Outcalt 2001). Many of these new models insist that leadership is a process of fostering change to transform society, to “empower change agents” to “work for the better- 84 leadership and civic engagement ment of others” (Understanding the social change model of leadership development , para. 1). The emergence of these models has been well documented and signals a promising shift in the overall directions of leadership theory and practice in this new millennium. A similar yet distinct trend attempts to renew an old tradition within leadership studies, the study of public leadership, and explicitly to resituate it in relation to the contemporary challenges and contexts of the cities, towns, communities, and regions in which institutions of higher education are located. Public leadership, widely associated with the work of elected officials, is a term that includes thousands of others serving in civic capacities: appointees, community activists, educators, nonprofit officials, and others whose work affects our civil society and wider social life. While these broad shifts are promising, we believe that the specific context of educating for and enacting leadership in the public sphere necessitates a particular approach to leadership education and understanding of the leader’s role. In this chapter, we call this specific approach public and community-based leadership. We provide definitional statements and a rationale for this approach and then outline practical suggestions for enacting public and community-based leadership education in higher education. We begin with a definition of leadership and an analysis of its key concepts. Leadership, practiced in and for public life, is comprised of the actions of citizens who convene, deliberate, inquire, collaborate, and act with the intent to improve life for fellow citizens in their communities and the larger society. In describing this model of leadership, we use three key terms: public, community, and of course, leadership itself. We begin our analysis with perhaps the most common but least understood of these three concepts. Public refers to the ideal of shared, diverse, and “universally accessible dimensions of collective life, as well as those things which have a general impact upon the interests of all; the realm of interdependence” (Cooper 2001, p. 55). The public is a more defined and specific site than the social, a term often found in the new leadership education literature and that often includes social change as a central value.Whilesocialsignalsthecharacteristicsofliving,coexistingorganismsasthey interact and share common systems and meanings, public refers to a specific political ideal commonly espoused in democratic nation-states. It is a notion reaching back thousands of years to the early Greek city-states in the earliest documented forms of democratic governance. The public is a “pluralist, heterogeneous social space of many different interests, viewpoints, and community histories,” where the aim is “common action on public problems” (Boyte 1993, p. 766). The public is the realm of political activities, large and small, formal and informal, a space where people come together to do the difficult work of solving collective problems in the face of competing interests and multiple viewpoints. Public work requires public...