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In an effort to better understand leadership educator preparation, this qualitative study explores leadership educators’ identity constructions, or (re)presentations of experiences, beliefs, and practices that contribute to one’s professional identity. We used three narrative approaches (storytelling, symbolic interactionism, and anticipatory reflection) to capture short stories of leadership educators’ lived experiences and life perspectives. Analysis of these narratives illustrate the kinds of past experiences that led to shifts in thinking or practice. Leadership education was seen as a process of leadership development, with teachers and students both exercising leadership. And participants’ reflection on their intentions for future practice emphasize learning that is both personal (relational) and procedural (developing knowledge and skills). Findings offer insight into recommendations for intentional professional development experiences and future research.

Bringing together leadership educators from 11 programs in Kansas, the Leadership Studies Summit fostered new initiatives and strengthened collegial networks. The summit responded to local and national expressed needs for intensive dialogue focusing on collaboration and capacity building among leadership educators for advancing the common good. This application brief will share the format and outcomes of this dialogue, including recommendations for future multi-institutional collaborations.

The use of high-impact practices is well documented in higher education literature. This brief describes the integrative practice of undergraduate peer-led leadership learning communities as a model of delivery within a large introductory leadership education course for first-year students. Utilizing open-ended questions embedded within end-of-semester teaching evaluation surveys, we analyzed students’ perceptions of the learning community experience and the peer leader’s role. Our findings illustrate how peer leaders play a critical role in fostering a vibrant leadership learning community, which contributes to students’ positive perceptions of their own leadership learning and development.

A great deal of literature exists for leadership educators related to programs design, delivery, and student learning. However, little is known about leadership educators, who have largely been left out of contemporary leadership education research. We looked to teaching and teacher education literature to derive a model for leadership educator professional identity development. The four spaces of identity development are exploration, experimentation, validation, and confirmation. We propose that an individual can move forward and backwards through the model as a result of both ongoing influences and positive or negative critical incidents. We discuss implications for professional development and future research.

This application brief describes the exploratory assessment of a mentoring program between current students and alumni of a leadership studies minor program. We connect leadership education research and practice in two ways: first, we describe a process of qualitative program evaluation to inform program best practices and improvement. In doing so, we also highlight the value of an alumni mentoring program as a strategic component of leadership education. Our findings demonstrate the mentoring program supported students’ leadership development in the areas of career transition, personal growth, and application to “real-life.” Recommendations are offered for creating formal and informal mentoring opportunities.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight a work-based leadership learning and development experience between a university and an organization in the Midwest of the USA.

The viewpoint highlights how the interplay of leadership in complex adaptive systems and Leadership-as-Practice development supports the need for work-based learning approaches to leadership development. The authors describe how the process of executive team meeting observations as a work-based, inquiry-focused leadership development intervention created a container for team members to explore their interactions and flow of practice in their everyday work experience.

Meeting observation and debriefing can be a powerful tool for work-based learning. This practice adds to the growing body of literature on collective, relational and practice leadership and offers insight into work-based learning for leadership learning and development.

Partnerships between higher education institutions and industry can create broader opportunities for leadership learning and development and contribute to organizational and community development. Leadership developers, consultants, coaches, trainers and practitioners can incorporate leadership learning and development experiences within existing organizational structures and systems.

This viewpoint provides new insights into a university-industry partnership to explore the impact of work-based leadership development exercises through meeting observations and debriefing activities.

In this innovative practice paper, we will illustrate how discursive practices of Visual Thinking StrategiesTM (VTS) can foster leadership development capacity of college students. We will show how VTS aligns with constructionist perspectives to post-heroic leadership grounded in discursive approaches to leadership development. This arts-based pedagogy advances leadership development through dialogue and sense-making.

The purpose of this study was to assess the leadership practices or behaviors of FFA members participating in a leadership development workshop known as the Success Conference in Georgia. Leadership practices were determined using the Student Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (Kouzes & Posner, 1998). While success conference participants scored the highest on encouraging the heart (M = 23.77; SD = 4.18) and enabling others to act (M = 23.75; SD = 4.40), placing Georgia FFA members participating in the Success Conference at approximately the 45^th and 35^th percentile respectively for all Student LPI scores, this was slightly below Kouzes’ and Posner’s (1998) normative data for high school students. It is recommended that future leadership development opportunities focus on activities that foster collaboration, strengthen others, recognize the contributions of others, and celebrate team accomplishments.

This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

Challenging, novel, and educational experiences are critical contributors to effective leader and follower development, in part, because such developmental experiences enable people to reconceptualize their perceptions about the traits and characteristics of effective leaders, or their implicit leadership theory (ILT). To understand how ILTs develop throughout developmental experiences, we examine the ILTs of 276 undergraduate students at the beginning and end of their first year of college. Using an open-ended ILT response format, a unique ILT trait of integrity emerged along with the dominant ILT traits of sensitivity, charisma, and dedication identified in previous literature. Overcoming limitations of the factor-based ILT approach, we investigate the development of ILT constellations, allowing a holistic picture of ILTs and how they throughout a developmental experience. Based on cluster analyses, four constellations of ILT themes emerged. Participants shifted to different ILT constellations after a year in college, moving from a non-descript, varied constellation toward constellations with clearly defined, dominant themes. Exploratory analysis revealed that completion of leadership coursework partially explains the shift towards more descript ILT constellations. Results have implications for new methods of future research using the ILTs constellation perspective and the practice of undergraduate leadership education in facilitating leader development among college students.