Running head: LEADERSHIP EXPRESS PROJECT 1

Leadership Express Project

Brett Stachler

Loyola University Chicago

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.