Proposal for a Center for Leadership and Learning
The Committee for Leadership and Learning
—President-to-be Douglas Bennet, in a letter to the editor of the Wesleyan Alumni Magazine.
I. Introduction
Wesleyan is blessed with an extremely active student body, a dynamic administration, and a faculty that is engaged and committed to the university as a community as well as an academic forum. Yet we are fragmented as a community, uncoordinated in our efforts to improve the University, and often divided over issues where we have common goals and ideals but have alienated each other with poor communication and ill-thought-out procedures.
The questions we must ask are these: how can we address the challenges facing Wesleyan as a community with constant dialogue, self-evaluation, and experiential learning? How can we nurture and support an active student body, help the administration make informed decisions for Wesleyan, and engage the processes and ideals we learn in the classroom on a practical level, as a community?
The Committee proposes a Center for Leadership and Learning to serve two important functions on campus. The first is to nurture and support student activities at Wesleyan by providing resources, coordination, and training. The second is to engage the community in a critical, self-reflective dialogue—to re-think our systems and structures, our models of action and our channels of communication, all in an unending effort to build the skills of community leadership.
II. Assessment of Need
"It is no accident that most communities learn poorly. The way they are designed and managed, the way people's roles are defined, and most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact create fundamental learning disabilities. These disabilities operate despite the best efforts of bright and committed people. Often the harder they try to solve problems, the worse the results. What learning does occur takes place despite these learning disabilities." (adapted from The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge)
Student Activities: We have over 180 student groups on campus, including community service organizations, political action coalitions, publications, identity groups, and art, athletic, and other interest-based organizations. These benefit the community, provide students with practical experience, and draw prospective students to the University. These groups face unique challenges at Wesleyan, but as of now they receive only scattered administrative support.
Student groups at Wesleyan have a few unique needs. With so many groups, there needs to be a lot of communication—not just between groups, but with the administration and the outside world as well. This is an incredibly active community—events need to be coordinated, well-publicized, and easy to organize. Students are only here for four years, if that—a group needs to figure out how to create a stable structure, recruit new members, train them, and maintain a group history to keep it true to its mission and commitments.
The fact is, these needs aren’t filled at Wesleyan. Communication is poor—groups often find that they’ve tackled the same issues independently when they could be working together. Organizing is anything but easy—students have to run from office to office around campus to book spaces, rent equipment, get approval, and publicize their functions. Coordination is poor—because there’s no central calendar, groups may schedule similar events in conflict with each other. Worst of all, without formal leadership training, many groups alienate prospective members with poorly-run meetings and fold shortly after the student(s) who founded them graduate.
The Wesleyan Community: As a community, Wesleyan has even greater needs. At a university lauded for its diversity, students from different backgrounds feel cut off from each other and isolated. At a school noted for its student activity, the student assembly is hampered by a student body that is uninformed as to its nature, importance, and the issues it is currently dealing with. At an institution of liberal learning the theories and ideals we engage in class don’t, for the most part, leave the classroom, and the well-rounded education we offer neglects one important area: practice. And poor channels of communication between the students, faculty, and administration results in a mutual distrust that leaves the administration uninformed, the students disempowered, the faculty alienated, and wastes the time of all three bodies as they butt heads over proposals and policies that they should be working together on.
We need to engage in a critical process of self-reflection whereby we can address the systemic problems this University faces, both in terms of formal structure and the informal models of interaction that we’ve come to take for granted.
III. Proposal
The Center: The Committee proposes to create a Center for Community Leadership and Learning composed of an office staffed by a full-time Director and part-time student workers, a physical space for meetings, workshops, and resource materials (books, videos, periodicals, manuals, etc.), and a student Steering Committee that will hopefully include a faculty representative.
The Director will facilitate communication between student groups on campus, coordinate and streamline student activities, and head up existing leadership programs like WESLEAD and WESCAPE. The steering committee will be a group of committed students researching the structures and methods working for student groups on campus, channels of communication between students, faculty, and the administration, and the other structures and processes that make up Wesleyan. Together, the Steering Committee and Director will develop new programs and work on new models of training and learning; they will engage in a critical evaluation of the workings of the Wesleyan community and extend that dialogue to the rest of community through forums, programming, and training that emphasizes experiential learning and peer education. Decisions affecting the form or content of programming, or the policies or direction of the Center, will be made by consensus: everyone—the Director and the students—must reach agreement on final proposals.
Methods: The Center will support and facilitate student activity in the following ways: first, by simply providing support for groups in areas like budget development, program planning, fund-raising, and publicity; second, by training students as leaders—educating them in facilitation, consensus, and group decision-making processes, teaching them sustainable structures for student groups and methods of peer education, and engaging them in critical discussions on the methods of action and change; third, and perhaps most pragmatically, by consolidating student access to administrative resources on campus.
Imagine those resources already in existence as the spokes on a wheel: The office of Student Services is one spoke, the Director of the Campus Center another; the Office of Community Services is a third spoke, and the million-and-one offices students might have to go through to set up an event on campus—the Registrar’s Office to book classroom space, Audio/Visual to get equipment, the Athletic Director to book Fayerweather, the Director of the CFA to book space there, and the countless campus periodicals and calendars to get the word out—are the rest of the spokes. Students, at different times and in different capacities, have to go through each of these offices to do things on campus and, unfortunately, they often have to run between several at once just to plan a simple event.
If each of the offices mentioned above represents a spoke, each with its own distinct responsibilities, each doing its part to support the rim of the wheel—which is Wesleyan—then what the model’s missing, from a student’s point of view, is an axle. The Center for Leadership and Learning could fill this gap, working with the Offices that control particular student resources or support particular types of student activity (like Community Services) to decrease overlap and inefficiency due to fragmentation, facilitate student access, and better address the interests of Wesleyan as a community. The Center could serve as an interface between students and all the different offices they routinely have to run between. Imagine, for instance, if all student booking of space went through one office. At the punch of a key, that office could inform a group of potential conflicts with similar events and put the group on a central calendar that would necessarily include every student-run activity on campus—instant free publicity. The calendar could be sent to the Wesleyan Review and the Argus regularly, it could be printed on Wesleyan’s home page and posted in the Campus Center.
The Center, of course, will go far beyond conventional Student Activities functions. Its resources and administrative functions will be driven by a critical dialogue on the structures, systems, channels of communication, models of action, and pre-determined roles at play in the Wesleyan community. Through the model of peer education—training trainers and educating educators—learning compounds itself and can spread to every corner of the campus. This is the ultimate function of the Center: to guide Wesleyan towards a self-awareness as a community, to help craft a direction for the University based on experience and reflection.
It will be up to the Director and the Steering Committee to decide exactly how that is to happen, but we can nonetheless outline a unified approach to evaluating and improving Wesleyan as a community.
Approaches: Use of the terms "leadership" and "leader" does not mean that the goal of the Center is to create leaders per se, but rather to teach the skills students need: creative thinking, critical thinking, communication, the ability to take on leadership roles, and most importantly the capacity to foster leadership in others. The Center should provide a resource for students to learn how to better run their meetings, how to best approach campus issues, and how to act as facilitators and conflict resolution thinkers. It should create responsible and trustworthy coordinators within Wesleyan (and eventually, beyond it) that will see "leadership" as a sustainable process that all students, faculty, and administrators can participate in and learn from.
The approach of the Center will be to recognize the ways in which information/issues/knowledge are learned in this community and to, as President Bennet wrote, ‘define alternative responses.’ The Center will look at the ways our community has chosen to design and regulate itself, the ways in which students take on community roles both in and out of group activities, and will critically analyze structural, managerial, and pedagogical ways of learning at Wesleyan. The questions we will be must constantly ask ourselves are: "How do our issues work as a system? Are there alternative ways of learning and leading? Have we pragmatically chosen the most effective ways of learning and leading on campus and beyond? Have we created a sustainable environment that allows for constant change?"
It is simply not enough to coordinate student groups, events, and feedback loops so that leadership on campus is logistically streamlined and more effective; the Center also will provide a space to theorize and put into practice new ways of learning. The Center will study and learn from the Wesleyan community's processes—from student group meetings to board meetings—and advise on how we at Wesleyan can structurally, managerially, and pedagogically deal with learning disabilities that inhibit leadership and growth within groups. The Center will be a resource for new ways of learning: learning by focusing on group process, finding the problems in our processes of learning and communicating by analyzing issues as interconnected and nonlinear systems, training competent facilitators for the purpose of taking on facilitating roles within student groups and practicing conflict resolution within the community at large, fostering student dialogues and peer education opportunities, and offering leadership training.
In short, The Center for Leadership and Learning will not only act as a coordinator for better communication within and between student groups—it will be a think tank for news ways of learning and new paradigms of leadership training. The Center will provide theoretical models and a constant dialogue to institutionalize "leadership" at Wesleyan.
Give the Committee for Leadership and Learning your feedback.
Email:
Brian Edwards-Tiekert
bedwardstiek@mail.wesleyan.edu