Date of Award
Spring 2012
Degree Type
Professional Project
Degree Name
Masters in Leadership Studies
Department
College of Professional Studies
Abstract
The critical essay seeks to establish a foundation for creating a servant leadership curriculum for high school and college students. The essay is divided into six sections. Section one, A Leadership Disconnect, contains a presentation of how our educational systems operate in support of prevailing leadership behaviors in a culture of global economic and social dysfunction. Section two, The Leadership We Have, contains an explanation of how current leadership constructs find their source in an archetypal transactional paradigm of competition and conflict. Section three, Re-thinking the Leadership Lessons Young People Receive, addresses how leadership lessons, messages and practices, in our schools are formed from an underlying paradigm of market forces, transactional authority, competition, and object based measures of success and failure. Servant leadership is introduced as a modern alternative leadership paradigm. Section Four, Tenets of Servant Leadership Literacy, contains an overview of servant leadership theory, themes and practice's as they have developed in the past 42 years. Section Five, Interdisciplinary Insights for Servant Leadership, provides examples of current servant leadership applications in traditional academic disciplines. Section Six provides a summary of key concepts from the preceding sections. It also provides foundational questions addressing the subject matter of each section from which a servant leadership curriculum can be designed.