Positionality, Place, and Pedagogies of Interdisciplinary Leadership Education

This event is part of the 2023 Celebrate Learning Week, taking place from May 2–9, 2023.

Leadership education plays a major role in students’ learning and development across many professional fields and disciplinary contexts. To learn from different perspectives, faculty members across disciplines of education, engineering, management, nursing, and social work have formed a new community of practice focused on interdisciplinary leadership. As an interdisciplinary learning community, we are confronted with differences in the way leadership is understood, enacted, affirmed, and oriented. We face a changing nature of leadership in a society that is awakening to the need to disrupt the status quo that does not serve our values of justice, freedom, and equity. We grapple with reconciling the past and current histories of injustice and equity gaps that are evident in our contemporary settings.

In this panel discussion, we aim to inspire conversations about how to productively engage students and colleagues in disrupting taken for granted notions and assumptions about leadership to open space for seeing relationships between power, privilege, place, and position. Through this panel, we will reflect on the power dynamics that arise in leadership contexts to develop understandings of how place shapes leadership education, and how we might promote more equitable and just leadership practices in the local context. Panelists will engage in an exploration of different pedagogies of leadership education, draw connections across their unique contexts, and reflect on their place and positionality as leadership educators from diverse disciplinary settings.

Facilitators:

• Richard Aleong, School of Engineering, UBCO
• Melanie Willson, School of Nursing, UBCO
• Sabre Cherkowski, Okanagan School of Education, UBCO
• Alon Eisenstein, School of Engineering, UBCO
• Jannik Haruo Eikenaar, School of Engineering, UBCO
• Judy Gillespie, School of Social Work, UBCO

Note to Non-UBC Participants:

In order to register for this program, non-UBC faculty, staff, and students will need to create a UBC Basic CWL. To do this, please go to the CWL page and scroll down to the accordion tab that reads “Basic”. Follow the instructions there for creating and activating a Basic CWL, then please return to this page to register for the program.

This event will be hosted online on Zoom and in-person on UBC Okangan Campus.