Leadership Faculty Scholars

Leadership Faculty Scholars

Elon’s Leadership Faculty Scholars program supports faculty who are interested in incorporating a leadership education component into their courses and exploring relevant pedagogies. The program has had participants from every college and most departments at Elon.

At Elon, leadership education is not centrally about giving orders or attaining formal power. Rather, Elon’s approach is relational and collaborative, and focused on helping students develop into ethical, purposive, and inclusive leaders and initiative-takers in organizations and society. This approach is consistent with shifts in the field as leadership education has grown beyond its early focus on formal authority to embrace topics like self-knowledge, informal leadership, effective cooperation, group dynamics, and conflict resolution, which are relevant for students regardless what formal roles they may attain.

There are 4-5 faculty in each cohort. Each participant identifies an upcoming course that they would like to create or modify to include a leadership education component. Participants learn together from a series of workshops. They also have access to a Moodle site with teaching materials and other resources. Ideally, the new or revised course is taught the following academic year. Faculty receive a $1,000 stipend upon completion of program requirements.

2023-24 projects (click on these links to see slides explaining each one) were: “Infusing Leadership Education into the Elon Music Theater BFA” (Courtney Liu), “Questioning (as) Leadership” (Ben Murphy), “Exploring Leadership with Experiential Learning” (Mustafa Akben), “Cross-Cultural Leadership Development through Collaborative Online Learning” (Sandy Marshall), and “Engineering Design for Service … and Leadership Development” (Sirena Hargrove-Leak).

Other examples of recent fellows’ projects (2021-22 and 2022-23) include: “Leadership and Mental Health: Applications in Exercise Science” (Eric Hall), “Ubuntu Leadership as Social Change Pedagogy” (Prudence Layne), “Leading the Sustainable Enterprise” (Scott Hayward), “Party Caucus Simulation and Leadership Development” (Aaron Sparks), “Leadership Pedagogy in Inclusive Communications” (Karen Lindsey), “‘Performing’ Leadership” (Keshia Wall), “Practices in Political Leadership” (Baris Kesgin), “Teaching as Classroom Leadership” (Aaron Trocki), and “Strategic Communications Leadership Development through Role Play” (Bill Anderson).

Applications

The program is open to permanent, full-time faculty from any field. Participants are selected through an application process. Elon is interested in infusing leadership education across the university, so applications from every discipline are welcome. Applications for the 2025-26 cohort will open in late Spring 2025. Contact Raj Ghoshal, Faculty Fellow for Leadership Education and Associate Professor of Sociology, with any questions.

2024-2025 Scholars

 

Recent Past Scholars