The Education for Leadership research group joins the Humanities Center in Fall 2020. This group is interested in elevating the quality of education for all grade levels, elementary through post-secondary, and see tying language arts education to leadership development as the most promising way to accomplish this goal. Specifically, they will focus on the following four points:
1) Scholarship documents that having the critico-creative thinking and “soft skills” acquired from language arts studies leads to leadership positions not only in professional organizations, but also civic life
2) Humanist educators from the Hellenistic period through the Renaissance widely proclaimed the end of liberal education, whose core was the language arts (the trivium), to be leadership development
3) Current scholarship in cognitive science has demonstrated that instruction organized under an expansive frame enables deeper learning and broader transference of principles. We believe that seeing language arts instruction as leadership development provides the largest frame for such curricula and hence best enables transferences of classroom instruction to real life and foregrounds the instruction’s relevance and value.
4) These connections between a language arts core (the trivium) and leadership training have been forgotten in the centuries after the Renaissance, causing disciplinary fragmentation and narrowing, a seeming irrelevance for humanities based courses and GE programs, and loss of focus on the fundamental capacities most crucial to human development and successful relationship-building.
This research group looks to draw upon and contribute to scholarship in the fields of rhetoric, leadership studies, and education, making the arguments for inter-disciplinary collaboration and reflecting such collaboration ourselves.