Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................viiPreface...........................................................................................................................ixPART I Background and Context....................................................................................................11. Grassroots Leadership: Making the Invisible Visible............................................................................32. Framing the Study: Tempered Radicals Framework.................................................................................293. Developing a Study of Grassroots Leaders: Approach to Inquiry, Assumptions, and Institutional Descriptions.....................44PART II Individual and Group Grassroots Phenomena................................................................................694. Meet the Grassroots Leaders....................................................................................................715. Tactics and Strategy for Creating Meaningful Change............................................................................976. Analyzing and Overcoming Obstacles and Challenges for Grassroots Leadership....................................................1217. Encounters with Authority and Power: Ways Grassroots Leaders Navigate Resistance and Oppression................................1488. Grassroots Leaders' Understanding of Power and Effects on Leadership Style.....................................................1779. Remaining Resilient............................................................................................................199PART III Organizational Grassroots Phenomena, Implications, and Conclusion.......................................................22510. Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up: Challenges and Opportunities........................................................................22711. Leading in a Time of Corporatization: The Impact of Institutional Structures and Culture......................................25012. Encouraging and Supporting Faculty and Staff Grassroots Leadership............................................................26613. Moving Forward: Leadership Implications and Future Research...................................................................287Appendix: Grassroots Leadership...................................................................................................317Notes.............................................................................................................................335References........................................................................................................................341Index.............................................................................................................................349

Chapter One

Making the Invisible Visible

* * *

Janine is a biologist who has watched students struggle in her classes for years—particularly those who cannot overcome math deficiencies. Few institutional supports exist, and she has no place to send students for additional academic assistance. After talking to several other colleagues, she realizes the issue is prevalent in other science majors. Janine discovers some helpful teaching techniques and new texts she can use with students, and she begins to offer an informal math support skills group that gains great popularity. Students tell her she is fundamentally changing their understanding of math. Yet this effort begins to create a great deal of additional work. She speaks with her department chair about getting a course release to offer the support group, but he feels that his hands are tied because of tight finances and refuses. Janine organizes several colleagues to contact the chair to discuss the importance of the support group. After a few months of communication by colleagues and students, the chair accedes and temporarily allows her a course release. In the meantime, Janine sets out to get broader campus support for math support skills. She collects data (pre-and posttests related to performance) in her support group to demonstrate the impact of her tutoring efforts. She presents these data to the academic senate and administration. Within the year, a math support center opens. Although resources are temporary, if the center demonstrates outcomes similar to her support group, campus administrators agree to provide ongoing funds. Over the next two years, Janine works with the center director to set up an advisory board of faculty and to gain campus support, and she collects data on the efficacy of the center. Many faculty and staff talk about Janine's work with pride—she identified a real need and developed a change that made students more successful. While this problem had existed for years on campus, it had never been addressed and maybe never would have been without Janine's efforts. This book is about people like Janine—bottom-up leaders who make important changes that often go largely unnoticed, unacknowledged, and often unsupported. Greater understanding of people like Janine may lead to more support for bottom-up changes on college campuses that can improve student learning and college completion.

Leadership remains one of the most important topics across a range of fields because studies continuously demonstrate that the success and well-being of any institution or society depend on the functionality, effectiveness, and promotion of leaders and leadership (Conger & Benjamin, 1999). Traditionally, leadership research has focused on individuals in positions of power, such as presidents and CEOs, and has seen leadership as an individual attribute (Kezar, Carducci, & Contreras-McGavin, 2006a).1 But, in the last twenty years, a variety of scholars have proposed that leadership is not synonymous with authority and have examined the role of other individuals within the organization and their contributions to institutional operations and change (Astin & Leland, 1991; Kanter, 1983; Meyerson, 2003; Pearce & Conger, 2003). These newer definitions of leadership also attempt to distinguish the work of managers and leaders because often the work of managers (budgeting, hiring, decision making) has become synonymous with leadership (Bass, 2009). Instead, the nonhierarchical views of leadership have defined and understood leadership to be distinctive from management (although the two are not mutually exclusive) and involved creating change (Astin & Leland, 1991; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Komives & Wagner, 2009; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Furthermore, leadership has expanded to be considered a process that involves groups and is not executed only by individuals. Over time, departing from traditional, hierarchical, and authority-based models, new models of leadership have emerged, such as team-based, shared, and distributed leadership (Astin & Leland, 1991; Bensimon & Neumann, 1993; Komives & Wagner, 2009; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Team and shared models identify and examine the role of individuals outside authority in leadership and consider leadership a collective process that is...