Liberation, Empathy and Democracy

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

My entry today is a little heady, but I promise I’ll alternate the theoretical with the practical and enjoyable–as well as mistakes I’ve made along the way.

I believe that re-imagining learning and leadership is bonded by themes of liberation, empathy, and democracy. These are the fibers that connect leadership and literature as well. I’ll start with a little bit about me, then the journey into the task of reframing leadership.

When I was growing up in a small Kansas town, it was books that became reflective mirrors, that fed my imagination. Jo in Little Women and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice–as well as my non-conventional mother–taught me about strength.

As a younger child, Lassie and Black Beauty, took me on a journeys from fear and tension to resolution. Wonderful mentors along the way challenged me to think beyond the limits often experienced by a young girl coming of age in Kansas in the ’50s. John Kennedy, and a personal conversation with Hubert Humphrey, taught me to believe in democracy and the role of government in people’s lives, although those beliefs are often strained these days.

Yet, it was my experiences in probation, social work, teaching, administration, and international work, as well as work in the university, that led me to understand the basic principles of liberation and empowerment and how those ideas must play out in a new view of leadership. How I arrived at Constructivist Leadership, the notion that leadership is “reciprocal, purposeful learning in community,” and thereby distinguishing it from “leader,” one who performs acts of leadership.

I learned of the consequences of working in organizations such as schools with a formal leader who was autocratic, seeking dominance and power. This type of leader, subtly defining leadership as the ability to control the work of others, results in the colonization and infantilization of those involved. Humans simply do not grow and develop, move into adulthood, when they are dominated. This has been the fate of many teachers in schools and workers in other organizations.

Leadership must be liberating, empowering of individuals, for it is those who can experience empathy, who can move outside of their own haunted worlds to feel compassion for others. Literature, as well, liberates by freeing our thoughts to imagine and think about anything that we want to think. The mind is freed by literature; the mind is freed by leadership that empowers.

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