Two K-State Leadership Communication doctoral students, Chibuzor Azubuike and N’Zoret Innocent Assoman, earned awards at the Association of Leadership Educators (ALE) Conference, in Kansas City, Missouri, June 26-29, 2022. The mission of ALE is to strengthen and sustain the expertise of professional leadership educators.
Chibuzor Azubuike, a graduate teaching assistant at the Staley School of Leadership, was awarded the 2022 Founding Mothers Student Scholars Award. This award recognizes outstanding graduate students for their potential to impact the growing field of leadership education.
Azubuike is a social change leader, social entrepreneur, researcher, and teacher in her professional life and roles. As a full-time graduate student, she engages in interdisciplinary exploration of leadership communication. Azubuike’s research interests include women, migration, and development. At the conference, she presented a research proposal, An Analysis of the Leadership Development Curriculum of the Nigerian National Youth Service Corp Orientation Course.
N’Zoret Innocent Assoman, a graduate teaching assistant in the Staley School of Leadership, and his collaborator Abdul-Latif Alhassan, were 2022 recipients of an Association of Leadership Educators’ Mini-Grant. These awards provide small grants to support new diversity, equity, and inclusion focused projects or programs.
Assoman presented in a mini-grant showcase at the ALE conference and also presented a poster on research in progress. The engaged research project was entitled Leadership for Young Change Agents across Factions and Countries: Building Youth-Led Organizations Actors to Address Regional Issues. This project aims to support agents of change to act as catalysts for the development of other youth in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana through entrepreneurship and leadership training. It seeks to foster a collaborative and integrative platform for young people (activists of youth transformational change in both countries) working in youth-led organizations to thrive and bring sustainable changes (through a transformational leadership lens) in West Africa.
The project involves participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. It is organized into phases that include meetings, awareness and advertising, training, leadership development workshops, and interviews. The program kicked off in early May 2022, facilitated onsite by members of LEAD+AFRICA, Côte d’Ivoire, and the Civil Society and Institutional Foundation, CSIF- Ghana with the active support of Staley School faculty. Currently, the project has directly impacted more than 25 young agents of change in both countries.
“Chibuzor and Innocent are dynamic leadership developers, committed to consistently growing, thriving, and advancing leadership learning across many contexts. Their work represents inclusive and engaged approaches to leading change,” says Kerry Priest, associate professor in the Staley School and director of the leadership communication doctoral program.
