Kansas State University

Continuing the Leadership in Democracy blog series, Alex Kappus introduces his research examining the lived experience of college students involved in nonpartisan political activity during the 2020 election season. Alex has worked in college student affairs administration for over 10 years and is a Ph.D. Candidate in Michigan State University’s Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education (HALE) program as well as a staff member at Central Carolina Community College in Sanford, North Carolina.

Between August and December 2020, I conducted interviews and focus groups with college students working to encourage their peers to be politically engaged. The students served as Democracy Fellows through the Campus Vote Project, an organization with a nonpartisan mission to promote student voting. Although the participants focused on voter registration and mobilization, they also promoted a wide range of nonpartisan activities, from organizing learning experiences, like Constitution Day, to moderating candidate forums, working the polls on election day, and more. In the midst of a turbulent election season and during a global pandemic no less, the students adapted, advocated, and contributed to historic youth voting rates. My study sought to illuminate the lived experience of nonpartisan political engagement and to understand how these experiences may influence student aspiration for future civic engagement.

A friend recently asked me, “Can someone really be nonpartisan?” The answer, at least according to my study’s participants, is yes and no. We all harbor personal opinions, and those ideas typically fall in line with entrenched partisan positions. Despite our internal inclinations about candidates and issues, however, we can exercise restraint in service to democracy. Continue reading “Agents for democracy: Learning from peer-to-peer nonpartisan political engagement” →

In this piece, Linda K Sibanyoni, an active politician and entrepreneur from Harare, Zimbabwe, and 2019 Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumna, offers a reflection from the global field on the state of democracy in the United States. In Linda’s piece, we’d invite you to consider a look from the outside in and reflect on the practices of democracy beyond the vote that challenge and sustain a nation. What leadership is required to persist in those practices at personal, organizational, and institutional levels? What practices must we strengthen and are their practices that need to be challenged or even jettisoned in order to make progress?

One of the true marks of a great leader, I believe, is their ability to be graceful in defeat.

As a Zimbabwean spectator to the insurrection in Washington, D.C., that took place Jan. 6, 2021, sadly this isn’t new to my Zimbabwean reality. The failure of a President to accept defeat is something I know very well, have seen and lived through. It is the highest mark of bad leadership in practice and it is dangerous to the progress and development of a nation.

What has kept the United States as a benchmark of democracy is its ability to continue striving for greatness even after 200 years. The ability of American leaders who have held office to respect institutions regardless of feelings. A history of Presidents who have always remembered that their duty to country – which also includes being graceful in defeat – is greater than personal sentiments and feelings. Continue reading “Duty to country, graceful in defeat” →

Continuing the Leadership in Democracy blog series, Mandela Washington Fellowship Alumnus from the Staley School of Leadership Studies’ 2019 Leadership in Civic Engagement Institute, Robson Chere, National General Secretary of the Amalgamated Rural Teachers Union of Zimbabwe (ARTUZ), shares his opinion on how the current COVID-19 context and government decisions impact educational opportunity in his home country of Zimbabwe. 

He asks us to consider the following questions:

• What role does the state have in recognizing educational inequity?
• How do educators advocate for more equitable learning?
• How can the state recognize power vested in the people?
• What does community change include when government officials are acting outside their formal authority prescribed by law?  

The state of the education sector in Zimbabwe has for the past two decades been under a series of direct attacks from the governing authorities in Zimbabwe and this, in retrospect, emboldened my resolve in the fight against the injustices and inequalities that have now been part of the social fabric. I completed the Leadership in Civic Engagement Institute, part of the 2018 U.S. Department of State’s Mandela Washington Fellowship, at the the Staley School Of Leadership Studies at Kansas State University. Continue reading “Education under siege” →

Meaningful leadership learning and development ought to prepare students to productively contest the proper relationship between, and the inner-workings of, the social (civil society), political (governing institutions), and economic (systems of production and distribution) spheres.

This post, by Associate Professor of Civic Leadership for the Staley School of Leadership Studies, Brandon W. Kliewer, Ph.D., unpacks the three categories of leadership learning and development that were identified in the initial post of this series and points readers to additional resources appropriate for leadership learning and development committed to advancing the project of democracy.

1. Deepening our understanding of democracy and the contested nature of the “common good”

Leadership learning and development in a democracy should NOT just be about celebrating the possibility of a common good or learning that it occurs at the levels of individual, community, and society. Under the common good frame, leadership efforts are often assumed to move groups towards a shared consensus. This type of consensus is really only possible when groups are largely homogenous and already share a large degree of common ground. Dialogical approaches to leadership learning and development call for what Chantel Mouffe might refer to as “agonistic pluralism,” channeling conflict between groups with different values in a positive way.

Agonistic pluralism assumes social, political, and economic conflict is inevitable and the ability of groups to understand this conflict from common ground is increasingly small. As a result, leadership learning and development ought to emphasize elements that improve the conditions of disagreement. This is the turn that moves leadership activity to emphasize dialogic interactions and conditions that produce productive disagreement.

Accepting some of the assumptions of agonistic pluralism, leadership learning and development becomes a project of shoring up internal tensions within the practice of democracy and working to create the conditions for productive disagreement in social, political, and economic spheres. Continue reading “Three categories to reconsider leadership for the common good” →

In this blog series we focus on discussions of leadership learning and development for improving the dialogic conditions of democracy. Put plainly, we will talk about how we talk and how our everyday interactions help us assign meaning to leadership activity necessary in a democracy. How does our practice of dialogue, listening, writing, retweeting, and communicating about ideas, values, and beliefs within our democracy shape our expectations for leadership activity? What does this have to do with how we teach, learn, and practice leadership in a democracy that aspires toward a common good? 

While planned prior to the insurgence at the U.S. Capitol, the first piece in this series highlights the mob assault on the peaceful transition of government power, a hallmark of U.S. democracy. 

This series will consider the role leadership learning, development and practice has in advancing democracy and responding to the growing threat of ethnonationalist authoritarianism.

Associate Professor of Civic Leadership for the Staley School of Leadership Studies, Brandon W. Kliewer, Ph.D., opens the series by providing the framework for the topic.

On Jan. 6, 2021, alt-right ethnonationalists coordinated an insurrection in Washington, D.C. The mob broke into the U.S. Capitol building and temporarily prevented a joint session of the U.S. Congress from fulfilling their Constitutionally-mandated duty of certifying the Electoral College.

Continue reading “What does the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol mean for leadership learning and development committed to advancing a common good?” →