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Humanities Teaching as Leadership Training: A Study-to-Practice Faculty Development Workshop Series

This spring semester, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative will partner with Kallion Leadership Inc. to host a four-part workshop series open to faculty, graduate students and senior undergraduates. 

The goals of the Study-to-Practice (S2P) Workshop are to: 

  1. Better understand and appreciate the role that humanities educators play as leadership trainers;
  2. Intentionally redesign course materials with the explicit aim of getting students to practice leadership behaviors and cultivate leadership traits; and
  3. Develop ways to effectively communicate with students, colleagues, administrators, and the public the ways in which humanities coursework translates into better leadership practice for students in the short and long-term.

Small cohorts of faculty, graduate students and senior undergraduates will work together as equal partners in creating innovative leadership development course materials in order to make more engaging subject matter for all.

Faculty will be asked to identify a specific set of course materials such as a syllabus, a module or assignment that they would like to redesign with a leadership development framework in mind. Students will co-design the materials alongside faculty and  provide their expert input on what kinds of activities are engaging and illuminating to students. 

The S2P workshop series begins with a plenary opening session on February 3, in which participants explore the ways the work they are already doing in the classroom functions as leadership training. 

For the two subsequent sessions on February 10 and February 17, participants will be allowed to select their own thematic track from the three options available to identify the leadership development goals for these materials and brainstorm creative ways to teach to those goals, while still meeting other curricular objectives. 

Participants will have six (6) weeks to incorporate the feedback they received from facilitators, peers and students into their final, revised course materials. In the closing plenary session on April 7th, faculty will present their revised course materials and reflect on the opportunities and challenges of approaching their teaching as leadership training. 

All sessions will be held via Zoom. All participants must be able to commit to attend all four sessions. Register for the series. 

Three Tracks

Understanding and meeting the evolving challenges of the human condition requires us to tap into our creativity and imagination. As humanities teachers and students, we regularly study and engage with creative artifacts, including literature, visual arts, music, film, and theater. But how do we understand our own identity as creative artists? What are the materials, practices, and mindsets that encourage imagination, creativity, and spirit of intellectual bravery in the classroom? And how can we translate those practices into leadership behaviors beyond the classroom? In this workshop, we will consider these and other questions with the aim of identifying and assessing the leadership behaviors germane to the practice of our disciplines. We will then consider ways by which we might integrate such behaviors in our teaching.

This track is dedicated to thinking through how we can teach students to be better practitioners of racial justice through humanities coursework. Facilitators will help participants re-envision and rework course materials such as syllabi, projects, and assessments to activate the classroom as a space for imagining a more diverse and inclusive democracy. Together we will consider ways to better teach students to read texts and images; to synthesize disparate and fragmentary evidence; to write and speak clearly and forcefully; to understand the values, experiences, and cultures of others; and to hold critical and constructive dialogues across differences. 

This workshop track will explore what role graduate programs in the humanities have to play in developing scholars as leaders and will showcase models and samples to participants. Specifically the workshop will seek to address:

  1. what leadership development is needed in graduate education specifically to develop graduates as leaders
  2. how does the unique context of the humanities graduate degree offer a space to build in leadership education and tools for enactment in academia and the workplace?
  3. how can course materials such as syllabi and course assignments be reworked using a leadership framework? 

About our Facilitators

Richard Giarusso is a teaching artist who seeks to build meaning, relationship, and understanding through the study and performance of music. With an extensive background in music of the “classical” tradition and an enthusiasm for cross-disciplinary dialogue, he engages audiences of diverse backgrounds in conversations about music and its relationship to history, culture, and creativity. Trained at Williams and Harvard, he is Chair of the Musicology Department at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore and music director of the Georgetown Chorale in Washington, DC. Alongside these appointments, Richard maintains an active freelance career as a singer and speaker.

Irene Morrison-Moncure (PhD, Classics) is a pre-modernist at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies. She serves on the Board for Ascanius: The Youth Classics Institute and the Graduate Student Committee for the Society of Classical Studies. Through Kallion, she co-chairs the Leading Teachers Community of Practice and is a two-time facilitator for the International Camp for Democratic Leadership. She is also the current Series Editor for the SAGE Business Cases Ancient Leadership Series. Prior to NYU, she helped coordinate the CUNY Pipeline Program for Careers in College Teaching and Research, which mentors students from groups currently underrepresented in America’s universities.

Christine Tulley is Professor of English and founder and director of the Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Writing at The University of Findlay. With a focus on humanities leadership through rhetoric, graduate students from this program seek careers in academia as faculty and administration, cultural institutions, and a variety of workplaces. She is the author of How Writing Faculty Write (2018), the forthcoming Rhet Comp Moms: What 150 Time Use Diaries Can Teach Us about Parenting, Leadership, and Productivity (Utah State University Press), and contributes regularly to Inside Higher Education on faculty productivity issues. Two key research threads are an emphasis on joyful, sustainable academic writing practices and reimagining the role of classical rhetoric in graduate rhetoric and writing programs. 

Mallory Monaco Caterine (C’07) is a co-founder and co-executive director of Kallion Leadership, Inc., and a Senior Professor of Practice in Classical Studies and Greenberg Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Tulane University. Mallory earned her PhD at Princeton University, writing a dissertation on the significance of the Hellenistic past in Plutarch’s Lives; her recent research has focused on the representations of tyrants and women’s leadership in Greek and Roman literature. Her goal as an educator is to help students make connections between the past, the present, the self, and the human community.

Session Dates

  • February 3, 4-5:30pm ET: Opening Session: How is Humanities Teaching Leadership Training?
  • February 10, 4-5:30pm ET: Track Workshop 1
  • February 17, 4-5:30pm ET: Track Workshop 2
  • April 7, 4-5:30pm ET: Closing Session: Presentation of New Materials
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