Integral multidisciplinary leadership learning.

Abstract

In this article we map intersections of theory and practice that arose through collaborations among three professors of leadership and one student. Our descriptions of this collaboration cut across distinctive professional orientations, yet result in a shared framework of insights. Both our collaboration and resultant framework illuminate how deep integration across departments and divisions enhances both student learning and faculty development.

Introduction

Despite the balkanized learning environments prevalent on most college campuses, many students still manage to experience their education as an integrative whole. Students integrate disparate opportunities for learning, whether educators do so or not. The collaborative story that follows is the result of an array of inter-connected experiences that arose among a student and three leadership educators who serve the university in distinctly different roles and contexts. David Cowan is Professor in the School of Business and frequently teaches undergraduate leadership courses. Judy Rogers is Associate Professor in the School of Education and teaches within a graduate leadership program. Denny Roberts is Associate Vice-President for Student Affairs, a position that involves coordinating campus-wide cocurricular leadership programs and includes serving as the advisor to student government and other student groups and organizations. The student who became the linking pin within this collaborative experience is John Newell. As an undergraduate student at Miami, John served as president of his own fraternity and then as president of the Inter-Fraternity Council, which oversaw the affairs of 27 fraternal organizations at the University. After his graduation in 2003, John joined Marsh USA, Inc. in Chicago, and presently serves as their Midwestern Higher Education Sales Leader.

The purpose of our article is to outline interconnections of theory and practice that arose through myriad interactions among these three professors of leadership and one student leader, John. Our story and its resultant insights are meant to illuminate how mutual collaborations can enhance the learning and development of individual students. In addition, they are meant to embody current emphases in leadership theory for boundary spanning and interconnectedness, as well as the higher education reform reports' call for seamless learning environments for optimal student development (e.g. The Student Learning Imperative, American College Personnel Association, 1994; American Pluralism and the College Curriculum: Higher Education in a Diverse Democracy, Association of American Colleges and Universities, 1995; and Greater Expectations: A New Vision of Learning as a Nation Goes to College, Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2002). Many of the discoveries leading to the framework of premises that we present near the end of this article definitely involved some synchronous serendipity (e.g., Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski, & Flowers, 2004) as described in Jean Lipman-Blumen's model (1996) the "connective edge." We begin with an explanation of forces that came together to enable this experience to occur. We then provide a brief excerpt of John's story about being at the center of this collaborative learning experience. In subsequent sections, we explain theoretical underpinnings that connect our three faculty approaches to leadership development, specific ways that we each engage students in learning, and shared premises about leadership development and learning that emerged from our collaborative efforts. We see our work as an example of how integration and boundary spanning across divisions, disciplines, and levels of a university can enhance student learning as well as faculty development.

Setting the Context

A single student, John, and a serendipitous reading were perhaps the initial conditions in bringing together a School of Business Professor, David, and an Associate Vice-President for Student Affairs, Denny. In his next-to-last semester as an undergraduate student, John enrolled in a business seminar in organizational leadership. At the same time, he held a challenging leadership role as President of the Inter-Fraternity Council. While John was taking David's seminar, he was also involved in regular meetings with Denny. Denny met with John in order to help him understand leadership challenges he faced and to offer both assistance and nurturance of his learning. At the same time, Denny was also teaching a section of a graduate introductory course for students studying college student personnel administration. Judy was teaching the other section and, in fact, had designed the syllabus both were using. One of the course readings involved the early twentieth-century principles of democratic education (pragmatism) proposed by John Dewey (Shot, 1992). This introduced Denny's graduate students to an age-old dilemma in education: discerning the degree to which students can and should be involved in shaping their own learning. Similar premises of empowered education also shaped how this graduate course was designed and taught. Goals of the course included not only introducing graduate students to empowered teaching on an intellectual level, but also engaging them in experiencing such education in ways the class was taught (cf. Baxter Magolda, 1992). Knowing that he would be teaching first-year students in a leadership seminar the following semester and wondering if empowered learning could be successful for that audience, Denny began discussing the model with John during their regular conversations in an effort to assess his reactions and ideas. John's insights along the way, some of which were drawn from David's seminar, demonstrated considerable depth of student understanding and a genuine willingness to engage learning across disciplines and levels. John soon inquired if Denny would allow him to serve as a teaching assistant in the upcoming undergraduate class. As a consequence, a unique stage was set for circumstances to collide from different directions. Denny, David, and Judy were all drawn together into emerging interactions triggered in many respects by a student who crossed these boundaries naturally. Integral multidisciplinary leadership learning emerged not only for John as a student, but also for each faculty member.

Integrating Curriculum and Co-Curriculum

Our work with each other as partners in both learning and educating was prompted by John, as just described. The following is a brief synopsis of this story in John's words.

   After completion of one term as chapter president of a campus
   Fraternity, I was elected as Inter Fraternity Council (IFC)
   President. Given my fraternity experience, I knew the issues
   surrounding a successful liaison between 27 fraternities and the
   University administration were going to be challenging. To succeed
   I would need a lot of advice and wisdom on the politics of the
   university as well as on the inter-workings of the different
   fraternity chapters. I was fortunate to be able to develop two
   serendipitous relationships, one with Dr. Denny Roberts, the
   Associate Vice President for Student Affairs and the other with Dr.
   Cowan, a professor in an organization leadership seminar I was
   taking at the time. Meeting the two of them, coupled with my
   readiness to take responsibility for my learning, were the main
   catalysts that brought together my academic and co-curricular
   experiences. This motivated me to seek an opportunity to work as a
   Teacher's Assistant (TA) with Dr. Roberts and another student
   leader, Matt. In doing so, not only could I then integrate my
   learning more deeply, but also I had the unique opportunity to learn
   from the freshmen I taught, while simultaneously enabling them to
   benefit from some of the experiences and principles that I was
   acquiring at Miami.

Leadership Development in the 21st Century

We believe that a growing number of responsible, mindful students have experiences similar to John's, in which learning has few formal boundaries. In addition, we believe that many faculty and administrators would agree that educational programs are not adequately designed for truly deep, integrative learning (e.g., Whitt, 2006), but that they instead retain imprints from the Newtonian, segmented mindsets that designed them long ago. In response, we propose not only that the past decade of developments in leadership and learning theory can help to facilitate constructive changes, but also that such changes require an increasing focus on whole systems of learning, not just on separate courses, majors, disciplines, and so forth. In this section, we highlight some theoretical developments that stand at the cutting edge of ideas that can motivate, inform, and guide integrative improvements in educational design. At the same time, we acknowledge that our coverage of relevant literature is intended to be representative and suggestive rather than collectively exhaustive and definitive. Without a doubt, education must fit its context. In other words, education must keep pace with changes in the world that affect not only how people live, interact, work, and learn, but also how institutions and societies emerge, grow, interact, and thrive. Education that is not aligned with the needs of its times and the lives of the people involved is perhaps not rightly called education. Consequently, in a world where physical and technological boundaries are falling while many emotional boundaries intensify; where cultures clash while they increasingly blend; where social and work processes accelerate, roles blur, and technological sophistication invades from all sides, both leadership and learning must follow suit and align with such patterns.

In many cases, leadership demands are increasing more rapidly than educational changes, although their rigid and exclusive premises have both been under attack for decades. Notable arguments in the domain of leadership include those by Greenleaf (1970), Senge (1990), Handy (1998), and Drucker (1999). In the domain of education, they include those by Dewey (1980), Adler (1977), Bloom (1987), and Sternberg (1985). Generally speaking, all of these arguments propose shifts toward empowerment, respect, involvement, engagement, connectedness, sharing, and sustainability. As societies and organizations of all shapes and sizes become increasingly comprised of better-educated people, leadership philosophies and their accompanying methods are increasingly being challenged to change in many unique ways. As they change, leadership-development is similarly being challenged to follow suit in order not to fall too far behind.

Amid social turbulence that demands rapid and integrative leadership and educational changes, John's experience shines through as a critical example of how some people are increasingly experiencing their lives in a seamless manner. At the same time, John's experience reminds us of how educational systems remain recognizably compartmental and disjointed. Comprising a theoretical foundation for change are at least two cornerstones. One involves increasing awareness of seamlessness (e.g., Bohm, 1980; Sample, 2002) and interconnectedness (Hall, 1994; Lipman-Blumen, 1996) that is rapidly rising in human consciousness. The other involves increasing awareness of the need for genuine respect for all humanity, however diverse (Bernard, 1981, Wall & Arden, 1990). These ingredients alone are arguably sufficient to create chaos and a need for rethinking our processes of "organizing" in most parts of previously stable societies (Friere, 1993). Accompanying impacts on leadership and education are likewise creating a need to reexamine the premises that inform the status quo in each domain.

In the realm of leadership theory, the recognition of seamlessness (e.g., Kim & Mauborgne, 1992; Wheatley, 1999) and the call for greater respect for humanity (e.g., Block, 1987; Rubin, 2001) are emerging from myriad different voices. Responding to such catalysts, Rost's (1994) framing of shared leadership, and Heifetz and Linsky's (2002) framing of leadership conviction both imply that leadership education can and must become more engaging for students, enabling "deep change" (e.g., Koestenbaum, 2002; Quinn, 1996) not just more knowledge. With similar intent, Loden (1985) contributes unique ideas for enriching leadership talent. For example, drawing insight from women's leadership strengths, Loden emphasizes the value of cooperation, teams, and relationships for today's complex scenarios. Similarly, Goleman (1998), Palmer (1992),

and Sample (2002) respectively promote emotionality, spirituality, and cognitive flexibility as dimensions that may also enrich leadership development. In the realm of learning theory, increased emphases on seamlessness and respect for humanity bring a distinct push for building bridges across educational silos. Furthermore, they suggest relevant inroads for helping to create such changes. Perhaps more than ever before, attention to developmental stages of learning is creating a critical mass of interest in integrative educational designs. Building on foundations of early developmental scholars such as Piaget (1972), Vygotsky (1978), Feuerstein (1979), and Gilligan (1982), emerging theories are capitalizing on synergies between empirical evidence and practical relevance. For example, Baxter Magolda (1992; 2004) has created a framework that is uniquely tuned to the frequencies of student development; Sternberg (1996; 2003) has created a framework centered on the acquisition of successful intelligence, which merges analytical, creative, and practical competencies; and Wilber (1995) has illuminated deeply integrative patterns--involving quadrants, levels, lines, states, and types--that cut across all disciplines and societies. Complementing these integral developmental perspectives, scholars such as Senge et al., (2004) have defined complex progressions that help to define how leaders gain insight, focus, commitment, and follow-through. Similar in purpose to the transformational frameworks of Quinn (1996) and Palmer (1992), their progression outlines a deeply transformative, inner journey that leaders must engage in order to gain sufficient wisdom and energy to face complex challenges in today's leadership contexts. Astin and Astin (2000) help to translate such ideas into educational contexts, while scholars such as Glassman (1998), Jones (1999), and Myss (1997) contribute complementary processes that increase our understanding of the intricate and intimate challenges involved.

Our argument is incomplete if we do not return to an emphasis on the need for systemic, inclusive leadership education, which is where John's story (above) left us. Systemic and inclusive education expands consideration beyond single courses, programs, and extra-curricular activities, to combinations that involve whole lives of people operating in whole systems. Reframed systemically and longitudinally, such learning becomes genuinely seamless as learners transform into integral multidisciplinary leaders, with more than favorite weapons in hand. Roberts (2003) highlights various issues of inclusion that must be addressed in these efforts, while theorists such as Capra (2002) and Darsoe (2004) illuminate "hidden connections" and "pockets of potential" that enable such systems to arise and sustain. In the next few sections, we examine three educational experiences at Miami University (from the perspectives of David, Judy, and Denny), drawing insight from interactions with students such as John and from relevant leadership and educational theorists. We then integrate these perspectives and insights as premises that support integral multidisciplinary leadership learning.

Organizational Leadership--David's Perspective

This section focuses on two dimensions of my undergraduate leadership seminar: 1) premises that guide the course design; and 2) frameworks that inform its structure and strategy. The seminar is called "Leadership and Learning" and resides within the "Management and Organizations" major in the School of Business.

Premises

The driving force behind my seminar design is that leadership potential increases as students become better prepared to handle "leadership moments" that comprise real-world situations. Leadership moments arise when circumstances collide to create a need for direction and action. Those who possess the potential to respond effectively are best suited to assume leadership. Leadership education prepares students to handle wider arrays of situations, enabling them to build a relevant repertoire of flexible skills that facilitate improvisation. The following are four representative premises of my seminar design:

1. Students benefit by understanding beliefs and values that align with their own generation.

2. Students cannot rely only on mental intelligence alone; an increasingly diverse and dynamic world demands effective use of multiple intelligences.

3. Students benefit by learning to wisely cross boundaries of various kinds (e.g., disciplinary, cultural, and so forth).

4. Increasing leadership potential is an "inside-out," not just "outside-in," learning challenge where learners confront subtle reality and engage in tacit learning.

Frameworks

Two frameworks guiding the structure of my seminar combine circular and linear patterns. The circular pattern derives from the Native American Medicine Wheel, grounded in understanding the natural (cf. real) world. Although interpretations and applications vary among Native American nations, premises of the structure are fairly consistent. Sources used in this paper for descriptions of the Medicine Wheel are primarily Cherokee, Lakota, and Iroquois. The second framework, which is linear, depicts stages of development along the novice-to-mastery path grounded in Western European literature. The novice-to-mastery pattern draws upon generations of empirical attention to human development from infancy to adulthood as well as to development within specific realms of life, such as mathematics, chess, and music. The Medicine Wheel is typically illustrated by a circle grounded in the cardinal directions, each serving as an anchor for a unique region of human potential (Storm, 1972; 1994). East represents spiritual potential with vision and intuition. South represents emotional potential with experience and scrutiny. West represents physical potential with reflection and introspection. North represents mental potential with integration and perspective (e.g., Meadows; 1989, 1990; Underwood, 2000). Examples of literature that illustrate the importance of each direction as listed include the inclusive vision of Dr. Venkataswamy (Rubin, 2001); the keen awareness of renowned tracker, Tom Brown, Jr. (Brown, Jr., 1999); the reflective insight of Carolyn Myss (1997); and the wise integration of Pawnee elder, Uncle Frank Davis (Wall & Arden, 1990). The four directions provide a metaphorical compass, intersecting a temporal horizontal axis from past to future, with a spatial vertical axis from microscopic to telescopic. Each region represents parts of a circle, much like primary colors represent regions of the color spectrum.

In contrast to cyclical interconnectedness, the novice-to-mastery path offers a linear pattern of development. This pattern is typically presented as a continuum of stages from novice to mastery, where each builds upon but transcends previous stages, bringing forward an essence of prior stages but creating a qualitatively distinct entity at each emerging stage. A helpful description of this path comes from the martial arts: 1) acquire basics, 2) personalize basics, 3) adapt basic to contexts, and 4) stop thinking about levels 1-3 in order to embody them naturally. Both frameworks--the Medicine Wheel and the novice-to-mastery path--operate within my seminar mostly as underlying structures. An important role for me as instructor, therefore, is to periodically bring them to the surface of attention so that students are reminded of their presence, relevance, and value. Each time this happens, I offer an alternative explanation to help students enrich, not just repeat, their understanding. Also, I have not found it constructive to include specific readings in the seminar about these frameworks, although students who seek additional knowledge can be directed to sources such as Gilligan (1982), Kohlberg (1981), and Wilber (1995) for the novice-to-mastery pattern, and to sources included above for the Medicine Wheel.

Higher Education Leadership--Judy's Perspective

I teach in a College Student Personnel (CSP) master's program preparing professionals for student affairs leadership roles. The theoretical models that guide my work encompass two areas of research, specifically, leadership theory and student development theory. Over my seventeen years of teaching, these two areas of study gradually intersected to inform each other. I noted that Marcia Baxter Magolda's (1992) research on what promotes students' intellectual development dovetailed with the empowerment literature (e.g., Block, 1987; Belasco & Stayer, 1993). For example, in talking with students about situations in which they learn best, Baxter Magolda discovered three elements present in an optimal learning environment, specifically, when: 1) the student is validated as a knower, 2) learning is situated in the student's experience, and 3) knowledge is mutually constructed among teacher and students. Learning environments that exhibit these characteristics promote students' self-authorship, that is, students develop the internal capacity to clarify their beliefs, identity and relationships. These three principles resonated with the qualities of empowering environments that Block (1987) and others described. Furthermore, self-authorship is clearly a requisite capacity for effective leadership. Based on the leadership theories that I espoused and on student development theory that described optimal learning environments, I transformed my pedagogy. The result was a new wholeness and integrity in my approach to developing integral multidisciplinary leaders.

As an instructor guided by Baxter Magolda's Learning Partnerships Model (Baxter Magolda & King, 2004), I recognize and respect that students bring knowledge and expertise to the learning situation, I ground the lesson in their experience, and we mutually make meaning of theories, issues, and problems under discussion. I moved away from an expert teaching model (which correlates with traditional views of leadership) and, instead, form partnerships with students as they rebuild their worlds (the relational approach to leadership). My objective is to model for students the kinds of relationships they want to construct with their collaborators in leadership situations. Our classroom becomes a laboratory for how to create the kind of environment that fosters empowerment, risk taking, creativity, self-reflection, and on-going learning among collaborators.

The Learning Partnership Model is now embedded in all facets of the CSP program. In essence, our curriculum provides a structure that implements the Learning Partnership Model, the pedagogical approaches and advising used by all the faculty are grounded in and enact the model, and we engage in on-going critical reflection and evaluation so that our learning community remains relevant and vibrant as a partnership among teachers and learners. One of the most tangible products of engaging the LPM in our work has been the emergence and explicit adoption of a set of core values that shapes all that we (both teachers & students) do as a community of scholars in our master's program. The core values of the CSP Learning Community:

--Situate Learning in Students' Experience--Members' experience is used as a context for learning.

--Self-Reflection--Members analyze their experience in relation to knowledge explored.

--Integration of Theory/Inquiry/Practice--Theory, inquiry and practice inform each other, and interact in knowledge construction.

--Constructive Collaboration--Members build on each other's knowledge, form opinions, explore multiple perspectives. All members are viewed as teachers/learners.

--Creative Controversy--Members engage in respectful dialogue and exchange as we explore our different perspectives.

--Self-Authorship--Members engage in exploration, critical analysis and synthesis that contribute to informed judgment.

--Shared Commitment to Inclusiveness--Members appreciate and include multiple forms of diversity.

--Offer Adequate Challenge and Significant Support--Members strive to create an environment that balances challenge and support.

These core values are embedded in each member of the community, and serve as an internal guide for our learning, actions, relationships and decisions. Students become active citizens and leaders in sharing in the ongoing creation of their community. The LPM creates an optimal environment for developing integral multidisciplinary leaders. It is holistic rather than fragmented, and collaborative rather than competitive. In addition, it focuses on interconnections among the cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal dimensions of the individual rather than on cognitive only, and it creates contexts to explore diverse perspectives rather than valuing only the views of supposed 'experts.' It is a context that nurtures capacities necessary for twenty-first century leadership.

Co-Curricular Leadership--Denny's Perspective

The "MU Leadership Commitment" is primarily a co-curricular leadership emphasis that invites all students to participate (Roberts, 2001). The program vision "to develop the leadership potential in all students for the global and interdependent world of the future" was the result of broad solicitation and hours of discussion and input.

Principles

The core principles of the "MU Leadership Commitment" include the beliefs that all people are capable of leadership, that true leadership is possible only when we know ourselves deeply, that one of the most powerful stimuli for leadership is the discovery of conviction in oneself, that authenticity in one's beliefs and relationships is key, and that learning to lead in many ways will take care of itself if the first four variables are enacted. These five principles are not all explicitly identified within the espoused premises of the "MU Leadership Commitment." However, the first of these, that all people are capable of leadership, was a shared assumption by the planning team from the beginning. Joseph Rost's (1991) work on post-industrial leadership, the shared leadership resulting from mutual work and dedicated to creating mutually beneficial outcomes, provided the foundation for this principle.

Such a core definition required a new and adaptive response. It required the involvement of many faculty and staff throughout the University communicating in a way that provided consistent and mutually-reinforcing messages. One way of creating coherence was to organize the strategies around multiple purposes and processes, as well as concern for multiple populations that would be served (Roberts, 1981). These broad categories allowed planners to analyze the systemic structure of how leadership was fostered and learned. The other four principles have emerged implicitly. If all students are embraced as having leadership potential, if self-knowledge and capacity for conviction are deepened, and if authenticity is fostered, students can learn the skills and tools they need to be more efficient and effective as they proceed through their experiences. They are also more likely to retain their learning if they encounter knowledge at moments when it is needed and in contexts where application is immediately available.

Principles applied to practice

Our experience with the value-based "MU Leadership Commitment" has indicated that this framework invites broader numbers of students into leadership and that it creates a cohesive and repeated message about what leadership entails. When MU students graduate, over one-third report having participated in some form of leadership development, more than double the percentage of other comparable institutions (Roberts, 2005). In addition, graduating students report greater endorsement of questions that convey a non-hierarchical and shared leadership perspective. Finally, they graduate believing that they are more capable of leadership and that they have the ability to create change in the work and community settings in which they will serve.

The nine values of "MU's Leadership Commitment" provide the foundation for more than 20 programs offered on an annual basis at Miami. While it is easy to recognize that these programs could achieve a variety of outcomes either singly or together, the following examples demonstrate how they address multiple purposes, through multiple processes, and are offered for multiple populations. Training, education, and development are recommended as three purposes that should be addressed in leadership learning. An example of training is a retreat for student government leaders on parliamentary process and how to draft legislation. An example of education is the "Leadership Connections" series, a set of workshops that can be requested via the web and provided in response to students' and student organizations' expressed needs. An ongoing seminar on social justice issues called Empower is a developmental program used to encourage students to exercise leadership to address human inequities and sub-standard living conditions. Multiple processes such as living groups, experiential education, conferences, retreats, a resource center and alternative spring break trips are all used to draw students with a variety of interests and learning styles together. Finally, different sub-populations such as students of color, women, members of fraternal organizations, social activists, and others are all targeted with special programs tailored to their needs and interests. MU's Leadership Commitment seeks to nurture leadership capacities in all students in ways that stimulate positive change in organizations, communities, government, and elsewhere.

An Emergent Model of Leadership Learning

Through mindful and rigorous discussions of the above approaches and of theoretical models for developing leadership potential, we converged on a set of core premises that we illuminate below. Our discussions, being multi-disciplinary and cross-level themselves, required considerable trust and collaboration. Our shared beliefs about both leadership education and ways of engaging students form the heart of what we call integral multidisciplinary leadership learning. We propose that attention to these premises challenges educators to look beyond traditional boundaries inherent in most educational settings. We also propose that translation of such premises into particular educational environments will enrich the learning of those involved, both in terms of breadth and depth. Our premises do not provide a laundry list of prescriptive guidelines, but rather an array of catalysts for thoughtful discussion and refinement.

Premise #1: Every student possesses a complex and holistic potentiality, comprised of diverse dimensions including physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Each of our professional perspectives recognizes in various ways that leadership engages all dimensions of the self, e.g., leadership challenges arise from all sides and may require diverse responses. Consequently, leadership potential increases to the degree that education accounts for myriad dimensions of humanity and not, for example, just the mind. To increase an individual's leadership capacity we therefore need to increase the synergy among all ingredients to the equation. Leaders in complex environments must increasingly be able to think well, to employ a high level of emotional intelligence, to stay physically fit in order to endure, and to embody spiritual maturity in order to serve as a role model of constructive and humane values. In each of our leadership education endeavors, as well as in the intersections among our work, we are moving beyond a focus solely on cognitive capacity and into more integrative and sustaining ways to emphasize significant development of the emotional, spiritual and physical domains. We believe that the outcomes of doing so include preparing students to more capably assume leadership roles and responsibilities in a complex, turbulent world.

Premise #2: Exploring important questions regarding one's life experiences is central to the process of genuine leadership education.

We believe that "who a person is" plays a critical role in the development of one's leadership potential. Depending upon the degree to which this becomes meaningfully engaged, understood, and unleashed in an authentic manner, it serves either as a catalyst or a constraint to subsequent leadership capabilities. Therefore, an exploration of deep yet transcendent questions such as "Who am I? Why am I here? What really matters in my life? Where am I heading?" are central to developing integral multidisciplinary leaders. Deep questions promote a vital level of integration among human dimensions (e.g., between ideas acquired and emotions provoked), which too often remains untapped. Each of our approaches mentioned above confronts learners with such seminal questions of existence and challenges them to engage in critical reflection and contemplation. Framed in the language of one of the authors, we recognize that creating leadership potential is an "inside-out" learning process. Issues of identity development are central in all true forms of integral multidisciplinary leadership education.

Premise #3: Mutual construction of knowledge among educators and learners is a powerful stimulus to both deep learning and the subsequent development of leadership capacities.

Each of us employs pedagogical approaches that provoke students to take responsibility for their own learning. Perhaps more central to leadership education than to other educational domains is the premise that no one can do our learning for us. Thus, our teaching is based on genuine respect for students as learners who bring rich experiences to the learning process, and who share in the work required to create insight. It is consequently our role to prompt students to surface and share relevant ideas, and to participate in the process of weaving together their current knowledge with new perspectives and theories. When this occurs, it not only expands the cognitive frameworks of learners, but also enriches and energizes their ways of being in the world. It is an objective of such leadership education to compel learners to reconstruct their worlds in empowering ways. Authentic and mutual engagement with learners, which our pedagogies emphasize, also means that our own perspectives as educators must be continually questioned and open for transformation along the way. Thus, the process of developing integral multidisciplinary leaders is a shared journey of discovery among both teachers and learners, as it confronts meaning-making not only about the world but also about ourselves.

Premise #4: Seamless connections can be made among students' experiences in and out of the classroom. Such integration can be a cornerstone on which to build leadership-development pedagogy, programs, and co-curricular education.

Given our focus on creating integral multidisciplinary leadership, we believe that it is critical for students to experience the kinds of environments that such leadership education is preparing them to enter. In other words, experiencing aspects of leadership in and among real-world environments helps students to understand first-hand more of the interconnectedness that comprises our world. Ideally students will increasingly experience synergies between what they engage in a formal classroom setting and what they experience in the rest of their collegiate environment. Furthermore, they will increasingly apply what they learn formally to their out-of class situations and leadership roles. John's story, which we highlighted at the beginning of our article, is an example of the direction that we envision, where students experience connections among all of their interactions within their campus community. We propose that leadership educators foster such seamless learning. What better way to prepare students for complexities of life and leadership than to create on our campuses an intricate web of laboratories where they can practice interconnecting their ways of thinking, being, learning, and doing.

Premise #5: Leadership education is emergent and developmental. Consequently, educators often can only plant seeds, which students must be ready, willing, and able to nurture in order to enable themselves to grow amid their own experiences and understanding.

In recognizing that leadership education focuses on the formation of identity as well as intellect, we understand that students arrive and depart from universities at different places along their developmental journeys toward self-understanding, maturity, and leadership potential. As noted within each of our respective stories above, students differ in their levels of readiness to take responsibility for their learning, and in their levels of ability to expand their worldviews. Consequently, we acknowledge the need to meet students wherever they currently are, and to challenge all of them to move to more integral levels of understanding. One way we do this is by being explicit about relevant developmental paths and prompting students to reflect not only on their current locations along such paths, but also on viable means for moving forward along their developmental journeys. Such prompts are the seeds we plant that bloom immediately for some students yet for others lie dormant and germinate. In the latter case, we believe that dormant seeds often bloom at other times and in other contexts when students awaken to their emerging potential and become better able to move into more complex realms of understanding. Because we have seen this pattern of "delayed growth" in students from each of our three contexts and because such patterns are chronicled in human-development research, we have confidence in challenging students to become more complex even though some inevitably resist or simply do not respond in their present stages. A need for persistence is grounded in this belief that current challenges will give rise to future growth.

Premise #6: Integral multidisciplinary leadership education will increasingly require both richly-diverse, multi-talented leadership educators, as well as richly-diverse multi-challenging leadership experiences.

As the boundaries of leadership and leadership education continue to crumble in the 21st century, we believe that it will become increasingly vital for leadership educators to transform themselves. It will become less sufficient to know particular information and more important to understand processes that enable information to arise as situations unfold. We propose that universities increasingly seek to provide opportunities for faculties to cross disciplinary boundaries; to develop multi-disciplinary projects and theories; to build interdisciplinary programs and gathering places; to make administrative processes transparent and inclusive; and to promote activities (such as travel) that send leadership educators on journeys into unexplored places and unfamiliar terrain. All such suggestions possess themes of discovery, collective meaning-making, and continual transformation. To the degree that leadership education can keep pace with a vibrant, dynamic world, we believe that it must not only infuse leadership education with multidisciplinary and cross-level experiences, but also that it must facilitate the remaking of educators in ways that make them increasingly wise and that keep them continually fresh.

Reflections on Interdisciplinary Collaboration

In addition to distilling the above premises on leadership development and working to embody them individually and collectively, our boundary-spanning work provided some additional collaborative lessons. One hallmark of our collaboration of faculty and staff across disciplines and divisions is that we openly compared our work in curious and synergistic ways, rather than competitively and divisively. We explored our different approaches and our unique styles as viable means for expanding our understanding of leadership theory and for enriching our teaching philosophies and practices. Protecting turf, which so often derails intersections across disciplines and levels within universities, was not in play in our collaborative efforts. Learning to be vulnerable in the short run in order to become wiser in the long run is a pattern that none of us intended but all of us realized as valuable if not also as necessary.

A second significant factor that emerged through our relationships is that we engaged in periodic, face-to-face, sustained conversations. Our collaborations matured and deepened through several years of interacting, learning with and from each other, and presenting our emerging ideas together at conferences (e.g., in order to gain outside feedback). Concomitantly, we recognized that the rewards of our efforts manifest more in long term rather than short term benefits, and as much intrinsically as extrinsically. In the demanding lives of faculty and student affairs professionals, this meant setting aside precious hours for dialogue and exploration in order to realize connections in our work and resultant implications for leadership education. In essence, we found ourselves engaging in cycles of "presencing" (Senge, et al., 2004), which we described earlier. This required honest commitment to the process without necessarily picturing tangible outcomes along the way--although they eventually emerged in the form of integrative insights. Continuing conversations were an investment that we made in our own on-going learning and development and we each gained considerably because of this.

Finally, our collaboration represented and embodied a fundamental belief in the wholeness of systems, rather than in the false separations of knowledge as it is traditionally sorted into courses, majors and disciplines. We sought to cross boundaries and to examine intersections among our personal and professional work because we deeply intuited value in doing so. As a consequence, we believe that this kind of process, partly encompassing a leap of faith, is what leaders, teachers, and scholars must do in real-world social scenarios. We learned first-hand how we can engage one another at the boundaries of our personal and professional lives and embrace what Lipman-Blumen (1996) calls the "connective edge" in order to emerge transformed and better prepared for tomorrow's challenges. An important part of this interconnected process and its integral results relies on mutual capacities to engage one another not only intellectually, but also emotionally and spiritually. Together, we experienced the seamless learning that we seek to create for our students and that we have learned to value for ourselves.

Conclusion

We acknowledge that many of our individual ideas are not new and that our collective insights do not provide a finished product. Furthermore, as we mentioned earlier, our review of leadership theories is intendedly only representative, given our purpose and space restrictions. At the same time, we believe that our ideas offer fresh and inclusive ways for re-thinking, re-framing, and understanding leadership development as it manifests within the "whole" lives of students, faculty, and administrators. The myriad challenges of integral multidisciplinary leadership education cannot be adequately addressed in one paper or at a single point in time. Nevertheless, we believe that they should, can, and will be addressed by involving increasingly wider arrays of scholars sharing other theories, perspectives, questions, and insights. The more voices we can motivate to share in these conversations, the less likely we will be to miss key ingredients that will enable our understanding of these processes to grow and sustain.

In this article, we offered our individual perspectives as well as our shared premises in order to provide an array of catalysts to promote conversation around these issues. Our set of premises is also incomplete, but we believe this sets the stage for others to help identify additional premises and perspectives that help to inform the process of integral multidisciplinary leadership learning. In closing, we emphasize that the measure of our understanding of this process begins and ends with student learning and collective sharing, not with individual courses, programs, or co-curricular activities. Our efforts to illuminate this process by working collectively among our diverse professional orientations and experiences is hopefully a beneficial step in this direction. Ultimately, we are all students. Continuing to weave threads of interconnection across disciplines and institutional levels will become increasingly important as universities attend more openly and carefully to their alignments with and within a diverse, turbulent world.

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Judy L. Rogers, Miami University, OH

Dennis C. Roberts, Miami University, OH

David A. Cowan, Miami University, OH

Rogers, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of College Student Personnel in the School of Education, and Roberts, Ph.D. is Associate Vice-President for Student Affairs; Cowan, Ph.D. is Professor of Management in the School of Bussiness