I struggled to pin down my thoughts for this activity. Perhaps that is because I am in a moment of flux where COVID has had a negative impact on my experiences of teaching online. I am a professor at Fanshawe College in London Ontario. I teach in Television and Film Production, TV News and Radio Broadcasting. Part of my courses have included the flipped learning model where I post lectures and students come to the lab portion ready to put the lecture content into practice. Because of COVID, all my content was moved online. This included teaching how to shoot with a broadcast camera and how to edit. Some subject matter easily lends itself to eLearning, shooting and editing do not. Suffice to say the resulting experience has been negative for both myself and the students.

In turning to leadership for support, I found a sadly definitive lack of, well, anything. While Kahn (2017) talks about motivation I found none. “Motivation plays an important role in education; for the student, the faculty, and the administrators” (p 4). I did not receive any support. In fact, my administrator took a punitive approach which resulted in my current attitude toward teaching which is, I no longer enjoy teaching. I am feeling resentful and must force myself to be the Professor I hope to be caring, compassionate, empathetic, flexible, responsive, agile and wholistic.  I am aware of the link between motivation, online learning, and student success and how “Motivating students to achieve success is an activity for all faculty, creating an awareness about motivation among the rank and file that may not be present in other types of organisations” (Kahn 2017 p 4).  Yet here I am feeling disconnected and disinterested, lost, without leadership and left to my own means to rescue my students and my career.

In turning to the first part of this activity, I reflected upon my rankings which show I value the qualities of a leader as a person first versus someone who has power. This directly reflects my current experiences with eLearning and a lack of leadership. When I compare myself to the overall rankings, I only shared two of the top five: honest and competent. This makes me think that I am not in line with more traditional approaches to leadership. When I compare myself to my team, I share three of the top five: competent, honest, and dependable. In both cases, my next highest rankings were amoungst their lower rankings. However, within my team our reflections were in the same vein –

We typically expect our leaders to rely on us, as actioners, to lead change in digital learning. With this, we agreed that in our perspectives and environments, leaders are required to be trusting, cautious, and competent, and open to relying on expertise within their team. (Chan, Houldsworth, Insell, Keating & Maxwell 2022)

Seeing this reflected made me feel supported in my view of what being a leader in digital environments means and less in line with a male dominated, hierarchical approach. I will be giving you more on that.

I believe, right now, leadership in higher education is the opposite to my values and my team’s values; power over person; very much how Khan (2017) describes transactional leadership. “Transactional leadership rest on behaviourist views of human activity. Leaders are those in positions of power, providing rewards and punishments (carrots and sticks) as part of leader – follower relations. This supports adherence to policy, regulations, and the status quo” (p 4). If we are to survive the online, eLearning tsunami that is COVID, I believe leaders in higher education, in digital environments must change. “Higher education institutions need to adopt a leadership approach that will allow them to be flexible and responsive to change” (Khan 2017 p 4). When I searched further to find a leadership model that was in line with my current needs, I found it interesting that stepping away from a more western perspective is where I found the most comfort in what I would look for in a leader. Julien, Wright and Zinni (2010) spoke to Aboriginal leaders, and it is in their paper, I found myself nodding in agreement as they wrote about how, even in leadership, all things are connected. “Leadership does not reside in one person, in one title, or one location—but rather, it lies within all. Everyone, when called upon, fulfils a leadership obligation and serves to undertake the needs of the community” (p 6). It is that collective sense of working together to create worthwhile and positive experiences for students that I yearn for in a leader.

Aboriginal leadership focuses on being connected to others, but not in a hierarchical way. Even if formal power is bestowed upon an Aboriginal leader, they tend not to draw upon it. Rather, they see themselves as being part of a community that is working toward a goal; all equal and all voices important. (Julien, Wright & Zinni 2010, p 8)

I did find myself in agreement with the negative experience aboriginals raised when they do step out and try to improve conditions within their community, in my case, trying something new with digital learning spaces. “You try to do something outside the norm, you’re the nail that sticks up and it draws attention you know” (Julien, Wright, & Zinni p 10). Lastly, I found myself, as a black & brown woman in a primarily male dominated field and faculty, agreeing with aboriginal leaders who were frustrated by the clash of values between mainstream management and Aboriginal people. “One respondent observed, “Colonial mindsets are seen as influencing and precluding people from living their values and being authentic to who they are. You have to sacrifice, you have to compromise” (Julien, Wright & Zinni p 10).

 

References

Chan, Houldsworth, Insell, Keating & Maxwell (2022) Team Forum, Team D, LRNT 525 Leading Change in Digital Learning, Royal Roads University

Julien, M., Wright, B., & Zinni, D. M. (2010). Stories from the circle: leadership lessons learned from aboriginal leaders. Leadership Quarterly, 21(1), 114–114. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.LEAQUA.2009.10.009 [retrieve from RRU library]

Khan, N. (2017) Adaptive or Transactional Leadership in Current Higher Education: A Brief Comparison. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning. 18 (3), http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/3294/4150

 

From Our Forum:

Group D underwent the process of assessing our personal values in regard to leadership characteristics, and then assessing a group consensus over the average agreed upon rank of these valued characteristics. We completed not only our ranking document, but one of our teammates also plotted our values on a graph that displayed average sentiment.

We found that we all leaned towards our top 5 characteristics being:

1 – Competent

2 – Honest

3 – Dependable

4 – Straightforward

5 – Supportive

And our least valued characteristics being:

16 – Courageous

17 – Fair Minded

18 – Determined

19 – Self-Controlled

20 – Independent

Interestingly, we agreed that many of us had completed this ranking with certain leaders from our past front of mind, assigning higher values to the traits that we valued while under their leadership (or, the absence of those characteristics). Also, we noted that although the topic of discussion was valued traits in digital learning leaders, we typically expect our leaders to rely on us, as actioners, to lead change in digital learning. With this, we agreed that in our perspectives and environments, leaders are required to be trusting, cautious, and competent, and open to relying on expertise within their team.

While we agreed on the general state of the ranking as indicated in both the spreadsheet as well as the graph, as a team we ultimately believe that leaders in our contexts are not required to be “do-er’s” or subject matter experts, but competent and supportive overseers. Our top characteristics really outlined the traits needed to pull a team together, and not to go in right away and shake things up. This was interesting to us and showed us the value of a leader, not necessarily the one who needs to be the subject matter expert or the “do-er” but the one who is the “cat herder.”