Running head: REFLECTION ON LEADERSHIP 1

Reflection on Leadership

Meghan Coletta

Loyola University Chicago

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My Visual Representation of Pieces of My Evolving Leadership Philosophy: (View First)

http://prezi.com/grxvqlqhxiyu/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

My leadership philosophy has become increasing complex as I have gained new

knowledge and skills during the semester. The most effective way for me to express my

philosophy was to create something that required me to reflect in multiple ways. Not only did I

require myself to find the words that corresponded to my leadership philosophy but my visual

learning style came through by finding pictures that continued to express a word that I had

chosen. This process allowed me to be able to frame my philosophy in many pieces because my

philosophy is multi-dimensional. My overarching philosophy of leadership that my visual

representation encompasses is, Leadership is a process of reflection grounded in critical hope.

This course has given me knowledge of current theories and research about leadership

and required me to engage in exercises that will allow to translate to practice. I know that I will

have to continue to engage in critical reflection on what being a leader and leadership is to me.

Taking it a step further I will employ what Carroll (2015, p. 94), calls, Critical reflexivity goes a

whole lot further, however, and involves unsettling not just our own assumptions about ourselves

but broader assumptions about the nature of this world we live in and how phenomena such as

leadership are both constructed by us and for us. That is the type of reflection that I want hold

myself accountable for to ensure that I do not slide back into complacent leadership. It will

necessitate that I am constantly keeping the concept of critical hope in the forefront of my mind.

Every word that I included in my leadership visual representation is a piece of my critical

reflexivity that I want to require of myself.

Critical hope is not just a remote concept or a nice turn of phrase. It has a concrete

reality that is hard, practical, and angry, (Preskill & Brookfield, 2009, p. 173). I truly believe
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that being an effective leader means facing the reality of our society, institutional cultures, and

climate of our country head on. Ignoring it or pretending it is not that bad does a disservice to

everyone and it allows flow of power to continue to be placed in the hands of those that abuse

that power. Critical hope is imperative to my leadership and something that keeps me grounded. I

will gain hope from working with students and keeping in mind the situations that gave me hope

from my past. I will continue to stay resilient in my work, disrupt normativity where I can,

continue to increase the efficacy of myself and my students while always considering the ethics

of every situation. I will push students to see past positional leadership by unpacking their stocks

of knowledge and developing their identities. Finally, I will continue to work on my agency to

deconstruct and reconstruct theories in order to utilize my knowledge to make positive change at

institutions that I work at. My leadership philosophy is multi-faceted but so its leadership.
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References

Carroll, B. (2015). Leadership learning and development. In B. Carroll, J. Ford, & S.

Taylor (Eds.), Leadership: Contemporary critical perspectives (pp. 89-108). Los

Angeles, CA: Sage

Preskill, S., & Brookfield, S.D. (2009). Learning as a way of leading: Lessons from the struggle

for social justice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.