Leaders+as+Educators

​Leaders As Educators: Today, as yesterday, and as will be in the future, we cannot underestimate the importance of leadership. As a graduate student, an organizational developer, and as a professor, I have noticed that the large majority (possibly up to 90%) of my colleagues and students in adult education have pursued careers in management and leadership, not in curriculum development, research or theory building. Yet adult education graduate programs for the most part spend little or no time teaching and researching leadership and management development. Adult educators often look as leadership differently than our counterparts in business and psychology; we see leadership as an educational process. This book seeks to inform and redirect our profession on the importance of "leaders as educators." Though the contributors to this book all have leadership experience in the military and use this knowledge to illustrate their chapters, we see our text as important to the entire field of adult education. In the complex settings of changing social-political dynamics around the world, and the dynamic theaters in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaders are being forced to change the way they think and perform. Successful leadership, from my perspective, is a reflection and manifestation of the social construction of reality.

This chapter focuses on the historical and theoretical connections between adult education and leadership. The binding theme of this chapter as well as the book is that leaders are educators, which aligns closely with the latest research on leadership, debunking classical perspectives of leadership, and placing it within the construct of complexity theory in a postmodern world.

Bio:

Jeff Zacharakis is an adult educator and associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Kansas State University. He has over 25 years experience in organizational and leadership development. He earned his Ed.D. in adult education from Northern Illinois University where he worked at the Lindeman Center for seven years. He then joined Iowa State University Extension as a community development specialist where he worked with local government and nonprofit organizations on community, organizational and leadership development projects. He has been at K-State since 2004.

Lieutenant Colonel Van Der Werff, U.S. Marine Corps (USMC), is currently serving on the faculty of the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, and is an instructor of strategic and operational studies.Prior assignments that form the basis of this article include Weapons and Tactics Instructor, and Department of Aviation, Headquarters, USMC, where he was responsible for overseeing the AH-1Z and UH-1Y programs including pilot and aircrew training.LtCol Van Der Werff is currently a doctoral student in Kansas State University’s Adult and Continuing Education program.

//Ann L. Swartz, D.Ed., CRNP// LTC (R) Ann Swartz retired from the Army Nurse Corps in 1995 after 21 years of service that began at Ft. Bragg, ran thru Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and ended in the burn unit at Fr. Sam Houston. The majority of her career was spent in roles that combined education, research, and administrative responsibilities with a clinical practice at the boundaries of psychiatry and physical trauma. After retirement she moved her practice into the community and began teaching. She has been Instructor of Nursing in an RN to BS program at Penn State University Harrisburg since 2003 where she incorporates complexity science into clinical education to improve nurses’ management of complex clinical problems and their organizational survival skills. She completed her D.Ed. in Adult Education in May of 2009. The focus of her research was in complexity theory and neuroscience perspectives in nurses’ embodied learning as related to trauma. That research is ongoing and has been extended to online learning. She has co-authored a book chapter on spirituality and health and an article on the transformative aspect of a collaborative writing partnership, is co-editing a volume of NDACE with Elizabeth Tisdell, and has done numerous presentations at the Adult Education Research Conference.