Contextualizing Our Leadership Education Approach to Complex Problem Solving: Priority #5 of the National Leadership Education Research Agenda 2020-2025

In this episode, Dan and Lauren hear from Rian Satterwhite, Director for Service Learning and Leadership at UNLV, and Teaching Faculty at Claremont Lincoln University and Dr. Carolyn Cunningham, Chair and Professor of Communication and Leadership at Gonzaga University. Rian and Carolyn explain the writing team’s process and vision for proposing and crafting the priority that focuses on complex problem-solving. The group proposed addressing the challenges around the increased complexity of solving problems and how new methods in advocacy and activism, big data and visualization, and new materialism are needed. The priority poses a path forward for centering sustainability and developing a mindset based on cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes.  

Satterwhite is the lead author and part of the writing team for Priority Number 5, titled “Contextualizing our Leadership Education Approach to Complex Problem Solving: Shifting Paradigms and Evolving Knowledge

This episode is part of a series of conversations with the lead authors of the nine priorities of the (NLERA) 2020-2025, published in Volume 14, issue 3, of the Journal of Leadership Studies.

Some additional resources mentioned in the episode include:

• The Climate Girl Effect: Fridays, Flint, and Fire, co-authored with Heather Crandall (also one of the NLERA authors)
• Kehkashan Basu launched the global social innovation organization Green Hope Foundation whose aim is to “use Education for Sustainable Development as a transformative tool to empower youth and adults alike, providing them with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors to think and act for a sustainable future.”  She launched it when she was 12 years old