Pedagogy: Becoming a Transformative Leader: The Student Leader Activist Identity Continuum

As transformative leadership requires that individuals reframe their world views and their senses of self in order to rethink assumptions and develop new solutions and systems, leadership educators must approach teaching transformative leadership as identity development (Christensen & Raynor, 2003; Pava, 2003; Quinn 1996). We operationalize the development of transformative leadership capacity as identity development along the Student Leader Activist Identity Continuum (SLAIC) – learner, ally, advocate, and activist identities (Bruce, McKee, Morgan-Fleming, & Warner, 2019). In becoming a transformative leader, students become learners, allies, advocates, and activists when they engage in the critique of inequitable practices, question systems, address individual and public good, and work from a commitment to justice and equity (van Oord, 2013; Shields, 2010, 2016; Shields, Dollarhide, & Young, 2018). As detailed in Fig. 1, students engage in these identities as they incorporate transformative leadership knowledge and behaviors into their representations of themselves.