Pedagogy: Developing Learner Identities through Countering Othering

The Hass Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society (n.d.) suggests leaders create meta-narratives and that these meta-narratives either bridge or break our communities. In this chapter, we offer that transformative leadership provides a means of bridging communities, countering othering, and taking action against structural inequities and discrimination, producing greater justice and tearing down the walls of bias and prejudice based on group identities. The Student Leader Activist Identity Continuum (SLAIC) can support the development of transformative leadership and greater justice, with less bigotry and bias that animate power differentials between “us” and “them.”

We begin with an understanding of transformative leadership grounded in ontological leadership (Erhard, Jensen, & Granger, 2010) and Buber’s (1937) framework of I–Thou. In order to dismantle othering, we focus on the othering process and the learner identity of the SLAIC. We suggest it is through engaging the learner identity, as the engine for transformative leadership, that we will construct opportunities for people to truly see the other, honor each person’s uniqueness and potential wholeness, and perceive the other as meaningful.