Academic Leadership Overview

Prompt:"In our first two weeks, you have read several articles, seen several videos and been engaged in several discussions related to the concept of academic leadership. At this point, and in your own words, what does the concept mean to you? What subjects or interests do you have a sophisticated, intellectual understanding of that you may want to turn into a major academic project in this class? How do people sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others? How would you feel if someone used your work to manipulate others (as Jared Diamond claims Mitt Romney has)? How can creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders help prevent such people from taking advantage of others the way they do? How can this create a stronger democratic society?"

Academic Leadership is when you learn to take matters into your own hands. You become a leader academically. Academic Leadership can help you develop your abilities and can enhance your confidence. This new course that we are going to have this year will be a good experience for us to get ready for IB next year. As John W. Gardner implied in his book Educational Leadership, “In our society, leaders are among the many “performance elites”". He is right; leaders are elites in both profession and the performance. I found a YouTube video on leadership that to me represented what leadership is all about. The quotes that the video had were significant as overall they summarized what leadership was to me. This video was made by a group of Graduate Students at Winona State University. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4rX4rWhX6A

I am interested in psychology and particularly in positive psychology. For my academic project I want to interview people who experienced the Tohoku Earthquake last year, like I did. Each person will have a different story and will have experienced the earthquake in a different place. They will also have a different perspective now on what they plan on doing and how they are holding up. I am hoping to have people of various ages and for some international people. I will combine these interviews and make them into a movie with some facts on the earthquake and pictures on the incident. In order to turn this into an academic project, I was also thinking on writing an essay on how positive psychology can help you in cases of trauma such that of the Earthquake. In order for the essay to be good it has to have an argumentative point of view as well.

People sometimes abuse academic knowledge to manipulate others. It can be done in several ways and one of them is doing it psychologically. If someone manipulated other using my work, I wouldn't be happy because I would prefer for them to ask me if they could use my work and I decide if I want to give them permission or not. In this way less people would be able to manipulate others using someone else’s information, in this case my work. I think that creating academically sophisticated, intellectual leaders will help prevent people from taking advantage of others because these leaders will not allow for that to happen. They will see in the long term and in the short term and can see what is happening with our society and they would be able to find long-lasting solutions. By having, academically, sophisticated, intellectual leaders, we will create a stronger democratic society, because there will be order but these leaders will be cultured and will have a global perspective thus they won’t rule out what one person says. They will listen to everyone and will bring a fresh and new start to the country. They will have some goals and will carefully weigh their decisions, maybe having to sacrifice some things but this leader will think on the long term. John W. Gardner described such leaders in his book, Educational Leadership.