Employers place a high value on collegiate leadership experience transferring to the workforce—and UT is helping students develop and hone these skills through the new leadership studies minor to be offered starting this fall.
The minor is a collaboration between the Division of Student Life’s Center for Leadership and Service and the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department in the College of Education, Health, and Human Sciences.
The new minor will prepare students to serve confidently, collaboratively, and ethically in formal and informal leadership roles in campus, local, national, and global contexts. Students will grow their knowledge and skills in critical areas including group dynamics, ethics, conflict management, vision casting, values clarification, social justice, communication, and mentorship, all while learning to be more adaptable to other cultures and viewpoints.
“As our students go out into the world and assume leadership roles and responsibilities, it is our duty as a university to provide the foundation and framework for those experiences. We are proud to offer this exciting, innovative, and collaborative approach to leadership education, and I am confident that it will produce outstanding leaders, scholars, and citizens who will change the world,” said Sally Parish, director of the Center for Leadership and Service and leadership studies minor co-director.
Students will take twelve hours of applied leadership education and will engage in educational activities both inside and outside the classroom. Students will explore leadership concepts, theories, and models applied to experiences in individual, group, organizational, and community collegiate settings.
Students also will perform a minimum of sixty applied experience hours where they will experience leadership in a campus or community setting. The applied experiences will focus on service and social responsibility, multiculturalism, academic endeavors, and student leadership.
Further cementing the concept, all students will combine the knowledge gained in their academic major with what they have learned in the leadership studies minor and apply that to solving a real-world problem in their culminating class.
“UT’s commitment to developing the leaders of tomorrow is at the foundation of the university’s Vol Vision, Top 25, and Ready for the World initiatives. To truly set our university apart from our peers and meet those expectations, the Educational Leadership and Policy Studies Department and the Division of Student Life partnered to provide an academic program intentionally structured to integrate the curricular, cocurricular, and extracurricular leadership and learning experiences of our undergraduates,” said Karen Boyd, visiting assistant professor of higher education administration and leadership studies minor co-director.
The minor will accept sixty new participants annually. Students from all academic programs and fields of study are encouraged to apply.
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CONTACT:
Katherine Saxon (865-974-8365, ksaxon@utk.edu)