Giving Rise to Leadership: Exploring Through Conversation

• Main Author: Clemmons, Laura
• Format: Others
• Published: ScholarWorks @ UVM 2008
• Subjects: storytelling; racial identity; conversation; leadership
• Online Access: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/graddis/48; http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1047&context=graddis

Everyone has conversations. They affect our mind set, challenging our current knowledge and encouraging us to see differently and perhaps respond more broadly. Conversations create change in how we do our work; they impact how we relate to each other, how we may teach each other, how we interact with each other and how we decide to lead others. To ignore the impact conversations can have on us as individuals is overlooking not only the existence of others, but how others exist. Conversations, and the messages that are within them, play an integral part with how we view ourselves and define our own identity as well as how we place ourselves in our community. Stories, whether written or oral, carry a significant amount of history and an even more overwhelming piece of power. With the ability to hold an audience captive, they possess a uniqueness to transfer information that can be the cornerstone to creating new policies and programs and can consequently prompt a new leadership that intersects community and individual. Embedded within these stories are those conversations that have the capability to provoke the reader or listener toward new mental and emotional shifts; creating a greater awareness from where one first began. By use of an autoethnographical approach, I place myself in the position of an informant insider and an analyst outsider (Russell, 1999, p. 14) and lead the reader through the journey of interpreting storytelling as a scholarly practice. Incorporating a journey of self, I integrate a cultural method (Russell, 1999) while guiding the reader through timeless conversations.