This course instructs students in a set of practices that are best characterized as constituting a kind of humanistic moral leadership. The central idea is that excellence in twenty-first century moral leadership requires the development of sense-making skills in order to adequately address our radically disorienting times. It requires the competence to offer and evaluate substantive and compelling visions of ways we can move forward and thrive. It requires the ability to lean into, rather than to run away from, negatively coded emotions, like grief and anger, that understandably characterize many of our experiences. And it requires, perhaps more than anything else, the capacity to truly see each other as having equal and absolute moral worth, so as to cut through the myriad ways we are dehumanized, objectified, marginalized, alienated, bureaucratized, and otherwise treated as being less than fully human, interpersonally and systemically.
The specific practices this course teaches in order to achieve these goals will be acquired by confronting the humanities directly. Students will engage with philosophy, literature, poetry, dance, music, film, sequential art, other visual arts, simulations and games. An emphasis will therefore be put on multi-modal pedagogy and mixing up classroom time with a variety of hands-on activities. In the spirit of the arts, students should come prepared to be taken outside their usual learning zone of comfort, in a constructive and responsible way, with the aim of understanding and practicing leadership differently.