“Life writing as leadership”: Teaching life writing in the general education classroom

This article considers the integration of leadership development into a general education curriculum at a liberal arts college, and specifically how foregrounding life writing in such a class allows students to think explicitly about different kinds of leadership approaches. Relying on primary texts as distinct as TED Talks, podcasts, novels, graphic narrative, testimonio, and biofiction, students consider how narrative activism allows for the circulation of testimony. Assignments illuminate many of the larger theoretical concerns of Life Writing Studies – including agency, self-representational strategies, artistic practice, memory, and witnessing – can be useful for reconceptualising leaders and leadership development. With an emphasis on student-directed classroom discussion, critical and careful reading, deliberate textual analysis, team-based learning, and writing for a variety of audiences, the course encourages individual assessments of how life writing can challenge preconceptions and encourage connection. Through such engagement, students learn some of the ways in which a leadership model of “reflect, analyze, act” functions in terms of their own understanding of leadership and their own capacity to lead.