Women and Leadership Development in College: A Facilitation Resource

About the Author
Jennifer M. Pigza is Director of the Catholic Institute for Lasallian Social Action, the center for community engagement and place-based justice at Saint Mary’s College of California, where she is also an adjunct assistant professor of leadership. She is co-editor of Leadership Development through Service-Learning (New Directions for Student Leadership series) and is founding co-editor of the journal Engaging Pedagogies in Catholic Higher Education (EPiCHE). Her writing and practice focus on critical pedagogy, leadership development through community engagement, and organizational leadership.
Julie Owen, PhD, is Associate Professor of Leadership Studies at the School of Integrative Studies, George Mason University, where she coordinates the leadership studies major and minor, and is affiliate faculty with the Higher Education Program, and with Women and Gender Studies. Owen has authored over 30 publications, including serving as co-editor of the Handbook for Student Leadership Development, and editor of Innovative Learning for Leadership Development (New Directions for Student Leadership Series No.1).
Daniel Tillapaugh, PhD, is assistant professor and chair in the Department of Counselor Education at California Lutheran University, where he primarily teaches in the Counseling and College Student Personnel Program. A graduate of the University of San Diego with a PhD in leadership studies, the University of Maryland with a MEd in counseling and personnel services, and Ithaca College with a MusB in music with an outside field of sociology, he worked as a student affairs administrator for 10 years before becoming a full-time faculty member. His research interests include intersectionality and student development in higher education, college men and masculinities, and college student leadership development and education. From 2012 to 2016, he served as the chair for the Coalition on Men and Masculinities, an entity group of ACPA–College Student Educators International, which focuses on the dissemination of research and practice on college men and masculinities. He has been recognized by ACPA as an Emerging Scholar Designee from 2016 to 2018 for his research on college student development.
As leadership educators shift from teacher- to learner-centered environments, from hierarchical to shared responsibility for learning, and from absolute to constructed ways of knowing, a desire for new inclusive and creative pedagogies is also emerging. This text includes over 40 easy-to-follow modules related to women and leadership development crafted by experienced leadership educators and practitioners. Each module includes learning objectives, detailed instructions, and ideas for adapting the module to diverse learning spaces and audiences. Here are but a few of the critical questions that are addressed in the modules:
• How do we make explicit the complexities of power in leadership and in the stories we tell ourselves about feminism and gender in leadership?
• How can we interrogate and deconstruct dominant narratives and invite intersectionality? Whose voices are missing or silenced in content and process?
• What practices build leadership efficacy and habits of critical self-reflection?
• What are the effects of stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination in leadership?
• How are learning and leadership both individual and collective processes?
• How do we develop critical consciousness and maintain hope in the face of the long arc of structural change?
This text is a detailed resource for anyone interested in women and leadership education, whether through a full-length course, a weekend workshop, or a one-time topical session. It also serves as a companion to the book We are the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For: Women and Leadership Development in College (Owen, 2020).