Campus-Based Weekend Immersion Experiences

What is the Immersion Experience?

The immersion experiences offer a hands-on approach to students’ personal evolution as educational leaders. These weekend residencies, the Immersive Weekend (one per year), focus on students’ understanding of their own individual leadership dynamics and how they can begin to view their leadership transformation through an organizational lens. Students receive individual attention from faculty and leadership experts on how best to position themselves as innovative leaders through the acquisition of self-knowledge and organizational consciousness. These intimate academic sessions enable students to take stock of their current leadership styles and set an agenda for their future leadership goals. Through small group discussions about leadership as a discipline, students come to understand leadership as a serious professional and personal responsibility. Featuring the tenets of today’s most renowned leadership principles, students will become catalysts for elevating leadership in their home organizations and pave the way for the next generation of leaders in the academy and other nonprofit organizations.

The action-research model is a second defining theme of the campus-based immersion experiences. Being introduced to action research at the start of the program in the first campus-based immersion experience, students will learn how to individually and collectively apply the model of action research to their coursework and assignments. By the time students enter the dissertation phase, they will be well versed in action research methodology and ready to engage in their own self-designed studies.

Overall, the annual campus-based immersion experiences serve five critical purposes for student learning:

• Engage faculty and peers in face-to-face-discourse that contributes to the collective advancement of scholarship about the innovation of education
• Provide a campus-based experience for learning and practicing design thinking and other entrepreneurial thinking and innovative practice tools
• Enhance students’ writing and research abilities through large group colloquia and thought-provoking seminars with the goal of contributing to immediate and long-term change in the field
• Provide students with an opportunity for face-to-face leadership skill development within a safe place supported by mentors and peers
• Demonstrate effective, appropriate communication skills in a variety of professional and interpersonal contexts and practice being a change agent in education
• Share academic experiences with fellow professionals with similar career interests in re-imagining and re-designing the frontier of education