Using Film to Illuminate Representations of Leadership

• In Event: Illuminating Challenges and Resilience in Women Leaders

Short Description

What can leadership educators do with film to teach about leadership concepts and expression? This presentation is about how we used movies to learn about students’ assumptions of gender, leadership styles, and women’s representation in media. Using film, we hoped to direct students to think about leadership portrayed in a creative way in a different context, and to understand the confluence of gender, context, and leadership separate from American ideas of leadership.

Detailed Abstract

What do students learn when watching films about women leaders? What do they learn about how women are represented? How does using film as part of a leadership curriculum help students visualize leadership?
Aspiring leaders need to recognize gender norms, stereotypes, and power dynamics in the practice and expression of leadership (Bell & Sinclair, 2016). The kind of stereotyping common in film, which portrays women negatively, whether flawed in character, sexualized, or facing great cost personally in choosing to be a leader, affects women’s views of their agency and aspirations (Ezzedeen, 2013). It reinforces beliefs about women leaders for both women and men. The assumptions held about the way leadership “is done” in the US or even the West ought to be challenged, and context must be understood. Film is storytelling; stories are important ways of understanding how people make sense of the world. Stories transmit culture and shape our identities by reflecting who we are or think we are and often by providing role models for certain ways of being. Visualizing and reflecting on leadership portrayals in film can encourage “not just learning but unlearning” (Montouri, 2010, p. 6). Students who are unaware of how to be tend to embrace conformity and replicate ideas of who leaders are and can be in their own culture (Nguyen, 2014). Analyzing depictions and contexts in film can help them reflect on their assumptions about leadership and modify them.

Critical thinking, listening, visual learning, high potential for retention of ideas all can take place when learning through film (Callahan, Whitener, & Sandlin, 2007; Long, 2017; Miller, 2009; Rajendran & Andrew, 2014; Scott & Weeks, 2016). Students are exposed to “complex mental imagery… for conceptual understanding” (Hannay & Venneit, 2012, p. 240, citing Miller, 2009), and they learn to interpret ideas and concepts to simply illustrate a point or to actually illuminate it by thinking deeper or differently about an issue (Swimelar, 2013). Film studies also can enhance personal development, self-awareness, and knowledge and development of one’s values (Miller, 2009; Scott & Weeks, 2016).

In selected courses on leadership delivered online, students will watch an English-language film which portrays a non-Western female doing leadership in a non-Western place, likely Pray the Devil back to Hell. Assignments for the film study will include discussions, personal journals, and essays to learn about students’ ability to apply leadership concepts in context, and to learn whether they can just illustrate abstract ideas about leadership, gender and context or if they can find deeper interpretations in the film portrayals of those things. We will explore their thinking about leadership, and consider various explanations to categorize themes such as implicit gender bias and cultural stereotypes; the discourse on leadership types, i.e., the controller, the therapist, and the messiah/hero (Long, 2017; Western, 2008), transformational, transactional, authentic as well as gender difference and similarities. And we will look for places to intervene to, for instance, teach critical theory, help with unlearning (Brown, Whitaker, & Brungardt, 2012; Montouri, 2010), or the breaking down of rigid and culturally absorbed “perceptions and beliefs about leadership and competence” (Nguyen, 2014, p. 96), and open up discussion of values, ways of knowing, and ways of being in the world (Montouri, 2010).

Our decisions on which film is not yet final, but our plan is to require one watching and “reading” of the same film during the 8-week term in at least three different courses. Although the courses have a different focus, in all of them students are exposed to theories of leadership and expressions of it, and they are given opportunities to analyze and demonstrate their comprehension and ability to apply what they are learning. The assignment will be similar in all classes: to integrate their knowledge of leadership theory and concepts, and write about the leader and how she is portrayed. We will give prompts in online discussions if and when needed to ensure that students examine their beliefs and assumptions about gender and leadership.
We support learning about the global importance of and actively engage our leadership students to think about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals in our courses on multicultural perspectives and on leading social movements as we teach about leadership in context and inequalities in perceptions and opportunities for women leading substantive change. It is a deliberate choice to choose a non-Western leader and infuse our curriculum with global leadership content.

Presenters

• Elizabeth Stork, Robert Morris University

• Lazarina Topuzova, Robert Morris University