By Jane Larsson, CIS Executive Director

 

Last week, Paakhi Mittal, a student at the Ryan International School in New Delhi, gave me an autographed copy of her new book, The Latibule of a Lyrical Heart, 2023. Within, she describes her educational experience.

‘Something bizarre about being a poet in high school is just how strong your emotions can get without you even realizing their intensity. One moment, you’re paying attention to a lecture, next, the uncertainty of the future plagues you. There’s just so much that goes unsaid and unheard in a world where the youth is supposed to have it easy.’

Helping students to navigate these feelings requires us to consider the duality of our educational and social responsibilities. Whether you are a leader or teacher, whether you work in a school or a university, you are a role model who is watched closely by your students. Your actions and words matter. They shape the young people in your care each and every day just as the academic content does.

When we do not provide space within formal education for conversations about social challenges, students are finding other spaces to seek guidance and voice their opinions.

Excerpts from a recent Brookings article, Our twin crises of despair and misinformation; Graham; July 2024, describe well the importance of our social responsibility to foster discussion within educational communities on the challenges we face in daily life. And how we create the space and facilitate these discussions can be empowering or overwhelming.

'New research by neurologists finds that people in despair are particularly vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the radicalization that often results. Scepticism about the value of education, meanwhile, which in part results from despair, is a key factor in the erosion of belief in science. These factors result in a weak base upon which to challenge fake news and rumors, and they all too quickly become ‘the truth.’

‘… interventions must incorporate communities in the proposed solutions … despair at the individual level is often linked to community-wide despair, in contrast to high levels of individual happiness having positive spillover effects on others in the same neighborhood or network.’

 

The ‘agency gap’

Amidst these well-researched and substantiated reports of a growing mental health crisis in our youth, how should we proceed as educational leaders to address their feelings of despair?

Pedro Conceição, Director of the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), refers to this as the ‘agency gap’. Quoting Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, he urges us to foster people’s ’ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act’ in addition to addressing their well-being needs.

'We should look at people not only as patients, recipients of services or benefits, but also as agents able to shape their future.’—Pedro Conceição, Forward Thinking, a podcast by McKinsey Global Institute; September 2024

At CIS, we agree. We believe the way to address the ‘agency gap’ is to focus on the development of socially responsible leadership through international education.

• What does socially responsible leadership look like in your community?
• How do you serve your community as a socially responsible leader?
• How do you educate the young people in your care as socially responsible leaders?

 

We asked our members to describe socially responsible leadership earlier this year. Here are a few examples from more than 300 responses.

'The achievement of powerful harmonies between a school's guiding statements, its current community and its local context.'

'Long-term thinking regarding the industry and the well-being of the students beyond just financial profit!'

'We have not inherited the earth from our ancestors but borrowed it from our future generations.'

The word cloud highlights keywords and themes from all the responses we collected.

 

 

Socially responsible leadership

At a high level, becoming socially responsible is an ongoing process of learning, reflection, and action that empowers individuals and communities to address local and global issues in specific areas of interdependence in ethical and sustainable ways. Conceição defines this as setting a ‘possibilist agenda’.

Socially responsible leadership is not a fixed or universal concept but rather a dynamic and contextual one that can be interpreted and enacted differently by different people from different cultures. It helps us to identify challenges in our own community, and those that transcend national borders.

It cannot be prescribed.

 

Dialogue vs debate

The art of asking a question to start a conversation, and listening with empathy, is a way to begin. Marine Galvez focuses on the importance of dialogue in contrast to debate.

For example, the CIS Board of Trustees begin their meetings by checking-in. The Board Chair asks each Board member to describe what is happening at their school or university as everyone listens.

This past June, our Board meeting began with each of our higher education board members reflecting on how challenging the end of the term had been due to the impact of student encampments in protest to specific conflicts and aggression across the world. They spoke of how their campuses were making space for these protests, considering whether or not to ask the police for help when disagreements turned physical, and how graduation ceremonies had been changed or cancelled to avoid risk.

One Board member stated, ‘And the worst thing is that no one knows how to lead these discussions in a productive way.’

Guiding questions can help each of us to understand community needs and pain points as they emerge. They are a way to explore and reveal insights into individual, interpersonal, and institutional identity, culture, and context.

This dialogue can be enlightening, diffusing, uncomfortable, empowering, confusing, and encouraging all at the same time.

 

Leading with understanding

We’re creating tools to help educational leaders incorporate socially responsible actions within school communities. 

To understand what a community needs to move ahead, our research-based resources will encourage dialogue and understanding to identify opportunities for purposeful next steps. Resources include a student agency pack on how to conduct student engagement sessions on sensitive topics.

We hope these new resources will help community leaders to integrate educational and social responsibilities. Working together with students to identify ‘a possibilist agenda’ will help them to find a sense of purpose as socially responsible leaders too. 

 

 

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CIS Mission & Vision:
CIS leads a collaborative global membership community of schools and higher education institutions, exploring and developing effective practices to foster healthy, interculturally competent global citizens. We connect ideas and cultures across the world, developing socially responsible leadership through international education.

 

Related content:

• We encourage our membership community to explore socially responsible leadership through three strategic growth areas: global citizenship, inclusion via diversity, equity, and anti-racism (I-DEA), and intercultural learning. 
• Socially responsible leadership: Taking a closer look
• Striving to live our CIS vision of socially responsible leadership