Academic Courses for Spiritual Wellness

LEAD 124: Leadership Development for Meeting the Moment: Practices and Pedagogy

Tuesdays 1:30 - 3:20 pm
20-22K

Instructors: Diane Friedlaender, Colleen Hallagan Preuninger

In the face of political, social, economic, environmental, and public health upheavals, many of us are grappling with uncertainty, isolation, and stress affecting academic and day-to-day life. In this course students will be supported in engaging in their own exploration and developing their capacities to be Student Facilitators for the winter and spring Meeting the Moment course, LIFE/ WELLNESS 105. We will draw on creative and embodied practices derived from psychology, spirituality, and storytelling to build skills for navigating isolation, uncertainty, stress, and help improve self-regulation, holistic learning, resilience, and creative confidence. In this course students will explore and learn to synthesize these capacities, and develop pedagogical skills for sharing knowledge, experience, and community building in the classroom. Enrollment by consent of the instructor.

LEAD 114: More than an Athlete: Intersectionality, Identity, and Wellbeing in sport

Thursdays 10:30 - 11:50 AM

Instructor: Toni Kokenis

Being an athlete provides us with a unique opportunity for leadership both within our team and beyond. In this experiential and discussion-based course, we will reflect critically on who we are behind our athlete identities - how do the other visible and invisible identities we carry intersect to shape our athlete experience? While we may all identify as Stanford athletes, no one athlete's experience is the same. With an emphasis on the importance of self-awareness and storytelling, students will look beyond their talents in their sports to reflect on how all their identities intersect and affect their positionality within Stanford and the surrounding community. As a class we will specifically look at how gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, socioeconomic status, mental health, and disability interact with one's identity as an athlete. Using the Marshall Ganz framework for public narrative, students will explore who they are beyond their athlete identity, what it means to be a Stanford athlete, and how the athlete community can come together to address challenges they face. Students will leave with tangible leadership skills in coaching and public narrative to allow them to better know themselves, find their voice, and learn how to use their voice for positive social change within the Stanford community. This class is specifically designed for varsity and club athletes.

URBANST 127A: Community Organizing: People, Power & Change

Thursdays, 3:00 - 5:50 PM 
CIRCLE Seminar Room (Third Floor of Old Union, Room 301)

Instructors: Toni Kokenis, Rabbi Laurie Hahn Tapper

Organizers ask three questions: who are my people, what challenges do they face, and how can they turn their resources into the power they need to meet these challenges? Organizing requires leadership: accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizers identify, recruit, and develop leadership; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community. In this fellowship course, students will build their coaching and leadership skills to support other students in the craft of community organizing. Students will be introduced to the five core leadership practices: public narrative, building relationships, structure, strategy, and action. In the first module, students will learn what coaching is and how to coach one another through leadership challenges. We will then focus on public narrative in the context of organizing. Students will learn to tell their own public narrative, coach one another on their public narratives, and learn how to use public narrative to analyze responses to leadership challenges. Students will receive the opportunity to coach other students at a public narrative workshop week 4 of the quarter. We will build off of the knowledge and skills students gain in the first module by diving into the remaining leadership practices: relationships, structure, strategy, and action. Students will apply the organizing principles by viewing the fellowship experience as a campaign - who is our constituency? What is our strategic goal? How will we reach it? Students will leave the retreat with a draft of our collective strategic plan. In the remaining three sessions, students will take the lead in facilitating and practicing the activities and skills modeled during the retreat in preparation for coaching at the Winter Intensive.

URBANST 127D: Storytelling for Leadership, Organizing, and Action

Friday, October 18, 3:00 - 5:00 pm
Sunday, October 20, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

CIRCLE (Third Floor of Old Union)

This experiential course introduces students to the leadership practice of public narrative - a storytelling tool for social change. To lead is to accept responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty. Through narrative we can learn to access the moral - or emotional - resources to respond to the challenges of an uncertain world - as individuals, as communities and as nations. Responding to urgent challenges mindfully - with agency - requires courage rooted in our ability to draw on hope over fear; empathy over alienation; and self-worth over self-doubt. While leading with authenticity requires understanding our own sources of hope and courage, it also pushes us to look beyond ourselves to form intentional relationships with others so that together we can address urgent challenges facing our community. Grounded in a pedagogy of reflective practice and experiential learning, each component of the practicum is sequenced as explanation, modeling, practicing, and debriefing. Students will learn not only "about" what makes an effective public narrative, but will learn experientially through practice drafting each narrative component - a story of self, story of us, and story of now. Students will leave with an understanding of how their calling to leadership connects with their community and can motivate others to action.