MEM students publish book review in complexity journal

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Many programs at Royal Roads Universityincluding the MA and MSc in Environment and Management (MEM)integrate learning about leadership and sustainability. Fielding Graduate University has published a monograph that includes dissertation research about this intersection. It is titled Sustainability Leadership: Integrating Values, Meaning and ActionAlice MacGillivray (Associate Faculty with the Schools of Leadership Studies and Environment and Sustainability) has a chapter in the monograph, and she also teaches in the final blended courses of the MEM program.  

Graduate students don’t always know how to get started with publishing in peer-reviewed journals. In the final (3rd) residency of the program, students learn about publication basics. When Norma Hogan and Jessie Hannigan studied in the MEM program, they volunteered for an extra activity: working with Alice after the courses ended, to synthesize assignment work for potential publication. 

The product of that work has now been published in the journal Emergence: Complexity and Organization: An International Transdisciplinary Journal of Complex Social Systems. The paper, by Hogan, Hannigan and MacGillivray "has elements of a book review, but its main focus is to use Sustainability Leadership as a vehicle to show how sustainability studies can illuminate complex leadership work."  

The paper highlights ways of moving towards sustainability from a variety of formal and non-formal leadership roles such as activism, Board of Directors memberships and entrepreneurship. It also synthesizes chapter contents, presents systems diagrams, and shows ways in which natural systems principles can inform leadership approaches. The paper cites scholars including Dr. Ann Dale of Royal Roads University.

Fielding University President Katrina S. Rogers (2015, p.312) ends her Afterword in the book with this paragraph:

The historians Will and Ariel Durant once wrote that civilization is not inherited, that it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew. Embedded in this idea is that we can teach a new way of thinking about  civilization to the next generation. In some sense, we have an opportunity that may never pass our way again. Let us do our part to transmit the very best of our thinking to the inheritors of the earth and do this in a way that gives them a chance to build the new civilization.

 

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