A Turning Point: Utilizing responsive interviewing and graphing to promote leader identity through meaning making

Abstract

College student leadership development has been identified as a critical learning outcome of higher education. Recently, scholarly attention has been placed on understanding college student leader identity development because of its influence on leadership cognitions and behavior. However, investigating and teaching about leader identity is difficult due to its dynamic nature and complex connections to broader adult development. As a result, leadership scholars have begun to incorporate more narrative pedagogy into curriculum because it allows students and instructors to co-explore meaning construction and leader identity creation through storytelling. Therefore, the purpose of the current innovative practice paper is to introduce a technique to explore leader identity development and meaning making, that builds on the narrative pedagogical tradition. In this paper, we recommend a process for combining turning-point graphing and responsive (semi-structured) interviews to co-explore leader identity development and meaning making with college students. The paper provides student feedback data on the effectiveness of the technique in improving understanding of leader identity and transforming meaning making. We hope practitioners can utilize this approach to build leader identity development and meaning-making capacity in college students.