Leading Change for the 21st Century

The present study aims at uncovering the political facet of the younger generation. It brings to light whether the female students is enriched with political awareness to voice in decision making as a future citizen. The objective of the study was to find whether there exists any difference in political awareness with respect to gender. The sample consisted of 1611 college students studying at various Colleges of Arts and Science in Tamilnadu. Descriptive method using survey as technique was used to solve the present problem. Political Awareness Test (PAT) developed and validated by the authors (2016) has been used for collecting the data. The result showed that gender difference played a dominant role determining political awareness. Male students possessed better political acquaintance than the female students. the paper includes the recommendation in the light of the findings.
* Research Scholar, St.Ignatius College of Education, Palayamkottai
** Research Director & Associate Professor, St.Ignatius College of Education, Palayamkottai

While student experience is a multifaceted term, what is perhaps little explored and understood is that of student leadership contributing to positive student learning experience. Student experience consists of two aspects, the academic experience and the non-academic experience. De Silva and Garnaut (2011) pointed out their interdependence with the latter essential to the overall student experience in the university as well as the student’s personal development in which the experience of student leadership could potentially contribute. Student experience is beyond an outcome-oriented academic experience. Mann (2001) describes as “an alienated experience of learning”, comprising of surface and strategic approaches to learning, but rather one that emphasises on an engaged or deep experience of learning. An engaged learning experience suggests a socio-cultural understanding of student experience involving learning communities which in turn would necessitate the practice of leadership. Considering the importance of learning communities in enhancing student experience, the importance of leadership, in the classroom context, would thus be inevitable. Therefore, there is a need for an empirical study to better understand the term “student leadership”, in terms of (1) establishing the roles of student leaders that have potential impact on positive student experience, and (2) identifying the specific student leadership practices that have such impact. Through the lens of Wenger’s concept of Communities of Practice (CoP), in which “engagement in social practice is the fundamental process by which we learn and so become who we are” (p. i), this paper looks at the student leadership practices that were surfaced in the data collected from one-to-one interviews of students and staff in the National Institute of Education (NIE) at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Snowball sampling was used in order to maximise the number of participants for the study. The analysis of the data draws on the frameworks of Social Change Model of Leadership Development (SCM) and the five practices of exemplary leadership. Based on the findings, this paper thus extends on the two frameworks – an idea of a distributed leadership that is dynamic in nature.