LDR 101: Leadership Prologue
LDR 101 seminars explore how the liberal arts inform good leadership. They engage every first-year student in the exploration of an interesting topic while providing the intellectual orientation and skills foundational to college learning and effective leadership. All LDR 101 seminars, regardless of topic, share specific learning goals based on the faculty's conviction that all good leaders work well with others, think analytically, and communicate effectively. For these reasons, all LDR 101 seminars place special emphasis on five fundamental intellectual and leadership skills: critical thinking, writing, public speaking, digital literacy, and teamwork.
Each seminar is designed to help you do the following, both singly and as a member of a team:
- Summarize and explain the main ideas of a text, speech, doctrine, principle or belief.
- Identify and analyze significant issues, problems, and questions, and evaluate or develop effective responses.
- Articulate, compare and judge the strengths and weaknesses of two or more competing arguments about an issue, problem or question, supporting your comparative judgment with appropriate evidence.
- Develop, focus and organize ideas concerning a central topic, and create, revise and present these ideas in written, spoken, visual and digital forms using appropriate sources.
- Articulate how working toward the outcomes above has informed your understanding of leadership and your capacity to lead.
Leadership Prologue Courses, Fall 2025
Select a course to view the description.
LDR-101 (Williams): For Her People: Margaret Walker, Literary Leadership, and the Struggle for Black Liberation (4.00)
Best known for her signature poem “For My People” and for her folk novel Jubilee, Margaret Walker exemplified a model of leadership grounded in intellectual rigor, cultural affirmation, and long-term institutional impact. From her role in the Chicago Black Renaissance to her foundational work in establishing the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People at Jackson State University (now the Margaret Walker Center), Walker’s career challenges us to expand our definitions of leadership to include literary activism, educational innovation, and generational mentorship. Through close readings of her poetry, fiction, essays, and archival materials, we will explore the ways in which Walker led through language, vision, and community engagement—offering a compelling model for ethical and inclusive leadership in the arts and education. What can Walker’s life and work teach us about the role of artists and educators in leading movements?
Taught by Seretha Williams.
LDR-101 (Drescher): Leadership and German Science Fiction: Anticipating the Future (4.00)
What leadership qualities will we need in the future? What will guide our decisions about how we live our lives in conditions that we can’t yet foresee? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves with the “remarkable set of tools” (Holland James) that science fiction provides for its readers: to imagine, learn, and strategize about alternative realities. Science fiction prompts us to think through complex systems, test assumptions, connect disciplines, understand the fragility of our world or ecosystem, and, finally, to compare and choose between competing approaches. Science fiction, like leadership, requires us to develop a bird’s-eye view of our world and adapt to rapid change. Reading and viewing selected German science fiction novels and films (in English translation) we will develop intercultural competence and pay particular attention to another culture’s assessment of future problems, its approaches to solutions, and to how its characters embody competing discourses and rationalizations.
Taught by Barbara Drescher.
LDR-101 (Kingsley): Democracy and Its Critics in Ancient Greece (4.00)
This seminar will explore leadership through the lens of the people’s use of power in the radical democracy of classical Athens. We will examine the birth of this political institution in the sixth century BCE, its organization, and the early and frequent criticisms made of this bold political experiment. In readings ranging from ancient Greek tragedy to comedy, history, and philosophy, we will interrogate whether democracy is simply ‘mob rule’ by another name, rule by the mediocre, and unstable by nature. Further, for six sessions each student will embody an Athenian democrat in a historical role-playing game in which you and your classmates will debate key issues every democracy must grapple with, such as: Who gets the vote? Who gets social welfare? Do we adopt a policy of free or limited speech? Do we need an aggressive military? Overall, this seminar will have a two-fold purpose: 1) to acquire a working knowledge of the rule of the people in antiquity and 2) to acquire leadership skills crucial in our own modernity through teamwork and individual exercises.
Taught by K. Scarlet Kingsley.
LDR-101 (Meyer-Lee): Leadership and Gender in the Young Adult Fantasy Novel and Film (4.00)
In this seminar, we will critically evaluate the representation of leadership and gender in several young adult fantasy novels and the films based on them. After reading some feminist, gender, and leadership theory, we will examine closely the ways in which these novels and films construct positive and negative models of leadership and of gender, and the ways in which they relate these models to each other. We will assess how much these models do and do not conform to existing norms and how successful they may be at challenging those norms. Examples of possible novels and films include The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; The Golden Compass; Binti; and The Hunger Games. Students will write reflection papers and analyses of films and novels, and, in teams as the final project, design their own young adult fantasy story, and write, film, and screen a segment of that story.
Taught by Bobby Meyer-Lee.
LDR-101 (Solomon): Close Listening and Popular Music (4.00)
Effective communication is a key component of successful leadership. Skillful communication involves more than writing or speaking clearly and convincingly—it requires listening. This course uses popular music to hone critical listening skills, as students apply research, close listening, and aural analysis to identify the various elements of a song (melody, lyrics, harmony, instrumentation, form) and describe how those elements interact and blend to form meaning.
Taught by Jason Solomon.
LDR-101 (Stamant J): Media, Communication, and the Shape of Our World (4.00)
After Johannes Gutenberg “invented” modern printing with movable type in the fifteenth century, it became much easier to disseminate information to large groups of people. Yet, the question remains: how is communication affected by the medium that exists between the speaker and the audience? Was Marshall McLuhan right when he wrote that “the medium is the message”? In this class we will consider how media has attempted to facilitate communication, transmit information, and tell stories, from Gutenberg to the present. We will examine old media and new media alike, including contemporary modes such as digital media, social media, and celebrity media. How does an understanding of, and ability to manipulate, media help leaders to lead? What is the relationship between media and leadership? We will interrogate these questions and this topic from different angles and by looking at various kinds of texts to create a discussion about the importance of media in the past, our present moment, and the future.
Taught by James Stamant.
LDR-101 (Stamant N): Life Writing as Leadership: Reading Women Leaders’ Lives (4.00)
In this section--Life Writing as Leadership: Reading Women Leaders’ Lives--we will consider how personal narratives and stories about lived experiences present models for leadership. Auto/biographical texts galvanize movement after movement, promoting civil and human rights across the world, and take many forms. This semester, we will think about what it is about women’s life stories--life writing--that can mobilize and convince. What forms can and do auto/biographical acts take? How can life writing and acts of memory provide counternarratives that promote social justice? What kind of agency does reading about another’s exceptional life confer? What about writing? To answer some of these questions, we will consider narrative activism, auto/biography, and the many different approaches to leadership our writers and subjects take in these narratives. Reading across texts, we pay particular attention to how people construct themselves, their lives, their artistic practices and creative processes, their leadership strategies, and their communities. In so doing, we will see how auto/biographical narratives demand recognition for lives lived and can function as a call to action.
Taught by Nicole Stamant.
LDR-101 (Wolfe): Narrative Medicine (4.00)
This course introduces students to interdisciplinary perspectives on health, wellbeing, and health care through Narrative Medicine methods. We will explore how patients and health care providers who occupy different social locations narrate their experiences and how Narrative Medicine methodologies can address differences in experiences across the life course. Students will explore patient- and provider-viewpoints in biomedical, medical humanities, and social and behavioral science fields. Students will participate in in-depth, analytic discussions of readings, and create narrative expressions of embodiment and health, including multi-media zines and Op Eds. This course will prepare students to critically examine different social, political, and philosophical perspectives in health and health care.
Taught by Atticus Wolfe.