Alma Blount
HLP Director
Teaching Statement

Service and Leadership: Our Pedagogy for Moral and Civic Education

I have had the good fortune to work with community groups all my adult life, coordinating programs, running nonprofits, serving on boards, serving as a planning consultant with multi-party collaborations, organizing grassroots initiatives, and designing advocacy campaigns. Through it all I have developed confidence and conviction about what I call the joy of public life. I believe we become whole when we find creative ways to live together in community, when we develop an intrinsic sense of purpose and calling to engage with each other on the important issues that directly affect our lives.

It is the process of engagement that interests me far more than any particular outcome, although I also believe strongly in working towards tangible goals. To me, though, the artistry lies in the practice of the democratic process. I call it a practice because my own experience has shown me it is an imperfect experiment that never really comes to closure. The vital questions that drive the experiment for me are, “How do I want to live my life?” “Where am I connected with others?” and “How should I and others try to live together in community?” All these simple questions of course have complex, constantly changing answers.

As director of Duke University’s Hart Leadership Program, I believe that exercising leadership begins with asking questions. I see it as a process of getting groups, institutions, and social systems to focus their attention on difficult issues and to frame coherent problems. You have to find leverage points for changing systems in order to make progress on problems. It is an art more than a science. It requires improvisation, patience, a sense of purpose, and the ability to orchestrate conflict skillfully so that people with different viewpoints and values can learn from each other. It is about working in communities and creating new conversations about the issues that affect our lives. It is about democratic participation and public life.

Now in its 20th year, the Hart Leadership Program grew from the idea that students need to develop their own leadership experience as well as their understanding of leadership studies. The experiential side and the intellectual side of learning about leadership go together. We see our mission as helping students develop a rich understanding of public life, deepening their commitment to service, philanthropy, and civic participation no matter what career paths they choose.

We are a diverse, interdisciplinary faculty, with backgrounds in government, business, the non-profit world, documentary studies, history, and political science. My own training is in theology, and I have worked with public sector organizations for most of my career. Our teaching combines rigorous academic coursework and community-based service to challenge students first to recognize their leadership potential. Then we ask them to see what issues and concerns call for their attention, and to find creative ways to take action.

Although we come from different disciplines we have a unified approach for developing the leadership capacities of our students:

• First, we know and use the power of immersion experiences, such as service learning projects, internships, and post-graduate fellowships.

• Second, we strongly emphasize and support a process of critical reflection, and see it as central to exercising leadership effectively. For example, we use documentary approaches to help students make sense of their experiences in the field, share knowledge with others effectively, and impact public policy.

• Third, the aim of our programs and courses is to establish learning environments that create a possibility for transformation for students, on a personal level and within communities. Our goal is to help students develop a personal commitment to service and then to be willing to take the all-important next step—action in a public arena. We call this "going public."

Our methodologies include traditional coursework, research, case studies, oral history, documentary film and video. We all have a strong passion for teaching. Our work emphasizes political engagement and citizen deliberation in the shaping of public policy. We explore the global and local connections among a wide range of social issues. Our civil sector partners include over 200 organizations across the US and around the world. And in the past 20 years more than 7500 Duke students have taken our courses and participated in our experiential programs.

As one of my colleagues likes to say, the truth is that, “we’re in the transformation business.” We try to help establish the conditions for learning and to hold students in the process. Then life itself in its complexity provides the opportunities for transformation, and those opportunities abound. We may be a small program, but what distinguishes us is the size of our hope for our students--that they will find ways to act in the world with genuine effectiveness.

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