When Leadership Counts: Engaging Youth Through the Washington Leadership Conference

Abstract

The National FFA Organization continues to be a leader in the positive development of youth. Programs sponsored by the FFA provide youth with opportunities to develop their capacity for leadership and citizenship. The Washington Leadership Conference (WLC) is a weeklong conference during the summer that culminates the FFA experience. The WLC's objectives range from defining authentic leadership and relationship building to evaluating ethical decisions and serving communities. Over a 3-year period (2003, 2004, and 2005) the WLC showed consistent results in creating a positive change in the leadership development of its attendees. The greatest area of change was in the WLC's ability to impart new knowledge in its participants, demonstrated by ease of recall for specific facts. However, once participants returned home there was a slight decrease in their ability to carry out behaviors related to the leadership competencies taught at WLC. Overall, results were favorable as to the accomplishment of the WLC's programmatic objectives. Continual support from chapter advisors and online resources would ideally increase the behavioral aspects of students becoming more civically engaged in their home communities and carrying out positive leadership behaviors.

Service-Learning's Ongoing Journey as a Method of Instruction: Implications for School-Based Agricultural Education

“…Service-learning is shaping SBAE, especially its FFA and SAE components. The National FFA Days of Service and WLC's service component resulted from the resurgence of progressive education approaches in SBAE (Stedman, Rutherford, Rosser, & Elbert, 2009). Because of this renewed optimism regarding the method's utility, new funding opportunities emerged supporting agricultural educators' attempts to conduct service-learning activities (Slavkin & Sebastian, 2013).…”

Leadership Curriculum and Materials Used by High School Agricultural Science Teachers: A National Study of the Pre-LifeKnowledge Days

“…This positive correlation reinforces the positive relationship between FFA activity and perceived leadership skills. Similarly, a three-year longitudinal study revealed that the WLC had a positive impact on student attendees (Stedman, Rutherford, Rosser, & Elbert, 2009). Further, Anderson and Kim (2009) found that students preferred the schoolbased leadership training found in FFA and agricultural science classes second only to high school sports.…”

How Are Leadership Programs Empowering Our Vulnerable Children and Youth? A Scoping Review

“…The programs were implemented in different ways, some following specified strategies which included participatory action research (Aldana et al 2016;Bailey et al 2017;Forbes-Genade and van Niekerk 2017;McCalman et al 2009), photovoice (Aldana et al 2016), therapeutic media empowerment (Levy 2012), cognitive behaviour therapy (Mazurek Melnyk et al 2007), Glasser's reality therapy (Hindes et al 2008), Sarling Gawa's youth leadership development model (Luluquisen et al 2012), a trauma-informed strengths-based approach (Sisselman-Borgia 2021), the youth leadership life-skills approach (Ahrens et al 2015), the PICO model of community organizing (Christens and Dolan 2011), the pedagogical framework for youth media participation (Chan and Holosko 2020), the theory of service leadership (Stedman et al 2009)…”

“…The programs were implemented in different ways, some following specified strategies which included participatory action research (Aldana et al 2016;Bailey et al 2017;Forbes-Genade and van Niekerk 2017;McCalman et al 2009), photovoice (Aldana et al 2016), therapeutic media empowerment (Levy 2012), cognitive behaviour therapy (Mazurek Melnyk et al 2007), Glasser's reality therapy (Hindes et al 2008), Sarling Gawa's youth leadership development model (Luluquisen et al 2012), a trauma-informed strengths-based approach (Sisselman-Borgia 2021), the youth leadership life-skills approach (Ahrens et al 2015), the PICO model of community organizing (Christens and Dolan 2011), the pedagogical framework for youth media participation (Chan and Holosko 2020), the theory of service leadership (Stedman et al 2009), group work principles (Northington 2018), a conceptual framework of the directionality of effects (Conner and Strobel 2007), and Tuckman's group developmental stages (Dima and Bucuta 2020). Although a specific framework was not always reported, a number of programs used creative arts in their implementation (n = 7) (Bentz and Brien 2019;Chan and Holosko 2020;Cooke et al 2018;Harvey et al 2021;Larson et al 2005;Lobman 2017;Northington 2018;Shelton 2008;Shimshon-Santo 2018;Siddiq et al 2015).…”