Morgan Douglas

Professor Arnold
Ethnography
October 22, 2014
Leadership Learning Community
The Leadership Learning Community is a group of students that strive to be the
worlds future leaders. These students are taught to become leaders by doing service
projects, personal interviews with the public, and other projects to improve social skills.
These students focus mainly on their individual strengths. Knowing their own strengths
can help the students to be more confident in themselves and therefore more successful in
their future.
While attending Learning Community classes, each student takes on a newer,
more professional, way of speaking to one another. Many students begin the class with
several compliments toward one another, in order to lighten the mood of their classmates.
Others walk in and immediately begin hugging everyone in the classroom. The closeness
of the members stems from the many team building activities that the students take part
in together.
When one student encounters a fellow Learning Community member in the
classroom, they act as if there has been zero contact between the two in weeks. Even
though the students act this way, most of them had come in contact with their classmates
just an hour earlier. This type of interaction creates a family-like environment for the
students in the Learning Community.
The main focus of the leadership class is to understand the strengths in yourself,
and others, in a positive way. The class teaches that each students strengths can be used
positively if properly practiced. In order to be properly practiced, each strength much be
carefully studied, by knowing what jobs are best for which strengths, or knowing what
kind of other strengths the students would best associate with.
The Learning Community members have learned so much about one another that
it is difficult to judge negatively because each student knows that the annoying
attributes in others stem from the positive strengths and talents within the student. The
fact that students are very open and honest with their struggles and inner feelings in class,
makes the other students feel trusted and creates more respect within the relationship of
the group as a whole.
Within every group, there is some sort of conflict or discourse. In the Learning
Community there is some tension between the professors assistant graduate students, and
some of the students. It was discussed in the last class that there was some
miscommunication with the emails between the students and the graduate assistants.
Other than this small problem, there are not many problems in the group. Considering the
size of the group, and how often the members are together, the amount of discourse is
fairly low.