Moving from ephemerality to resonant learning: Integrating creative industries leadership experiences into the delivery of leadership education as a lifelong experience

Abstract

Developing graduates from business school programs that can develop and apply transdisciplinary capabilities to become responsible, creative, and innovative leaders and creators of good throughout their career is a complex curricular challenge. The development of leadership education programs that explicitly and tacitly integrate the transdisciplinary frameworks, tropes and behavioural aspirations of arts and cultural industries leadership (and vice versa) is equally complex yet enabling of the development and opportunities of human-centred leadership capability.

This paper will interrogate the challenges and affordances of designing leadership education programs that purposefully integrate creative industries leadership capabilities to support skills development and experiences that transcend the immediacy of a graduates first job and into the complexities and challenges of a future career facing successive crises. As a counter to the economic and consumerist conceptualisation and co-option of ephemerality as a framing of the market value of lifelong learning to a university, this paper will posit the design concept of resonant learning to describe the longitudinal epistemic influence of learning through educational experiences that last past the immediate gratification of graduate employment. It will use an analysis of staff and student data from a participatory action research project evaluating a higher education program that integrates creative industries knowledge into responsible leadership education conducted over five iterative cycles of development. The study showed that supporting learners to move from a state of ephemerality to states of resonance frames the modalities of transition and experiential learning through a creative leadership education.