2024-2025 Graduate Catalog 
    
    Dec 26, 2024  
2024-2025 Graduate Catalog

Leadership Studies (MA.LDR)


Program Director: David McGough, Ph.D.
Email: david.mcgough@vermontstate.edu
 

Program Description

The Master of Arts in Leadership Studies program provides an original stance to the study of leadership. Each 5-credit course blends a humanistic, interdisciplinary core with classic and contemporary leadership theory. The program expands the boundaries of conventional approaches to leadership studies by augmenting customary content with aesthetic sensibilities, design and system thinking, diversity studies, social ethics, complexity and future studies, and scholar-practitioner methods of inquiry. 

Participants in the Master of Arts in Leadership Studies program gain a deeper understanding of the operation and potential of their professional endeavors by: 

  • Employing their personal strengths to create purposeful leadership goals 
  • Enacting strategies to generate inclusive leadership relationships 
  • Designing and guiding meaningful and productive projects for specific organizational environments 
  • Advocating for innovation through analysis of the social and cultural forces shaping specific contexts 
  • Facilitating collective actions toward sustainable ends 
  • Applying their learning in original projects in real-work settings 

Program Highlights 

  • The M.A. in Leadership Studies program is offered in an asynchronous online format, so you can work at your own weekly schedule. 
  • The program includes only six courses that can be completed in one year through full-time enrollment (two concurrent courses) or two years with part-time enrollment (one course per semester). 
  • The 5-credits courses meld interdisciplinary contextual study with practical leadership strategies. This design gives you fewer courses to complete, fewer transitions, fewer (yet more captivating) assignments, and fewer readings, so you can absorb them more fully. 
  • Semesters are fifteen weeks in the spring and fall and twelve weeks in the summer. This allows sufficient time for deep learning, careful study, and meaningful interactions with peers and instructors. 
  • Courses employ adult learning theory with multimedia content, experiential projects, open educational resources, peer study sessions, critical perspectives, creative expression, and other engaging instructional strategies and practical assignments. 
  • Courses can be completed in any sequence. You may begin coursework in any semester. 
  • Enroll with any bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university with a GPA of 2.75 or higher; GRE not required; international applicants see specific requirements. 

Program Outcomes

Participants in the Master of Arts in Leadership Studies program gain a deeper understanding of the operation and potential of their professional endeavors by: 

  • Employing their personal strengths to create purposeful leadership goals 
  • Enacting strategies to generate inclusive leadership relationships 
  • Designing and guiding meaningful and productive projects for specific organizational environments 
  • Advocating for innovation through analysis of the social and cultural forces shaping specific contexts 
  • Facilitating collective actions toward sustainable ends 
  • Applying their learning in original projects in real-work settings