MCAD emphasizes a collaborative process and working with students from all professions. For this Master of Arts degree, you will take courses in several different areas adding up to 30 total credits required for graduation.
Learning Outcomes
This foundational survey course examines leadership through a creative lens. A key premise of this course is that we need the methodologies of artists and designers alongside those of scientists and entrepreneurs to undertake necessary transformational change and worldmaking. The in-demand creative skills introduced through this course, which can be applied at any scale and scope of endeavor, include: resourcefulness, adaptability, comfort with reinvention and failure, deep listening, empathy, critique, systems thinking, disciplined imagination, storytelling, facilitation, and community building. The course reviews major leadership theories / approaches and students spend time considering their own leadership style, philosophy, strengths, and weaknesses. Finally, students develop a plan outlining key goals for their ongoing journey through the program, documented in a personal learning portfolio.
By the end of this course students should be able to:
This course invites exploration of a range of relational practices for cultural understanding and change, in response to calls for civic imagination and systemic transformation in support of a more inclusive, equitable society. It examines how practices of artists and other creators are a means by which to develop critical (lost) ways of knowing that are central to human development and how they support an increasingly called for paradigm shift in leadership: away from one grounded in individualism, competition, scarcity, exploitation of people, and extraction of natural resources; and toward one grounded in self-organizing (or collectivism), collaboration, abundance, and care for both people and planet. Students will experience and reflect on resilience under pressure, somatic self-awareness, attentional capacity, decision-making in uncertainty, power dynamics, community-driven design processes, and creative placekeeping. This residency also fosters community building within the Master of Arts in Creative Leadership program itself and centers the value of intentionally formed networks, communities of practice, and peer groups whereby individuals with shared goals support one another, exchange knowledge, develop skills, and work to advance thinking and progress in a particular domain.
This course increases the ability of students to understand and effectively engage with people from different cultures, or holding different values, to co-create inclusive, human-centered work environments where everyone can thrive. Key concepts and related tools that students engage include: healthy conflict and understanding, implicit attitudes and un-biasing, disability justice principles, systemic inequality, sharing power and decision making, anti-racist and anti-oppressive organizations, restorative HR, culture and influence mapping, decolonizing policies and practices, and designing values-based recruitment and hiring processes. Students gain awareness of their own worldview, as well as an appreciation for different worldviews.
This course introduces students to futures-thinking (/futuring) and invites them to apply insights from imagining futures (decades from now) to guide their work in the present. A long-view of the evolution of human collaboration helps students review various forms of organizing and their relationship to contemporaneous challenges and opportunities. Students examine the social, technological, ecological, economic, and political reasons behind the decline of 20th-century organizations and structures; and they identify models and principles of working together that are better aligned with both their inner values and 21st-century realities. With these, students make sense of and contribute to the landscape of new experiments in collective change-making and world-making. This course sets the foundation for courses in spring 2023 that will delve deeply into the structures, forms, and practices of non-hierarchical organizations, teams, and networks, as well as tools, methods, and processes for transformational change.
This course introduces students to a framework and processes to address complex social challenges, grounded in the principles and methods of design thinking with elements from other schools of thought such as social entrepreneurship, impact measurement and community-centered approaches. Addressing such challenges requires a set of behaviors and mindsets that can be mastered and applied by anyone. Following a conceptual foundation, the course will shift to the analysis of case studies that illustrate the impact and potential scalability of design informed solutions to complex social problems. Students will then apply tools they have learned to community challenge projects of their choice, moving from insights to execution in an iterative manner. This process includes: building empathy and relationships; identifying and clarifying a community need; analyzing the larger environment in which that need or problem is situated; building coalitions for ideation and co-creation; prototyping one or more solutions to address the need; testing and evaluating those solutions; communications; and developing ways to scale the intervention for long-term social impact.
The course introduces students to management processes, practices, and tools employed within decentralized networks, organizations, and teams to support collective visioning, planning, decision-making, budgeting, and operations. As a key component of this work, students learn to cultivate an agile mindset: that is, the capacity to respond to unpredictable and complex environments, a rapidly changing marketplace, disruptions stemming from the increasing interdependence of systems or internal feedback loops, and learning. This course focuses on applying these practices to the challenge of leading self-managed teams, including hybrid and remote work that has become prevalent in the wake of the pandemic. This course will also examine the evolution of distributed autonomous organizations ‘DAO’ community-led entities without central authority that are fully autonomous and transparent and operate using blockchain technology.
There is increasing recognition that transformational change is needed to realize a just society where all life thrives, but less clarity on what this involves. During this course, students explore the essential role of collaboration across differences to imagining and realizing transformational change. In doing so, it honors the wisdom embodied by many indigenous groups and spiritual traditions and attempts to decolonize the practice of 'systems change.' This course additionally challenges the dichotomous relationship between culture and nature that is embedded in a Western worldview and, alongside the models for change from the natural world, asserts the critical role of creators, culture-bearers, as well as the capacities for (and fruits of) human imagination more generally to the processes of transformational change. Because culturally constructed paradigms shape social systems, this course additionally asserts that having the capacity to reflect upon, problematize, and transcend one's worldview is a critical capacity for change-makers and world builders. While, ’systems change’ work often stops short of incorporating such invisible yet critical domains of beliefs, identities, and worldview, this course integrates them. Ultimately, students identify creative ways to apply the principles and frameworks of this course to their personal and professional development, including to a progressive community change project.
This course focuses on the issues and trends in the area of ecological and regenerative sustainability, with attention paid to their interconnection to economic and social sustainability (e.g. environmental and social justice, inequity, and the North-South divide), as well as the role of art and design in sustainability. While a range of sustainability frameworks (e.g. triple bottom line, limits to growth, nature’s principles, and the natural step) are covered, students move beyond the goal of reducing harms and explore regenerative approaches. Students ultimately apply course concepts to design a regenerative approach to sustainability within a real-world context, and initiate a personal journey of transformation for regenerative leadership.
To graduate all students must complete a capstone project. This experience gives students the opportunity to reflect upon the knowledge they have gained in the program and demonstrate their skills as creative leaders. The capstone is composed of three requirements. First, students successfully complete a personal learning portfolio, started at the top of the program and maintained throughout, that represents the student’s capacity for reflection-in-action and encourages the cultivation of professional relationships aimed at expanding a personal learning network. Second, students work in pairs to design a leadership workshop, supported by theories and practices taught in the program, that they market and deliver to one or more Twin Cities-area cultural or creative organizations during their final residency week. Third, students develop a Creative Leadership Plan to support their ongoing development post-graduation. This plan includes such things as: their personal values and an articulation of their vision as leaders; reflections on their personal leadership style and preferred model of leadership; an evaluation of their cultural competence and areas for growth in this arena; their own continuous learning plan (including specific tools and practices they have acquired throughout the program that they want to maintain); and their creative leadership goals in the short- and long-term.
In the final residency students spend the week demonstrating their communication skills, listening skills, empathy, and capacity for both intuitive thinking and critical analysis. They strengthen their competencies as coaches, able to provide support and guidance to others and facilitate their development; as facilitators, able to use well-crafted questions, reflection, and well-designed processes to help teams and individuals solve problems; and as storytellers, able to connect with an audience, speak authentically and confidently, and inspire others to action. Students deploy these skills by co-leading a workshop (designed as part of their capstone) with a local cultural or creative organization or business.