5th Annual Emerging Scholars Research Consortium

The research aims to see how the requests issued by the OECD, UNESCO and European Union with respect to the school, intended as a place of training in social life, are applied with respect to the development of leadership attitudes. The educational program of the school has been compared with that of Scouting, educational association that uses a model of active education and has always proposed to help children to develop leadership attitudes and moral values. The idea that leadership skills are developed in an educational context that permits an active role of the learner is the common heritage of the educational models of active learning, which developed at the same time as the birth of the Scout Movement. In this perspective, the organization of the educational environment acquires a significance equal, if not superior, to that of the contents to be transmitted. For this purpose, we used two instruments: the first designed to measure the attitudes and values of leadership expressed by the students, the second aimed to identify through the perceptions of adolescents the characteristics of the two educational settings. To measure the attitudes of leadership, we used the Socially Responsible Leadership Scale (SRLS) (Tyree, 1998; Appel-Silbaugh, 2005; Dugan, 2006), translated and used for the first time in Italy. For the definition of leadership, we referred to the Student Leadership theories and in particular to the Social Change Model of Leadership, in which leadership is considered to be an inclusive process, not dependent on the assumption of a formal role, based on values, which “facilitate positive social change at the institution or in the community” (HERI, 1996). The instrument of Perception of the Environment was inspired to the Culture Questionnaire dimensions of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Research (GLOBE) (House, 2004). The dimensions of the Environment Perception Questionnaire have been revised on the basis of factor analysis of the collected data. The tool allows to observe what impact have certain aspects of the educational context on creating opportunities for leadership development. The questionnaires have been submitted to 600 students and 231 scouts, enrolled in upper secondary schools in Rome. The Environment Perception Questionnaire has also been compiled by teachers and scout leaders of adolescents. In this article, are described the characteristics of both instruments and presented the results concerning the differences between scouts and students in their perception of the classroom or scout group environment and in their development of leadership attitudes. The analyzes indicate statistically significant differences in favor of adolescents scout, relating to both the environment perception and the development of leadership attitudes.