SECTION 3
ADVANCED MCH LEADERSHIP TRAINING
Building Leadership Structures to Support Collective Efficacy (4 sessions/ Session 9 is number four of the four sessions on building leadership structures)
SESSION 9: Antigone and her Golden Circle
HOMEWORK
FINISH READING "Antigone" by Sophocles
Continue developing your Management Plan from last week and leave the financial area blank until our meeting with a fund raising expert next week.
WRITE RESPONSES TO Antigone
1) If Antigone had articulated her triple-focus, what do you think it might have been?
1B) If Antigone drew a Golden Circle, what might that look like?
2) Think about team building and coalitions in Antigone. Who do you think makes up one of the "teams"? What one thing does the team you identify do to try to build a coalition?
3) Antigone is a famous Greek tragedy. There are times a play like Antigone makes us think of people in the news or politics. If you think about modern situations, what is one comparison you would make to Antigone? [Who in the news has a conflict and tragic end?]
SESSION OVERVIEW: Antigone and Tragedy
"These rigid spirits are the first to fall.
The strongest iron, hardened in the fire, most often ends in scraps and shatters."
Creon, from Sophocles Antigone
TRANSFER OF CORE CONCEPTS into OTHER ENVIRONMENTS
How can we explore Antigone's motivations and choices using leadership strategies from Kellogg and Sinek? Think about the ways we can apply concepts like a triple focus, golden circle, and team building to characters and their actions in Antigone.
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LOOKING BACK at our session and discussion of Antigone
Last night, we spent time sharing about our week, then we read the first 15 pages [or so] of Antigone out loud and talked about what was going on in the play.
We also talked about the way plays are set up [some of the genre expectations]: characters listed first + setting + scene changes with characters moving on and off stage.
Then, we talked a little about the Chorus and the role the Chorus played in Greek dramas--something like a mix of gossipers sharing background information and something like a narrator letting you know more about the rhetorical scenario and which gods are invested in the humans/cities of the play.
We also talked about human nature, and the window we get into the family fighting at the heart of this tragedy. We agreed that pride and a sense of self-righteousness were at the heart of this family's problems. The term the Greeks used to talk about the sort of pride that Creon exhibits is huberis. Creon believes he knows better than the gods or that he is making a more logical/righteous choice than the gods when he refuses to bury and give last rights to Polyneices. The cliche "pride goes before a fall" emerges from the hubris of characters like Creon [and Oedipus] and is central to many Greek tragedies.
We also discussed the challenges of reading Sophocles. The play follows some of the same structures of Greek long poems. The English translation attempts to capture some of the beauty of the original language. For this reason, the text is challenging for many modern readers because it is not in a familiar narrative tone. We commented on the value of becoming a close reader and reading + rereading a text to get to the heart of the story. This practice of close reading strategies can transfer into other situations and may help us be savvy readers of legislation, contracts, and other formal documents we will encounter as grassroots leaders.
We plan to talk about Antigone more at another session.
