Strategies for Culturally Responsive Leaders
by Fatima Brunson PhD., DaVonna Graham, Tanja Burkhard PhD., Valerie Kinloch PhD.
This is the eighth in a series of blogs from the editors and authors of It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings. This blog focuses on the chapter “Organizing for Equity: Addressing Institutional Barriers and Creating Learning Opportunities,” by Fatima Brunson, DaVonna Graham, Tanja Burkhard, and Valerie Kinloch.
From increased economic instability, educational inequities, and health disparities to political upheaval and social inequalities, the lives of millions of people are being negatively impacted by the conditions of this present moment. This moment is being shaped heavily by the COVID-19 global pandemic and ongoing racial violence directed at Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and other People of Color. It is also being defined by increased disconnections within and across the multiple learning systems in which children, youth, and adults participate. As we recognize these difficult times and their impact on learning, we suggest that we need new forms and examples of leadership to meet this moment — forms and examples that are collaborative, collective, and based in cultural knowledge.
Exemplars of Culturally Responsive Leadership
In this piece, we turn our attention to how two educational leaders — Mr. Blackwell, a Black man who is a high school principal; and Dr. Kinloch, a Black woman who is a university dean of a school of education — organize for equity.
Mr. Blackwell has spent his entire 15-year career as an administrative leader at Wells High School (WHS), a suburban district in the U.S. Midwest where he was born and raised. Interview and observational data show that the overwhelming majority of the teaching staff at WHS is white. The demographic divide (Gay & Howard, 2000) is highly visible at WHS, with just over 70% of the students identifying as Black, and less than 25% of the students identifying as Hispanic.
Dr. Kinloch is dean of the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) School of education in the U.S. Northeast. She has been dean since summer 2017, and before becoming dean, she spent approximately 17 years as a university professor at other universities, including some years as a chief diversity officer, an associate dean, and an associate department chair.
Both leaders seek to eliminate institutional barriers and foster sustainable, positive learning opportunities for educators and students, and in so doing, their leadership practices have significant implications for those working to change the odds for youth.
This piece discusses how their leadership practices inform the shaping of learning and development of ecosystems. Drawing on the public school and higher educational contexts in which Mr. Blackwell and Dr. Kinloch work, we consider the following question: “How is culturally responsive leadership defined, enacted, and sustained within their practices?”
By relying on the stories told by these two culturally responsive leaders, we detail how Mr. Blackwell moves beyond standardized measures to implement relevant pedagogies, and how Dr. Kinloch works with her staff to cultivate a culturally responsive school environment. We conclude by listing tangible strategies for changing the odds by improving learning ecosystems.
Moving Beyond “Mainstream Mandates”
Our analysis of Mr. Blackwell begins with how he critically self-reflects on his leadership behaviors, while inviting his leadership team to do the same. This regular reflection is important because it can, as Theoharis and Haddix (2011) remind us, help leaders “challenge hegemonic epistemologies and whiteness in their school” (p. 12).
As Mr. Blackwell reflects on his work as a leader, especially within the contexts of standardization and reform, he acknowledges the importance of attending to the political and cultural contexts in which educators work and students attend school. He is honest about how district and state level measures have made WHS look like “a failure” by requiring “unrealistic expectations.” He highlighted that the pressures of accountability have increased since the inception of the law, No Child Left Behind, which served to label schools, like WHS, as failing.
Thus, he challenges hegemonic discourses within educational systems; he highlights how NCLB used unrealistic benchmarks, set by people who are not educators, to measure academic progress. In meetings with staff, he refers to district aligned state standards as “mainstream mandates” that narrowly focus on raising math and reading scores and do not focus on promoting equitable teaching environments. Because of this awareness and the tension that it creates, he develops formal and informal systems to support educators to determine what is truly “relevant” and “needed” at WHS.
Mr. Blackwell’s commitment to promoting equitable teaching environments is also connected to his desire to reverse the public narrative about the school’s poor teacher quality and pedagogical engagements, hence, the low test scores. Reversing the narrative starts with his investment in changing teachers’ mindsets about themselves, their students, and their practice. He finds that teachers, particularly those who work with Black and Latinx students and families, are subjected to “the blame game” where educational narratives often attack educators in schools for much of what is going wrong in society and social institutions.
Mr. Blackwell makes sure to provide educators with multiple ways to see themselves and to honor their practices outside of “mainstream mandates.” Recognizing hegemonic epistemologies within state and district policies and committing to reversing WHS’s narrative serve as an important way to begin developing an equitable environment and taking up equitable teaching and learning strategies.
Cultivating a Culturally Responsive Learning Environment
During what many might consider the settling in period, Dr. Kinloch began to build and strengthen relationships among faculty, staff, students, and community partners. She did so by establishing networks for sharing with, and learning from, one another.
Frequent convenings, with flexible and open agendas called “Conversations with the Dean,” were held at least monthly. These provided a venue for students, faculty, and staff to think and learn with her, and for her to do the same with them. People were invited to bring questions and suggest recommendations for programmatic initiatives, strategic priorities, and overall school improvements. More importantly, they were invited to just think and talk with each other. Such access, responsiveness, and visibility of someone in the role of dean was in itself radical.
Dr. Kinloch shared with us that faculty, staff, and students began to rely on these regular opportunities to connect with her in ways that had not been expected or typical before.
Change the Odds by Improving Learning Ecosystems
Within the stories that Mr. Blackwell and Dr. Kinloch shared surfaced commitments to how diversity, equity, and justice provide critical opportunities to support learning and development. Their stories revealed strategies for organizing for equity within institutions such as:
- Increasing connections, alignments, and complementarities within and across learning systems;
- Supporting the professional development and learning of educators and self by centering cultural responsiveness;
- Focusing on the people, practices, and policies within systems in order to impact sustainable change; and
- Relying on stories in order to engage in a paradigm shift in how people lead, teach, collaborate, and organize for equity.
Their stories also revealed strategies for organizing for equity within communities such as:
- Engaging in leadership practices that inform the shaping of learning and development ecosystems;
- Working to de-center learning in traditionally formal educational spaces by being attentive to how young people learn, thrive, and survive in out-of-school spaces; and
- Expressing expanded notions of education beyond formal institutions by always working to de-center schools.
This is an important point, as Hal Smith (in “Narrow Definitions of How, Where, and When Learning Happens Undermine Equity: How OST Leaders Can Help” in It Takes an Ecosystem) describes, because de-centering schools allows us to better understand how “communities have schools.”
Ultimately, these strategies for organizing for equity within institutions involve noticing, acknowledging, and disrupting current social norms and harmful policies that negatively impact young people’s learning experiences and opportunities.
