Culturally Responsive School Leadership

Culturally Responsive School Leadership focuses on how school leaders can effectively serve minoritized students--those who have been historically marginalized in school and society. The book demonstrates how leaders can engage students, parents, teachers, and communities in ways that positively impact learning by honoring indigenous heritages and local cultural practices.

Muhammad Khalifa explores three basic premises. First, that a full-fledged and nuanced understanding of "cultural responsiveness" is essential to successful school leadership. Second, that cultural responsiveness will not flourish and succeed in schools without sustained efforts by school leaders to define and promote it. Finally, that culturally responsive school leadership comprises a number of crucial leadership behaviors, which include critical self-reflection; the development of culturally responsive teachers; the promotion of inclusive, anti-oppressive school environments; and engagement with students' indigenous community contexts.

Based on an ethnography of a school principal who exemplifies the practices and behaviors of culturally responsive school leadership, the book provides educators with pedagogy and strategies for immediate implementation.
About the Author: Muhammad Khalifa is the Robert H. Beck Professor of Ideas in Education in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. He has worked as a public school teacher and administrator in Detroit. He is most noted for helping districts perform equity audits as a way to address injustice and dehumanization in school, and has helped leaders select appropriate reforms that counter inequitable practices in school (www.ajusted.org). His research examines how urban school leaders enact culturally responsive leadership practices. He is coeditor of three other books: Handbook on Urban Educational Leadership, Becoming Critical: The Emergence of Social Justice Scholars, and The School to Prison Pipeline: The Role of Culture and Discipline in School. He has also published widely, with articles appearing in such journals as Review of Educational Research, Teachers College Record, QSE, Urban Review, EAQ, Journal of Negro Education, and the Journal of School Leadership. Dr. Khalifa has also contributed in Asian and African educational contexts, and most recently was invited to several post-conflict areas to improve education.