NEW from Harvard Press: Culturally Responsive School Leadership
Professor Muhammad Khalifa has a new book out entitled Culturally Responsive School Leadership from the Harvard Press that I’d like to recommend. I first met Muhammad at my college job fundraising for the University of Michigan Ann Arbor in 1994. It was actually one of the three college jobs that I had at the same time to make ends meet. I next saw Muhammad in 2007, more than a decade after college, at the University Council For Educational Administration national conference in Alexandria Virginia. We’ve been close colleagues ever since.
The first time I wrote about community-based accountability— which later became the Local Control Accountability Plans in California— was a chapter for the Handbook of Urban Education (click the link to read and to cite the piece).
Vasquez Heilig, J., Khalifa, M., & Tillman, L. (2013). Why have NCLB and high-stakes reforms failed?: Reframing the discourse with a post-colonial lens. In K. Lomotey and R. Milner (Eds.), Handbook of Urban Education (pp. 523-537). New York, NY: Routledge.
Later, I collaborated with some of my colleauges and students at UT-Austin on a chapter about restorative justice and Youth Courts in a book Dr. Khalifa co-edited (click the link to read and to cite the piece).
Cole, H., Vasquez Heilig, J., Fernandez, T., Clifford, M., & Garcia, R. (2015). Social Justice in action: Urban school leaders address the school to prison pipeline via a youth court. In M. Khalifa, C. Grant, N.W. Arnold and A. Osanloo (Eds.), Handbook of Urban Educational Leadership (pp. 320-328). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield.
Dr. Khalifa has a new book out. In the field we often discuss culturally responsive schooling, and it is typically framed as culturally responsive teaching, but in this new book we are challenged to implement culturally responsive leadership.
Based on an ethnography of a school principal who exemplifies the practices and behaviors of culturally responsive school leadership, Culturally Responsive School Leadership provides educators with pedagogy and strategies for immediate implementation.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. It pushes beyond books that focus on conversation or discourse, and instead highlights concrete leadership behaviors that humanize students and communities.
Professor 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.
I am pleased to announce that Dr. Khalifa will give a guest lecture at California State University Sacramento in the coming academic year. Stay tuned to Cloaking Inequity for details and livestream information.
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