Culturally Responsive Leadership in Higher Education

Promoting Access, Equity, and Improvement

Lorri Santamaría, Andrés Santamaría, Lorri Santamaría, Andrés Santamaría

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317519966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Liderazgo en educación

Rapidly changing global demographics demand visionary, collaborative, and culturally appropriate leadership practices on university campuses. In the face of widening gaps in academic achievement and socio-economic roadblocks, Culturally Responsive Leadership in Higher Education offers a new vision of leadership, where diversity is transformed from challenge into opportunity. This book offers a range of perspectives from culturally, racially, linguistically, ability, and gender-diverse contributors who demonstrate that effective leadership springs from those who engage, link theory to practice, and promote access, equity, and educational improvement for underserved students. Each chapter explores a critical higher educational leadership issue with feasible strategies and solutions. In this exciting book, theory and research-based chapters unpack culturally responsive leadership, revealing how higher education leaders in the U.S. and international contexts can improve their practice for social equity and educational change.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315720777-1

The Urgent Call for Culturally Responsive Leadership in Higher Education

Lorri J. Santamaría and Andrés P. Santamaría

We begin, as we have in the past, with this premise: “It is an undeniable conclusion that the educational system and its partners have failed to produce citizens who can contribute to and benefit from a world that offers enormous opportunity” (Fullan, 2001, cited in Santamaría & Santamaría, 2012, p. 152). As a result, the U.S. and similar nations are plagued by widening gaps in academic achievement, and social and economic opportunity that separate economically disadvantaged, culturally and linguistically diverse learners (e.g., those of African, Latino/a, Indigenous, or Pacific Island descent) in schools from their mainstream, middle-class and often White or European-descent peers (Akiba, LeTendre, & Scribner, 2007). Educational inequities, disparities, uneven access, and exclusion have become the focus of educational leadership attention, energy and fiscal resources (California Department of Education [CDE], 2007; Darling-Hammond, 1999, 2007; Vanneman, Hamilton, Baldwin Anderson, & Rahman, 2009).

Over the last 20 years, much time has been spent identifying and discussing various gaps (e.g., academic, social, economic) that impact systemically under-served students. These disparities have been confirmed by empirical research (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2007; Vanneman et al., 2009). Yet, within the context of these academic conversations, there have been few scholarly contributions addressing ways in which achievement gaps affect students on college and university campuses, trickling into the national equity agenda designed to protect educational inequities (Nevarez & Wood, 2010, 2014). Although equity and access issues are carried through early childhood education, primary, intermediate, and secondary schools, the educational leadership needs in tertiary settings are specific to the complexities present at that particular level (Middlehurst & Elton, 1992). These differences may be compounded depending on the type of institution (e.g., community college, polytechnic, research-intensive) under consideration.

Differentiating Educational Leadership in Higher Education

Educational leadership in the academy is conceptualized by Blaschke, Frost, and Hattke (2014) as consisting of “conflictory institutional” ways of supporting organizations encompassing elements of leadership, governance, and management (LGM) (p. 711). These scholars describe ways in which university leadership is shifting from engaging relational and, consequently, more collegial governance patterns to more neo-liberal, business-like ways of management in complementary micro patterns. These micro ways of leading involve leading the scholarship of academic work as well as coordination of courses, people (students and colleagues), and resources in a somewhat contrived and often diverse community within a larger geopolitical community. Equity and access toward improvement are issues that necessitate micro patterns of leadership in order to enact change (Santamaría, 2012, 2014a).

Unfortunately, micro patterns of leadership practice do not feature in research on educational leadership in higher education (HE). This has resulted in a theory-to-practice vacuum in the field regarding what one might consider effective leadership practices in academe (Bryman, 2007; Kezar, 2002). In fact, Blaschke et al. (2014) argue that “there is little explanation of how universities perform their everyday practices of LGM on the micro-level of (inter)actions, let alone face organizational change” (p. 713). In direct response to the lack of information and research on understanding the micro-levels of leadership, governance, and management in tertiary settings, this book provides experiential and often empirical examples of complementary ways of leading. The practices presented here promote equity and access to benefit systemically underserved and, as a result, underperforming students through change in a variety of culturally and linguistically diverse tertiary settings in the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia.

More specifically, this edited book introduces the perspectives of 29 culturally, linguistically, racially, ability-, and gender-diverse scholars and educational leaders from the U.S., Australia, South Africa, Tonga, Samoa, and New Zealand, who each work toward equity, access, and improvement, while serving academic and professional staff leadership roles. Drawing on each author's bird's-eye view and micro-level leadership experience, this volume takes readers from the base of common knowledge about what we know, what we can feasibly do in terms of organizational improvement on an institutional level with our knowledge, and a deeper understanding of racial and cultural inequities. It also aims to communicate actions that we, as critical leaders, can employ to transformatively facilitate authentic change and progress toward re-visioning a strengths-based and improvement-focused equity agenda in HE contexts.

A Question of Power

Currently, educational researchers, leaders, and practitioners in the U.S. and other Western predominantly English-speaking countries are increasingly understanding the need for practical transformative models, frameworks, and theories to address educational disparities resulting in academic chasms (Capps, Fix, Murray, Passel, & Herwantoro, 2005; CDE, 2007; Darling-Hammond, 2007; May & Sleeter, 2010). Research findings indicate that educators are also beginning to understand that unequal distribution of power and cultural capital at institutional levels may very well result in some gaps, particularly at college and university levels (Anyon, 2009; Bailey & Morest, 2006; Capps et al., 2005; Goldenberg, 2008; Lum, 2009; Nevarez & Wood, 2010).

The Evolution of Equity and Access Concerns in Educational Leadership

Over time, educational leadership has evolved as a discipline and come to a ‘place’ where scholars and practitioners can discuss racial inequality and how it manifests itself in academic achievement and other critical, educationally based gaps with certainty, as a micro-level of leadership. Educators from kindergarten level through higher education (K–HE) in general have come a long way from academic conversations about multicultural education as supplemental curriculum to diversity as something to consider; to education for social justice and equity as necessary for student access to learning; and, more currently, to the common understanding of the need for an equity agenda in order to institute access for student learning and equal outcomes for all students.

Similarly, educational inequality as an issue has moved from a concern, since Brown vs. the Board of Education, to take the center of the educational stage with the advent of transparent, accountability-driven data, and, as a result, a growing institutional platform. Preliminary changes are taking place in K–12 education and there are current conversations with regard to graduation initiatives, freshman and transfer success programs, and the like in higher education. However, there are quantifiably fewer critical conversations and leadership initiatives designed to reach and impact learners at the college and university level.

Culturally Responsive Leadership in the Academy

Rather than waiting to hear about best practices from K–12 education efforts or reports on the outcomes from newly instituted graduation initiatives, which will be a long time coming, this book informs educational leaders committed to higher education today about ways to move their institutions and organizations from common knowledge regarding equity agendas and pervasive tertiary achievement gaps, to a place of practical action with immediate applicability, resulting in educational change. This book unpacks and clarifies culturally responsive leadership by building and expanding Gay's (2000; 2010) seminal work on cultural responsivity and Santamaría and Santamaría's (2012) Applied Critical Leadership (ACL) theoretical framework approach, along with related research (Santamaría, 2014b; Santamaría & Jean-Marie, 2014; Santamaría, Santamaría, & Dam, 2014; Santamaría, Santamaría, Webber, & Pearson, 2014). Authors of this volume concur with Johnson and Fuller's (2014) assertion that culturally responsive leadership is “derived from the concept of culturally responsive pedagogy, [and] involves those leadership philosophies, practices, and policies that create inclusive schooling environments for students and families from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds” (p. 1). These and other scholars further define culturally responsive leadership as theory and educational leadership practices (e.g., influence, management, administrative) that take into consideration race, ethnicity, language, culture, and gender. These include the emphasis on high expectations for academic achievement; pedagogical and social inclusion of students' history, core values, community, and cultural knowledge; work toward “develop[ing] a critical consciousness among both students and faculty to challenge inequities in the larger society” (Johnson & Fuller, 2014, p. 1); and the institutionalization of organizational structures to empower systemically underserved students, families, and communities (e.g., Agosto, Dias, Kaiza, Alvarez McHatton, & Elam, 2013; Beachum, 2011; Brown, Benkovitz, Muttillo, & Urban, 2011; Riehl, 2000; Santamaría & Santamaría, 2012; Theoharis, 2008). Few scholars have taken a look at what it means to define, unpack, and understand culturally responsive leadership with regard to access, equity, and improvement in academe (e.g., Kezar, 2002).

To this end, chapters in this volume provide further evidence linking culturally responsive leadership to ACL applications and characteristics of educational leaders in HE. This work is substantiated by empirical research and examples provided by those practicing ACL at individual leader levels, micro-levels, and working toward macro-institutional levels. This contribution provides educational leaders, scholars, and practitioners at institutes of higher learning with guidelines and key facilitation processes to re-conceptualize an equity agenda through meaningful structured exemplars and action plans envisaged to fire their communities' perceptions around how racial and cultural inequities contribute to achievement and related gaps. Utilizing the principles of ACL as cultural responsivity and informed purposeful facilitation, these kinds of strategies have the potential to result in the creation of feasible context-specific equity agendas as a response to the kinds of complex inequities that constitute achievement and other gaps in colleges and universities nationwide and worldwide.

Applied Critical Leadership Research in Education: An Overview

Applied Critical Leadership is—a strengths-based model of leadership practice where educational leaders consider the social context of their educational communitiesand empower individual members of these communities based on the educational leaders' identities (i.e., subjectivity, biases, assumptions, race, class, gender, and traditions) as perceived through a critical race theory (CRT) or other critical lens (e.g., LatCrit, Queer, Feminist, TribalCrit).

(Santamaría & Santamaría, 2012, p. 5)

There is scant literature available identifying and celebrating the positive attributes of educational leaders from historically oppressed, underrepresented groups and those who identify with them, and further ways in which these individuals acquire mainstream institutional access to create real change (Jean-Marie, 2006; Jean-Marie, James, & Bynum, 2006). Understanding how principles of transformative leadership, critical multiculturalism, and critical race theory (CRT) interface and intersect is in the nature of how transformative leadership in HE, as a part of powerful equity agendas to address academic and other gaps separating learners, can be re-conceptualized as an innovative idea worthy of exploration.

ACL research was originally conceived as a means to explore and explain culturally responsive leadership practices of historically oppressed individuals who express multiple intersecting self-identities and characteristics ranging from the obvious (e.g., race, ethnicity, linguistic, physical) to the subtle or hidden (e.g., gender identity, HIV-positive, post-traumatic stress syndrome). What we noticed and subsequently documented was that the identity and experiences of diverse educational leaders impacted their leadership practice. Often, this impact was positive and appeared to address the very issues of...