Page 20 - Educational Leadership in a Changing World

Marta Ambite et al.

4. Engaging students and parents in community contexts: designing
environments that are both supportive, caring communities, and
learning organizations by, for example, validating and including
different cultures and knowledge in the school, resisting deficit im-
ages of students and families by maintaining high expectations in
all areas, advocating for community-based causes, or sharing re-
sources with families.

As we can see, culturally relevant leadership is considered an ethical
stance that educational leaders need to adopt, rather than a fixed collec-
tion of strategies designed for minoritized students (Ladson-Billings,
2006). Developing true critical awareness and creating opportunities to
dialogue about gender, race, or class, together with shifting the percep-
tion of families and students from passive recipients of school services
to active participants in the educational process, appear to be strong
antidotes to overlooking the structural causes of inequality and repro-
ducing neoliberal patterns of oppression.
Some limitations of these practices, gathered by Schmeichel (2012)
would include teachers’ difficulty in applying crsl due to large class
sizes, insufficient support, and a focus on standardized testing and
completing the curriculum (Morrison et al., 2008), which could lead
to well-intentioned educators with a lack of time and an excess of pa-
perwork to reduce culturally relevant pedagogy to recognizing ethnic
holidays, incorporating popular culture into lessons, or using informal
language (Irvine, 2010), ultimately using students’ culture as a perfor-
mative and superficial hook or as a tool of assimilation (Evans et al.,
2020).
Additionally, developing awareness of their cultural biases and blind
spots is a gradual process that takes time and effort for teachers and
leaders – it does not happen overnight. Effective (and not structural)
change, and an idea of continuous improvement is not the same as a
process of genuine and profound transformation (Ward et al., 2015),
which takes time and could be equated to a marathon more than a race.
Ward et al. (2015), facing the fact that leaders normally have a rather
limited scope of action, proposed three options: exit, voice and loy-

to external mandates when they hinder our ability to address the genuine needs and
interests of the children in our care. The Civil Rights Movement activist John Lewis
refers to similar actions when he speaks of causing ’good and necessary trouble’ by
speaking up, speaking out, and getting in the way.

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