Building Culturally Responsive Schools: How Principals Lead Secondary Public Schools With Increasing Numbers of Immigrant Students
Open AccessIn U.S. public schools, the population of immigrant students continues to rise. Mindful of the critical role school leaders play in all students' academic achievement, the school leadership standards in the U.S. were updated to provide guideposts for school leaders to become culturally responsive and meet the needs of their increasingly diverse students by recognizing, respecting, and employing each student's strengths, diversity, and culture as assets for teaching and learning. However, there is limited literature on how school leaders leverage the strengths of immigrants to build a culturally responsive and inclusive school environment for the students and their families. Using the qualitative interpretive design, I examined how 13 secondary public school principals in two districts from two states in the Mid-Atlantic region leveraged immigrant students and their families' different assets by creating a culturally responsive school with culturally responsive school leadership and transformative leadership frameworks. I conducted a series of coding of the interviews to identify consistent themes.Based on the data collected, the principals perceived that a culturally responsive leader undergoes critical self-reflection, strength-based perceptions of diversity, and cultural work to transform the school into a culturally responsive organization for all stakeholders. The principals listened proactively and worked collaboratively with staff and different agencies to leverage different structures and processes to create culturally responsive teaching and learning. They engaged their culturally diverse families by creating a safe and welcoming school that served as a hub for resources to support students and their families. Finally, school leaders that portrayed asset-based leadership challenged deficit thinking and dismantled unjust structures to create a more equitable and inclusive environment for marginalized groups such as immigrants. This research can ignite more perspectives that will add to new approaches for the schooling of immigrant students and focus more on their assets rather than their deficits. Asset-based perspectives and approaches are significant for the development of strength-based leadership frameworks for immigrant students and policies relating to teaching and curriculum designs, professional development and leadership preparation, and human resources decisions. Future research is needed to investigate culturally responsive and transformative leadership among specific immigrant groups.
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