Culture Clash and the Oppression Olympics

Cultural proficiency opens the window to understanding diversity and its value in society. Studies have shown that when communities organize, have the ability to see the differences, and respond positively, their interactions are effective in diverse environments. Alliance-forming approaches to grapple with inequities substantiate the need for communities of color to collaborate and willingly address power imbalances by speaking out against systems of oppression. Instead of engaging in divisive forms of advocacy, cultural humility encourages critical self-reflection and acknowledges that unhealthy comparison about racial oppression implies that power structures and privilege are reserved for one specific group. This critical commentary calls for increased solidarity and compassion to learn from one another to further the movement towards an anti-racist society.

Cultural Proficiency: The Necessary Link to Family Engagement

Although family engagement is crucial to student and community outcomes, schools often alienate families who are not part of the dominant culture. As a result, school leaders need to become culturally proficient to systematically engage all families equitably regardless of their race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other cultural identifiers. This teaching case study raises issues related to cultural proficiency and family engagement. To help current and future educational leaders foster family engagement, I provide a cultural proficiency for family and community engagement framework. I also pose questions designed to trigger conversations and find practical solutions related to equitable family engagement.

The Use Culturally Proficient Professional Development to Enhance Learning Transfer

The National Staff Development Council recommends that principals devote 10% of the school budget and 25% of teacher time to professional development (PD). While PD requires time, it is crucial that the time be organized, carefully structured, and purposefully led to avoid the waste of human and financial resources. Despite the millions of dollars spent on professional development nationally, student learning outcomes continue to stagnate or dwindle, discipline issues continue to skyrocket, and teacher moral plummets. This may be due, in part, to leaders paying little attention to learning transfer. Culture plays a key role in one’s ability to learn because learning is a social endeavor. Because our schools worldwide are more and more diverse, professional development that is grounded in culture is paramount for educators whose goal is to improve learning outcomes for all students. Because attending professional development does not necessarily equate to the implementation of knowledge or skills, this conceptual paper proposes a Culturally Proficient Professional Development (CPPD) framework that includes a Multidimensional Model of Learning Transfer (MMLT). The MMLT and its rubrics aim to be culturally responsive tools that school leaders in PK-12 schools can use to organize, deliver, and assess professional development offerings while also enhancing learning transfer and improve educators’ cultural proficiency. Considering culture as the main enhancer or inhibitor to transfer is innovative and useful because schools spend large amounts of money and resources on PD, yet the money invested does not often produce the desired outcomes.

Using a Culturally Proficient Leadership Lens to Effectively Serve Refugee Students

This teaching case study takes place in an American middle school and tells the story of Dorah, a refugee student from the Republic of Congo who experienced severe trauma. At Lincoln Middle School, the principal and her teachers encounter difficulties serving their refugee students adequately because of their lack of cultural proficiency. This case aims to help leaders in diverse contexts understand how to embrace and advocate for different cultures, beliefs, and norms to increase the cultural wealth of their communities. To achieve this goal, I provide a cultural proficiency model and a trauma-invested framework.

Gatekeepers in Gifted: A Case Study of the Disproportionality of Gifted Black Youth in Elementary Programs

Gifted identification and services, like many aspects of education, are inequitable and disproportionate in favor of White students. Obama Elementary School serves 421 students: 29% are Black and 58% are White; the school’s gifted program is 10% Black and 86% White. Rebecca Johnson, the gifted teacher, brings this to the attention of her principal, who has Rebecca present to the school improvement team. Rebecca receives pushback from a culturally unresponsive and equity-illiterate group. This case study provides teaching notes on gifted identification and services as well as cultural proficiency and equity literacy, and is framed in both gifted education and anti-racism.

The Increasing Importance of How We Think of the “Others” During a Time of Uncertainty

This article presents one of the current and evolving societal challenges during the time of Covid-19 crisis and uncertainty: equity in education. Equal opportunities and how we think of the “other” play a vital role on maintaining a stable society. Transformative learning opportunities develop intercultural competencies and cultural proficiency. Finally, a process model for the Development of Intercultural Competencies is presented, accompanied by a table of functional factors completing the model.

Assessing Preservice Teachers’ Cultural Competence With the Cultural Proficiency Continuum Q-Sort

This article describes an educational design research program situated within a professional development school that led to the development of the Cultural Proficiency Continuum Q-Sort (CPCQ). The CPCQ is a tool that enables teacher educators to systematically examine preservice teachers’ cultural competence concerning students who are minoritized, marginalized, and otherized within PreK–12 schools. The author provides background and rationales for the need of the CPCQ together with a discussion of the educational design research program that facilitated the design of the CPCQ. Findings for this study are discussed discursively addressing the following question: (a) What are the rationales and chain of decisions that warranted advancing the development of the CPCQ through each phase of an educational design research program? and (b) What are participants’ perceptions of the emerging tool’s effectiveness for facilitating critical self-reflection, inquiry, and dialogue concerning students who are minoritized, marginalized, and othered within PreK–12 schools? This study demonstrated that educational design research together with professional development schools are an ideal context to develop tools in a real-world setting aimed to address issues around racial and social justice and cultural competence within teacher education programs and PreK–12 schools and classrooms.

Culturally Proficient Leadership

Culturally proficient leadership is an inside-out process of personal and organizational change. Cultural proficiency reflects educational leaders’ values through their actions in service of all students. Culturally proficient leaders demonstrate their capability and willingness to embrace change as an inside-out process in which school leaders become students of their assumptions about self, others, and the context in which they work. The willingness and ability to assess and examine self, school, and school district are fundamental to addressing educational access and achievement disparity issues. Cultural proficiency provides a comprehensive, systemic structure for school leaders to identify, examine, and discuss educational equity in their schools. Cultural proficiency provides the means to assess and change school leaders’ values and behaviors through their school’s policies and practices to serve students, schools, communities, and society in an equitable and inclusive manner. Culturally proficient school leaders engage in processes of self-growth as a philosophical and moral imperative. Cultural proficiency is a mindset for how we interact with all people, irrespective of their or others’ cultural memberships. Cultural proficiency is a world view that carries explicit values, language, and standards for effective personal interactions and professional practices. Cross, Bazron, Dennis, and Isaacs were motivated to develop cultural competence and cultural proficiency when they recognized that only a few mental health professionals and institutions were effective in cross-cultural settings. They devised the elements of cultural competence to identify why some health professionals were successful irrespective of culture of the professional or client. From their work came the cultural proficient framework. The work is profound in causing shifts in thinking and actions. Educators who commit to culturally proficient leadership practices represent a paradigmatic shift from demonstrating a value for tolerating diversity to a transformative commitment to equity. The Cultural Proficiency Framework comprises an interrelated set of four tools: the Cultural Proficiency Continuum, Overcoming Barriers to Cultural Proficiency, the Guiding Principles of Cultural Proficiency, and the Essential Elements of Cultural Competence. The guiding principles inform individual and organizational core values and the essential elements inform and guide individual actions and organizational policies and practices.