Date of Submission

6-30-2019

Document Type

DiP

Degree

Doctor of Education

Department

Education

Keywords

culturally-responsive leadership, independent boarding school, global stewardship, intercultural competency, distributed leadership, change path model

Abstract

This Organizational Improvement Plan (OIP) explores opportunities to prioritize, teach, and assess intercultural competency in students at a large independent boarding school. The school currently assumes that the presence of a diverse population will result in intercultural learning, a strategy shown to be ineffective. Considering culture as the combined beliefs and behaviours of individuals due to the groups they have been a part of, and intercultural competency as the ability to interact appropriately with individuals who are different from oneself, the range of countries of origin and backgrounds of students, including boarders, provides diversity that could be leveraged to create opportunities for intercultural learning if appropriately facilitated. Intercultural competency has been identified as a key skill supporting the school’s strategic goal of developing global stewardship, defined by the school as a sense of social and environmental responsibility based upon a broad global perspective, global competencies, and the ability and desire to take action to promote a sustainable future. Combining servant leadership with culturally responsive school leadership, this OIP navigates existing structures of distributed leadership through an intentional reflection and change process. The outcome is the proposed institutional integration of culturally responsive school leadership principles and the development of a framework of articulated goals for global and intercultural competency. With specific targets set, teaching strategies intentionally integrating the perspectives of students from diverse backgrounds may support meaningful interactions, directed by experiential learning theory, leading to increased intercultural competency.

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