Dauntless and Determined: Reimagining Culturally Responsive Leadership in Current Contexts, Changing Times, and Shifting Landscapes

• In Event: Teaching and Leadership for Social Justice

Abstract

This paper re-imagines Culturally Responsive Leadership (CRL) as dauntless leadership focused on challenging practices that marginalize some students based on class, race, sexual orientation, language and immigrant status. It explores what it means to be a dauntless leader based on research conducted with fourteen school leaders in a very large ethnically, racially, and socio-economically diverse school board Southern Ontario. The findings reveal the following key tenets of dauntless culturally responsive leaders - self-reflexive, transformative, determined, agentive, and critical. The findings of the research have implications for principal preparation programs and other professional development programs. It is the hope that the findings of this research answers some of the practical questions of CRL and provide a framework to effectively evaluate.

Author

• Ann E. Lopez, OISE/University of Toronto