Theorizing a Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining School Leadership: Exploring the Intersections of Cultural Sustenance and Care

Abstract

In the current American context where culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students frequently experience schools as uncaring spaces, exploring school leadership that values student identity is vital for providing an affirming environment for meaningful learning. Towards such ends, we echo the recent call for culturally sustaining approaches and explore the role school leaders might have in fostering cultural and linguistic pluralism at an organizational level. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to present a preliminary conceptual framework, culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership (CLSL), that honors the intersections between critical caring and culturally sustaining theories. In doing so, we discuss reimagined school leadership values and practices that prioritize culturally and linguistically sustaining climates of care.

Keywords

culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership critical care school leadership culturally sustaining culturally and linguistically diverse school climate caring school leadership social justice

Introduction

Systemically, exclusionary practices hinder the democratic growth of our society in which the perspectives and influence of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) communities might be generative of social progress (Riley, 2013). In too many schools, such practices continue to stifle diverse voices by erecting parameters for acceptable behavior and valuable learning based on white,¹ eurocentric norms, thereby positioning Students of Color outside of these norms as unworthy of care ( DeMatthews et al., 2017; Lee, 2017; Rolón-Dow, 2005; Tienken, 2013; Walls et al., 2021; Watkins & Aber, 2009). School leaders may play a role in perpetuating or disrupting such exclusionary practices—including being pushed-out of schools, placed in lower academic tracks, subjected to corporal punishment, underrepresented in curriculum, or stereotyped by teachers—which have disproportionately impacted Black and Brown students² (Horning et al., 2015; Morris, 2016; Skiba et al., 2011; Whitaker & Losen, 2019). While schools have made educational gains towards equity for CLD communities, there is room to address the pervasive pattern of educators who perceive CLD students and families as uncaring about school, which influences students and families to potentially perceive their school to be uncaring about them (Milner, 2012; Stanford Center for Education Policy Analysis, n.d; Valenzuela, 1999). School leaders might skew this reciprocal relationship and climate of care towards equity—and thus, student well-being and achievement—by way of creating a vision, culture, climate, and instructional initiatives that sustain multicultural, multilingual, and pluralistic identities (Louis et al., 2010; Scanlan et al., 2019; Skiba et al., 2011).

In this theoretical paper, we propose a conceptual leadership framework, culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership (CLSL), to reorient schools as sites of caring for complex, ever-changing lifeways and identities of CLD students and communities. Culturally sustaining school approaches challenge perspectives that require Students of Color³ to defend their worth and make their worthiness as recipients of care contingent on their acceptance of school-based norms (Lee, 2017; Paris & Alim, 2017). Culturally sustaining approaches provide a theoretical entrance for principals to center and affirm CLD students’ ways of knowing and to resist certain assimilationist norms of schooling (Paris, 2012). In addition to past scholarship on cultural sustenance, we draw on theories of critical caring—caring that is highly responsive to needs, but also attends to the ways that power legitimizes certain needs while ignoring others (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020; Valenzuela, 1999; Zembylas, 2017). Critical care reconceptualizes educational caring as political and active, rather than merely benignly helpful. In essence, critically caring and culturally sustaining educators believe that students’ multicultural and multilingual identities deserve to be sustained in and of themselves.

To this end, we ask: how might principals leverage the tenets of critical care to foster a school-wide culturally sustaining environment? Our proposed leadership framework - CLSL - explores the congruences between theories of critical caring and culturally sustaining education as practices that honor the home and community lifeways that students bring to school (Cooper, 2009; Wilson, 2016). CLSL draws on and extends certain existing frameworks, including leadership for social justice, decolonizing leadership, and democratic leadership—Appendix A offers a more thorough discussion of these connections and extensions (see also Agosto et al., 2013). Here we offer a focused illustration of how our proposed framework leverages the existing literatures on educational caring and cultural sustenance to better orient school leaders and schools in ways that valorize CLD students.

Culturally sustaining theories have clear implications for school leadership, yet thus far, most empirical studies have occurred in classrooms. Such studies demonstrate that CLD students who experience culturally sustaining instruction feel validated, acquire a positive self-concept, and develop language to “speak back” to stereotypes (Borck, 2019; Williams & Long, 2019). Despite the clear benefits to students, studies have demonstrated that culturally responsive and sustaining practices are difficult to enact in isolation, with teachers at times reporting limited support from peers and leadership which results in emotional and physical exhaustion and “feelings of unmet goals and instances of self-blame and self-hate” (Borrero et al., 2016, p. 36Freire & Valdez, 2017; Santamaría, 2009; Sleeter, 2011). These challenges can generate a sense amongst teachers of feeling uncared for themselves and erode their ability to produce a caring classroom climate for students (Roffey, 2007).

To prevent feelings of isolation, and to mirror the pedagogical shifts occurring within the classroom, school leaders have a responsibility to foster a school-wide approach that ensures stakeholders “understand, respond, incorporate, accommodate, and ultimately celebrate the entirety of the children” (Khalifa et al., 2016, p. 1278). Affirming the entirety of students requires that school leaders consider the inseparable nature of language and culture; both of which for CLD students are often marginalized (Rosa & Flores, 2017). Under culturally sustaining schooling, school leaders must consider both aspects of student identity when cultivating the school’s climate, expectations, instruction, and structures (Holmes & Young, 2018; Leu Bonanno, 2022). Emphasizing the role of a culturally and linguistically sustaining principal illuminates how schools might move from isolated and embattled pockets of cultural and linguistic sustenance to a schoolwide care-based approach.

This paper presents a framework to consider how school leaders may cultivate and support cultural sustenance on an organizational level. First, we discuss theories of caring leadership in education, with an emphasis on critical care, and highlight extant deficiencies in our understanding of caring school leadership. We then propose culturally sustaining theories as a theoretical complement for addressing gaps in the literature on caring leadership. We finally present four major theoretical intersections of the framework’s foundation to articulate how school leaders may sustain multiple identities in practice.

Caring School Leadership and Critical Care

Mayeroff (1971) characterized caring as helping another person grow as it pertains to the one-cared for’s interests and notions of well-being. Recent scholarship suggests that leaders’ caring beliefs and practices affect school climate and other school-level attributes (Bass, 2019; Louis & Murphy, 2017; Smylie et al., 2016; Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016). We believe that one particular conceptualization of caring educational leadership - that which draws on critical care - is of the greatest utility in elaborating a CLSL framework.

We define critical care as the process and politics of caring that “engages in a deeper exploration of the complexities in the meanings and enactments of caring teaching in different educational institutions” (Zembylas, 2017, p. 7). Critical care rejects conceptualizations that are rooted in white, middle-class visions of care (Rolón-Dow, 2005; Thompson, 1998), and instead emphasizes the role of students’ home contexts in culturally grounded school relationships (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Curry, 2016). Our framework of culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership draws from critical care as a response to subtractive educational practices that delegitimize the multicultural strengths students bring to school with them, and predicate students’ worthiness of care on behaving in school sanctioned ways (Bartlett & García, 2011; Valenzuela, 1999). Cooper (2009) elaborates that critical care is “not just a common, altruistic sentiment but a power-laden activity” (p. 383) that positions educators as co-advocates for students and their interests. For example, Bartlett and García (2011) profile Luperon High School, where Dominican immigrant youth in New York City are educated in ways that allow them to gain social capital from peer interaction, and where the school environment emphasized confianza (social trust) in teachers and peers. Critical care is thus grounded in empathy but is politically active rather than sympathetic and passive (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020; Wilson, 2016). Recent scholarship suggests that when school leaders enact critical care as a political act, they directly address the “micro-aggressions and injustices that fuel systemic oppression” (Wilson, 2016, p. 561) and that shape the lived experiences of their students, teachers, staff, administrators, and the community at-large.

Although critically caring leadership is the subject of a growing research base (Bass, 2019; Rivera-McCutchen, 2020; Wilson, 2016), some scholars of caring educational leadership focus more on the organizational dimensions of care than on the political activism or positionality of caring leaders (Louis & Murphy, 2017; Ryu et al., 2022; Smylie et al., 2016; Tichnor-Wagner & Allen, 2016). While this research is insufficiently attentive to the politics of care, there has been even less attention to organizational processes and the particulars of how leaders change minds and change practices (Kurland, 2018; Louis et al., 2016; van der Vyver et al., 2014). Recently, several studies have pointed out this misalignment (Walls et al., 2021) and sought to integrate organizational conceptions of caring school leadership with notions of leadership for social justice (Forde et al., 2021) or social-emotional learning (Kennedy, 2019). However, neither of these studies have directly taken up the work of integrating politically activist caring leadership with organizational conceptions of caring leadership. Furthermore, we argue that the tenets of cultural sustenance offer insight into how to operationalize critically caring leadership in ways that bolster and humanize education for CLD students (Marshall & Khalifa, 2018). We elaborate these reasons in the subsequent section.

Culturally Sustaining, Critical Care

We posit that integrating culturally sustaining approaches on an organizational level advances how we conceptualize the leadership process of fostering caring school environments. Paris and Alim’s (2017) culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) offer theoretical tools in support of our leadership framework that give insight into how to alter relational and systemic practices to ultimately sustain the ways of knowing and being of CLD students within our current context of organizational politics. We build upon culturally sustaining pedagogical tenets of: (1) A fluid and hybrid understanding of culture, (2) Widening the parameters of success to sustain diverse ways of knowing, and (3) Critical reflexivity to challenge the reification of potential –isms in our school communities, and to explore how these tenets are implemented in a leadership role (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017).

When combined with the tenets of CSP, critical care scholarship provides useful theoretical intersections and recommendations for how educators can move beyond responding to students’ racial and cultural identities and towards recognizing, bolstering, and sustaining the fullness of these identities within schools (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Mackey et al., 2020). The relational, contextual, reciprocal, and authentic nature of caring (Louis et al., 2016) provides guidelines for how school leaders might approach the daunting tasks of culturally and linguistically sustaining students through interpersonal and institutional mechanisms. The leadership mindset and practice required to sustain CLD students aligns with the nature of caring because caring requires a sustained interchange with and attentiveness to the individual being cared for. A culturally sustaining approach orients the actions and ethos of critical care to consider how CLD students might leave schools more culturally and linguistically whole.

For these reasons, we adopt sustaining rather than responsive or relevant tenets in culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership. In 2012, Paris troubled the terms “relevant” and “responsive”, contending that one can be relevant or responsive to culture without investing in its continuity. He also questioned whether these terms in practice sufficiently nuanced the directionality of power to shift education towards a more pluralistic society.

Similarly, Ladson-Billings (2014) has expressed dissatisfaction with the “…static conception of what it means to be culturally relevant” (p. 77). For example, Bonner (2009) studied the classroom community and instructional practices of a culturally responsive mathematics teacher who utilized students’ cultural knowledge and built relationships of trust, but simultaneously reinforced eurocentric goalposts of student growth and learning. Paris (2012) argued that such standards of success are situated in “access to opportunities afforded by proficiency in the dominant academic and social ways …[which] are goals of deficit and difference approaches [that] focus attention solely on the legitimated school ways” (p. 94).

We suggest elucidating the explicit leadership role of enacting culturally sustaining pedagogy might occur through a commitment to critical care, and that the two complement each other in realizing linguistic and cultural pluralism in schools. Both theories deepen our understanding of leadership that re-personalizes education, particularly for CLD students, by emphasizing academic press and authentic positive relationships (Agosto et al., 2013; Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Madhlangobe & Gordon, 2012; Smylie et al., 2016). However, while the end result of leadership actions and high levels of caring have been recognized as important outcomes, little is known about the process by which critical and culturally sustaining caring is defined, produced, or distributed in schools and how it may refine our understanding of culturally sustaining education.

Therefore, we next propose the theoretical foundations of a CLSL framework by reviewing culturally sustaining and critically caring leadership practices proposed by the extant literature to clarify the process for how school leadership might shift from fostering a culturally responsive to culturally and linguistically sustaining school-wide climate.

Theorizing a Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining School Leadership Framework

We propose four major intersections that stem from critical caring and culturally sustaining theories to offer a generative vision of school leadership for sustaining the identities and lifeways of CLD students in the school climate and instruction. Figure 1. Serves as a conceptual roadmap for theoretical dimensions that compose our preliminary leadership framework, culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership.

Figure 1.

A conceptual mapping of culturally and linguistically sustaining school leadership.

We consider these four intersections as theoretical possibilities that challenge the field to continue conceptualizing how the role of school leadership might leverage the tenets of critical care towards a school-wide culturally and linguistically sustaining environment. School leaders engaged in CLSL might:

• develop individual caring relationships to denser networks of caring relationships that improve the capacity for collective action towards a culturally sustaining and caring school vision.

• attend to the fluid and intersectional identities of teachers, students, and families by fostering a culturally sustaining climate and supporting culturally sustaining instruction through dense networks of intersubjective care.

• demonstrate an organizational commitment to care through democratic or shared leadership structures so that all voices, and especially those of CLD communities can advocate for their perspective, input, and needs.

• cultivate their own critical consciousness and conscious and reflexive networks that beget students’ own caring and critically conscious traits.

While the theoretical possibility of culturally and linguistically sustaining leadership is rather novel, we examine its constructs in conversation with existing scholarship from (but not limited to) culturally responsive school leadership, social justice leadership, leadership in support of bilingual education, and caring school leadership (see Appendix A for a more thorough discussion of these connections and extensions). In the following narrative, we purposefully select leadership examples from extant studies and discuss how CLSL might support school leaders to shift from responding to sustaining CLD communities in education.

Caring School Communities: Leadership for Density and Reciprocity of Caring and Culturally Sustaining Relations

In bolstering schools as caring environments for CLD students, school leaders must shift from focusing solely on critically caring relationships with individuals to fostering a critically caring school organization or network. Traditionally, caring has been conceived of as a dyadic relationship between teachers and students (Noddings, 2012), though certain scholars of educational caring have shifted attention from specific educator-student relationships to the cultivation of membership and a sense of belonging (Riley et al., 2006; Smerdon, 2002). Shifting to dense networks of care acknowledges that a principal may not have the opportunity to cultivate meaningful, identity-centered relationships of care with every stakeholder—nor may school leaders be the best suited to do so. Hence, we leverage a sociocultural approach to understand how leaders might empower teachers, students, and families to engage in a shared culture of critical care by demonstrating critical care for one another (Brown et al., 2016; Scanlan et al., 2019).

Although multiple critical and culturally responsive school leadership frameworks advocate for fostering positive and authentic relationships with the school community (Khalifa, et al., 2016; Madhlangobe & Gordon, 2012), there are few studies that specify the practices that generate dense and reciprocal caring, and culturally sustaining relations (Louis et al., 2016). From a culturally sustaining perspective, few leaders know how to shift from conversations with individual faculty about race to schoolwide changes (Khalifa, 2018). In many ways, this is unsurprising, because while school leaders grasp the urgency of equity for CLD students, transitioning from an ideological advocate to implementing culturally sustaining organizational systems can seem nebulous.

Past research has indicated two ways that leaders cultivate a depth of caring relations in ways that orient organizations toward cultural sustenance. Research on caring school communities has found that they are characterized by de-privatization of work, trusting relationships, and depth of collaboration (Smylie et al., 2016). Furthermore, scholars have found links between caring leadership and increasing educators’ sense of collective responsibility (Louis & Murphy, 2017). However, the notions of care conceptualized by these works are largely culturally neutral and invite investigations of how critically caring communities foreground the culture and language of adults to promote critical care. A second vein of research from scholars of critical care scholars has found that creating school communities that are family-like—especially in a way that actively mimics the cultural arrangements of students’ own families—is an especially effective means to promote schoolwide communities of care (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Bartlett & García, 2011). However, this research does not offer much insight into the role of leaders in arranging and sustaining such communities.

While multiple scholars have also advocated for culturally responsive and sustaining school leaders to simultaneously confront biased assumptions and demonstrate compassion for CLD communities as a form of building relationships of trust with stakeholders (Holmes & Young, 2018; Khalifa, et al., 2016), fewer have explored how school leaders might emulate culturally and linguistically sustaining care for the identities of teachers as a channel for supporting a parallel climate for CLD students. We suggest that culturally and linguistically sustaining school leaders focus on creating a practice amongst adults of recognizing and caring for one another’s intersectional identities. Complicating traditional notions of white eurocentric tendencies of care, we wonder if CLSL might foster dense and culturally sustaining networks of care by encouraging teachers, and particularly CLD teachers, to interweave their cultural and linguistic expertise into their professional roles. This shared habit of recognizing and reinforcing the cultural and linguistic lifeways of school adults is likely to produce a layered and symmetrical practice for students (Murakami et al., 2016). Through leadership modeling, we predict that teachers might experience the efficacy of culturally and linguistically sustaining care and perpetuate dense networks of similar care in their classrooms and with colleagues that model for students how to engage in critical care amongst themselves. Moving beyond access to solely dominant forms of thriving, we hope for this CLSL framework to chart how school leaders collectively establish the ways in which CLD communities imbue love and hope as norms within schools.

Fostering a School Climates Attentive to and Sustaining of Intersectional Identities

Scholars of culturally responsive school leadership have argued for principals to create welcoming and inclusive environments by explicitly reexamining the school systems and norms that reify harmful stereotypes and barriers based on categorical tropes of races, cultures, and language (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006; Gardiner & Enomoto, 2006; McCray & Beachum, 2011). Building on the traditions of concept of freedom to achieve in social justice leadership, we further claim that CLSL might reframe healthy learning behaviors and academic success to reflect students’ fluid and intersectional identities more authentically within culturally sustaining environments of care (Larson & Murtadha, 2002). We draw on intersectionality as an analytical approach for understanding the multidimensional and compounding forms of oppression one might experience based on identity to honor the complex lived realities of marginalized communities (Crenshaw, 1990). The addition of CSP further provides examples for how a fluid and intersectional understanding of culture can be conceptualized in schools as a process of weaving between heritage and current community practices (Paris & Alim, 2017). Such attentiveness to constantly evolving and fluid identities aligns with intersubjective theories of care that problematize static and culturally-neutral methods for how educators interact with students (Rolón-Dow, 2005).

Positioning caring as phenomenological and situational (Smylie et al., 2016), school leaders might model flexibility by evolving their leadership alongside the ever-changing student populations they serve and co-creating a sense of belonging and academic press ((Khalifa et al., 2016; Leu Bonanno et al., 2019; Rivera-McCutchen, 2020)). First, we advocate for culturally and linguistically sustaining school leaders to widen the parameters of what constitutes learning and learning behaviors. CLSL builds upon the CSP tenet of complicating and widening notions of academic success to reflect cultural and linguistic pluralism innate in CLD communities (Khalifa, 2010; Paris & Alim, 2017; Williams, 2020). For example, Wiemelt and Welton (2015) described school leaders who challenged monolingual language policies and included bilingualism as a formal learning goal that expanded the rights and knowledge of their Latinx populations. Incorporating bilingualism or translanguaging practices into the formal landscape of schooling requires a shift in how educators frame the capacity and trajectory of CLD learners. Towards these ends, school leaders must reject the additive notions of bilingualism as a tool for English-centric achievement and recognize the interwoven nature of language development as a holistic process alongside sustaining culture (López & García, 2019).

Secondly, few studies elaborate about the leadership process behind reimagining healthy learning behaviors that are culturally and linguistically salient. Here, researchers of caring theories have suggested that an intersectional and inclusive environment must promote spaces for counter-narratives that highlight students’ resistance against harmful tropes (Kennedy, 2019; Rolón-Dow, 2005). One such example includes Curry’s (2016) study of leaders and faculty who designed an organizational ritual of “firewalks” to help students metacognate through their “values, habits, successes, struggles and goals” and “declare who they are” (p. 898). School leaders framed firewalks as a rite of passage tradition in which students, surrounded by their community, contended with difficult self-reflective questions about their unique growth and complex journeys. This example sheds light on organizational structures that sustain and foreground identities defined by student voice, and contribute to a culturally sustaining school climate. By naming their development as a person, leaders afforded students the opportunity to reflect on their whole personhood and how it interacts with their learning.

To ensure a fluid and intersubjective approach to care that contrasts with previous static conceptions of responsiveness, we propose that CLSL might problematize the policies and structures of schools that force CLD students into categorical ways of knowing and teachers to perpetuate categorical forms of care (May, 2015; Rolón-Dow, 2005). Current research has emphasized the need for parallel policies and organizational structures that support rather than bar teachers from imbuing an intersectional care for students beyond their academic achievements (Antrop-González & De Jesús, 2006). For example, scholars have proposed the theoretical potential for combining instructional leadership practices - such as teacher-principal interdependency and instructional conferencing - with culturally sustaining pedagogical tenets (Holmes & Young, 2018; Marshall & Khalifa, 2018; Santamaría & Santamaría, 2016). We further call for CLSL to examine policies and measures of accountability encompassed by the narrative of school improvement to reorient towards sustaining cultural and linguistic pluralism. We suggest that culturally and linguistically sustaining school leaders interrogate how the school community aligns its capacity, resources, and structures in traditionally fractured initiatives that maintain rather than upend threads of whiteness.

Democratic Structures and Leadership as Caring Conduits for Cultural Sustenance

To foster a school climate and culture that are attentive to intersectional and fluid identities, democratic structures are essential. School leaders have overlapped school and community goals as a responsive strategy for creating a welcoming school environment and establishing relationships of trust; yet, enacting permeable boundaries can also create transformative opportunities for schools to forward cultural and linguistic sustenance. Here, we examine how studies of critically caring leadership have promoted school and community collaboration. We further argue for principals to disrupt the directionality of power—by analyzing which identities and stakeholders have the capacity to initiate school reform and how initiatives are implemented (Tian et al., 2016).

First, we wonder how school leaders might critically implement democratic structures to ensure the multitude of voices required when actively sustaining students’ complex and multifarious linguistic and cultural practices. For example, García and co-authors (García et al., 2012) detailed the way that New York City public high schools serving Latinx youth drew from compadrazgo, a culturally-grounded form of collaboration and mutual support that reinforced a “transcaring” school climate. Educators supported students’ intersectional identities by moving beyond dichotomous understandings of culture and language to support acts of “crossing borders” and allowing students to “draw on their different language, cultural, schooling, and community practices to maximize learning” (p. 818). In contrast to shared leadership, democratic leadership practices, such as shared decision-making and interactional dialogue, demonstrate care and reform traditional hierarchies of power in which school leaders and stakeholders bidirectionally inform the collective work of sustaining multiple identities (Woods & Woods, 2013).

Traditionally, shared leadership models function to distribute leadership opportunities that further predetermined goals set by districts and school leaders (Tian, et al., 2016). Conversely, CLSL draws upon democratic leadership tenets to nuance the directionality of power and nature of shared initiatives. Ascenzi-Moreno and Flores (2012) provide a useful shared governance model that somewhat clarifies the theoretical differences between shared leadership and the use of democratic structures in CLSL. In their case study, school leaders created the role of a parent co-director who held equal decision-making power as the school principal to honor multilingual and multicultural expertise and perspectives of elders in the school community. This democratically-oriented structure disrupted unilateral decision-making, widened concentrated power and enabled a greater spectrum of identity-specific needs to be addressed that are often overlooked from the positionality of one school leader.

Similar research of school leaders who recognize students, families, and community leaders as experts of their own context and alter the nature of shared work might illuminate leadership practices that also empower stakeholders to identify ways to further meaningful intersections of culture and language as a part of school improvement (Eckert, 2019; Ishimaru, 2012; Santamaría, 2014). For example, Bertrand (2014) examined how school leaders engaged traditionally marginalized stakeholders in reciprocal or dialogue, or interactions where educators built upon the words and ideas of the persons being cared-for. Such caring exchanges engage CLD students and community voices to achieve a democratic Third Space, that Bertrand (2014) framed as a transformative interchange and insight for school improvement that neither students nor principals could have achieved alone. We further suggest that culturally sustaining school leaders consider how adults and students rotate through various roles so that all stakeholders develop the skills needed to meaningfully participate in collaborative dialogues for the purposes of cultural and linguistic sustenance (Amiot et al., 2019; Mitra, 2008). In this concept of thick democracy (Strike, 1999), students and communities vocalize their best interests and are actively involved in interactive work that promotes transformative inquiry and shared decision-making rather than a unilateral centering of a single leader (Furman & Starratt, 2002; Green, 2015; Mayrowetz, 2008).

Cultivating Critical Consciousness as a Form of Self and Community Care

Studies that employed a CRSL framework have consistently located critical consciousness and reflection as a central component of leadership mindsets and practices (Dantley, 2005; Gooden & Dantley, 2012; Horsford et al., 2011). Extending upon their work, we argue that school leaders who lead from a CLSL framework intentionally inculcate critical consciousness in themselves and in fellow educators and students. We draw from Godfrey and Grayman’s (2014) definition of critical consciousness which includes: “the ability to critically read social conditions (critical reflection), feelings of efficacy to effect change (sociopolitical efficacy) and actual participation in these efforts (critical action)” (p. 1801, see also Freire, 1970, 1973). Thus, culturally and linguistically sustaining leaders must cultivate critical consciousness at all three levels by acknowledging that diverse and underserved communities can be buffeted by deficit messages and that building caring and boundary-crossing communities includes equipping students to deconstruct and challenge these messages.

School leaders who realize this combination of care and cultural sustenance promote critical reflection amongst both school adults and students. Amongst adults, leaders may incorporate teachers’ cultural knowledge and critical reflection as goals into supervision and evaluation activities to encourage teachers to think of these elements as crucial to their professional growth (Khalifa, 2018; Marshall & Khalifa, 2018). As Lopez (2015) argued, teacher decision-making reflects their cultural knowledge, and attaining greater cultural knowledge is essential for developing caring relationships that effectively attend to students and families. Thus, incenting teachers and other school adults to develop broader awareness of society and its inequities as they relate to students’ identities is tantamount to also developing consistent habits of critical reflection that affect teacher decision-making and further networks of care.

When school leaders develop structures and spaces for reflecting on injustice through shared knowledge, they acknowledge the ways that society may “deny students access to ‘community cultural wealth,” and take steps to highlight and mitigate inequalities that (re)produce these conditions (Achinstein et al., 2016, p. 5). For example, school leaders can critique how accountability testing privileges certain ways of knowing and seeks to legitimize other ways of knowing in school policy and practice (Bartlett & García, 2011; Khalifa, 2018). School leaders must also promote internal examination of school communities, and even Communities of Color, to be critically reflective of their own practices that may reify –isms (Paris & Alim, 2014). Taking these steps promotes critical reflection while simultaneously validating the varied experiences of students.

Like the goals of democratic structures, school leaders can also cultivate a sense of boundary crossing that leverages students’ cultural capital and sociopolitical efficacy to effectuate a sense of belonging in both school and the community. Achinstein et al. (2016) highlighted the idea of permeable boundaries between schools and communities that open intersectional spaces where new hybrid forms of knowledge merge. This porous school-community border ensures the school is thoroughly present in the community and vice versa. In lower grades, school leaders might promote this sense of connection between school and community by inviting immigrant parents into school to read to students, either in English or in their home language or participate in expert panels to inform school policy and processes (Brown, 2004; Lopez, 2015). In upper grades, students might participate in culturally grounded rituals or rites of passage such as hip-hop counter-storytelling that promote a powerful sense of self and agency (Curry, 2016; Kuttner, 2016). In both cases, students understand that belonging in school and in the community are mutually bound; and that they can be powerful agents of change in these contexts. Developing critical reflection and efficacy are precursors to collective acts of resistance that can lead to associating schools as caring and culturally sustaining sites.

School leaders can promote critical action by reorienting the curriculum and learning activities to encourage student participation in the development of community well-being. Examples of such practices include: engaging students in varied internships (i.e., doing rounds with physicians), projects that promote local community public health (Achinstein et al., 2016), or even urban farming initiatives where youth explore “what needs to be transformed and what needs to be preserved” in the local community (Delia & Krasny, 2018, p. 12). These studies of students (and teachers) participating in “place-based and action-oriented stewardship” of the local community are useful examples of how critical care for the community can be intertwined with culturally sustaining learning (Delia & Krasny, 2018, p. 1).

We suggest that culturally sustaining school leaders enact their essential role in cultivating critical consciousness, both as a means for students to practice self-care, and to engage teachers and learners in community care. Leadership practices that help students to develop critical awareness and conceptualize their multicultural and multilingual identities as strengths help students to develop positive “affective structuring… the means through which we develop a sense of self-regard… and sense that we ‘matter’” (Luttrell, 2013, p. 296). This self-care can transition into community-care through boundary crossing activities and rites of passage that promote student empowerment, and into actual care for the community through curricular programming. Understanding how leaders facilitate growth in critical consciousness across the multiple layers of the school is likely to offer insight into the process of how caring leadership produces culturally sustaining organizational effects. Principals who center a culturally sustaining lens in their efforts to lead with care do so partly through cultivating critical consciousness themselves.

Conclusion

Through our exploration of how the theoretical literature of critical care intersects with culturally sustaining pedagogy, we proposed a reimagined school leadership that respectfully builds on the current literature and prioritizes culturally and linguistically sustaining environments of care. We posited that culturally and linguistically sustaining school leaders must: (1) own their role in building dense networks of caring relationships to enhance collective advocacy and resiliency within the school community, (2) attend to students’ and teachers’ fluid and evolving racial, cultural, and linguistic identities, (3) enact democratic structures to involve diverse voices in the process of school development, and (4) cultivate students’, teachers’, and their own critical consciousness as a form of self and community care.

We believe that these intersections help to construct the theoretical and practical stepping stones towards culturally sustaining organizations. These intersections are complementary in that they offer additional insight into the leadership processes behind critical care and cultural sustenance. To advance the conversation, we suggest that culturally and linguistically sustaining principals might guide teachers to critically reflect on racial, cultural, and linguistic biases, and also sustain the intersectional identities of teachers themselves as a conduit for realizing the efficacy of culturally sustaining pedagogy for students. In tandem, providing leadership coaching to develop the critical consciousness and reflexivity of the school community empowers stakeholders to dictate what is culturally sustaining for themselves. Such school climates disrupt the current politics of education in which school leaders attend to relational power dynamics, problematizing whose voices define cultural sustenance by implementing democratic leadership and structures. Lastly, as an effort to align internal and external school accountability measures, we underscore the need for principals to widen the standards of student success and norms of healthy learning behaviors by advocating for the goals of the community and school as well as mirror the expanse of students’ identities (Khalifa, 2018). Together these leadership practices illuminate the possibilities for fostering dense networks of critical and culturally sustaining care.

Our framework also provides some preliminary implications for principal preparation programs, such as the integration of CLSL into curriculum and clinical experiences. Preparation programs might include experiences and curriculum for future school leaders to establish dense networks of care, engage the racial, cultural, and linguistic identities of their teachers and students, enact democratic structures, and cultivate critical consciousness. Including specific and actionable recommendations for practice might bridge the social justice beliefs of school leaders towards the concrete implementation of said beliefs (Genao, 2021; Miller & Martin, 2015). This paper builds on the recommendations of DeMatthews and Izquierdo (2020) for preparation programs to articulate technical, adaptive, and advocacy-oriented manifestations of CLSL such as having critical discussions with stakeholders to formulate long-term action plans of school initiatives that deepen multicultural and multilingual school-wide practices beyond superficial diverse celebrations.

Future research will reveal how the conceptual underpinnings we have proposed are enacted in practice and in principal preparation programs. For instance, we wonder: does caring activate culturally and linguistically sustaining climates? Alternatively, do culturally and linguistically sustaining climates activate care? It is possible that these two patterns are not mutually exclusive, and that other possibilities may hold true. Thus, we wonder: Does critical consciousness serve as a conduit between care and cultural and linguistic sustenance? Do caring relationships (or ties) foster the distribution of cultural and linguistic sustenance within a school network? What types of clinical experiences are most effective in preparing school leaders in CLSL? Anecdotal data from actual prospective and practicing school leaders will illustrate how school leaders perceive these components exist in their own practice. In conclusion, this CLSL framework is a first and modest attempt at considering the untapped potential of integrating two specific, yet, powerful theoretical lenses. We welcome engagement in this evolving discussion, and in conducting research to help refine the values and practices of a reimagined school leadership that prioritizes culturally and linguistically sustaining climates of care.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Sandra Leu Bonanno

Jeff Walls

Notes

Contributions and Contradistinctions of CLSL with Extant Leadership Models

The table below clarifies our proposed framework, Culturally and Linguistically Sustaining School Leadership (CLSL), in the context of four frameworks that we recognize as related, but also see as distinct: democratic educational leadership, decolonizing educational leadership, leadership for social justice/transformative educational leadership, and culturally responsive educational leadership. The intention of this table is to be illustrative rather than exhaustive: we recognize that we cannot fully encapsulate existing frameworks in such a small space. Furthermore, it is not the case that these frameworks are mutually exclusive; democratic practices are an important component of Transformative Leadership, although the latter is commonly positioned as a social justice leadership framework (Shields & Hesbol, 2020). However, we believe that examining these theories also helps to clarify the theoretical raison d’etre for CLSL.

	Democratic Educational Leadership	Indigenous and Decolonizing Educational Leadership	Leadership for Social Justice	Culturally Responsive School Leadership
Tenets of this approach	Democratic leadership traces its origins to leadership that is based on guidance and mutual participation (Lewin et al., 1939; Woods & Woods, 2013). More recent iterations have emphasized progressive democratic educational leadership aligned with Deweyan norms including, “a sense of cultivation of the common good, and the individual freedom to act according to one’s direction” (Kılıçoğlu, 2018, p. 9)	Khalifa and co-authors (2018) reviewed extant research on indigenous and decolonizing school leadership (IDSL) that clarifies both the tenets of this approach and the contributions of this approach to CLSL. IDSL refers to leadership epistemologies practiced by “communities forced, through the violence of colonialism and slave labor, to draw on their shared experience of oppression, and resistance to imperialist, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy (hooks, 2004)” (Khalifa et al., 2018, p. 8). It is characterized by studies of how school leadership continues to colonize by invisibilizing, othering, and practicing vestigial colonialism. IDSL approaches emphasize (1) prioritizing self-reflection, (2) self-determination for community empowerment, (3) committing to community values, (4) leadership that emphasized altruism and spirituality, and (5) prioritizing collectivism in communication	One oft-cited definition of social justice leadership is, “principals [who] make issues of race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and other historically and currently marginalizing conditions in the United States central to their advocacy, leadership practice, and vision. This definition centers on addressing and eliminating marginalization in schools” (Theoharis, 2007, p. 223). There also exist specific leadership frameworks within social justice leadership such as transformative leadership (Shields, 2004) and Applied critical leadership (Santamaria, 2014)	Culturally responsive school leadership (CRSL) is characterized by four tenets: (1) critical self-awareness by leaders, (2) culturally responsive curricula and teacher preparation, (3) culturally responsive and inclusive school environments, and (4) engaging students and parents in community contexts (Johnson, 2014; Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016Khalifa et al., 2016; Khalifa, 2012). CRSL leaders resist deficit and marginalizing construction of students, practice transformational instructional leadership, and validate the social and cultural capital of students and their communities (Khalifa, 2018; Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016Khalifa et al., 2016)
Contributions of this approach	Democratic leadership is characterized by “enabling contextually specific struggles to determine what is needed, and by developing a politically informed commitment to justice for all” (Gale & Densmore, 2003, p. 119). Democratic leadership is cognizant of power relations, but also informed by a moral sense of right and wrong (Gross & Shapiro, 2015; Shapiro, 2006; Woods, 2004). Democratic leadership repudiates hierarchical management either internally or externally (i.e., from policy mandates) (Gross & Shapiro, 2015)		CLSL shares the commitment of social justice leadership frameworks to resisting marginalization (Jean-Marie et al., 2009) and to the importance of increasing critical consciousness in school leaders (Furman, 2012). Furthermore, social justice leadership promotes a generally activist and strategic risk-taking approach mirrored by CLSL (Rivera-McCutchen, 2020)	In general, CLSL tenets align strongly with the tenets of CRSL. In particular, we believe that CRSL’s emphases on critical self-reflection and the links between culturally responsive teaching and a supportive and culturally responsive school climate are important facets of CLSL (Dantley, 2005; Khalifa et al., 2016)
CLSL Distinction from this approach	CLSL moves somewhat beyond the bounds of traditional democratic educational leadership by expanding from a participative vision of leadership to a more broadly shared vision of what leadership is and can do to sustain cultural and linguistic pluralism (Ascenzi-Moreno & Flores, 2012; Bertrand, 2014). Furthermore, democratic leadership processes serve the purpose of creating conduits for cultural support and sustenance in CLSL.	We believe that CLSL is a decolonizing framework. It is important to note that IDSL is not a unitary framework, but a collection of approaches that emphasize decolonizing epistemologies. We believe that CLSL foregrounds the potential of care ethics, and especially care ethics in organizational contexts, to promote cultural sustenance (Palmer & Louis, 2017; Witherspoon & Arnold, 2010). In this sense, we hope CLSL layers onto existing IDSL work to illustrate how care ethics can infiltrate layers of organizational colonization and reorient them toward sustenance	One challenge is that as the popularity of leadership for social justice has grown in educational research, the meaning of the term has grown less clear. MacDonald (2020) illustrates how misunderstandings can lead to reproductions of inequity. Dantley and Green (2015) called for a “reradicalization” of the idea (p. 820). They add, “anger arises when persons whom we care about, persons for whom we are accountable, and persons who bring particular meaning to our lives face acts from others that devalue and demean them” (p. 827). CLSL is centered in care ethics, rather than an ethic of distributive justice: it is focused on meeting the needs and resisting cultural devaluation in highly local, contextual ways, rather than focused on a general normative principle of justice	CLSL builds on the insights of CRSL in three ways. First, CLSL takes a more broadly participative vision of what constitutes leadership, and the way that democratic processes themselves can serve as a source of cultural resilience within the school community (Bertrand & Rodela, 2018). Second, the emphasis on care ethics in CLSL is a source of intersubjective reflexivity that moves leadership from responding to culture to actively sustaining it (Daniels, 2012). Third, CLSL advocates for a reimagining of academic achievement and healthy learning behaviors that more closely align and affirm the ways of being and knowing of CLD communities rather than leveraging or being responsive to diverse identities for achieving monocultural, eurocentric academic gains (Daniels, 2012; Lee, 2017; Paris, 2012)

Author Biographies

Alyson L. Lavigne is Associate Professor of Instructional Leadership in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at Utah State University. Using her training as an educational psychologist and classroom researcher, Lavigne studies teacher retention, beliefs, supervision, and evaluation, and student, teacher, and leader dynamics in schools that serve linguistically and culturally minoritized youth.

Sandra Leu Bonanno is a Research Associate at WestEd. Her research and technical assistance focus on culturally sustaining education and leadership for culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Jeff Walls is Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Washington State University. His research focuses on the intersection of ethics and organization in education.

Karen H. Washburn is an assistant professor of social education at Montana State University Billings. As a former social studies and English as a second language teacher, Washburn studies cultural studies in curriculum and instruction with a focus on responsive, relevant, sustaining/revitalizing social studies for linguistically minoritized youth.

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