Culturally Relevant Leadership: A Deaf Education Cultural Approach

In Cultural Proficiency: A Manual for School Leaders, Lindsey, Robins, and Terrell draw on accumulated knowledge from more than 100 years of study in the areas of cultural leadership in education, diversity, and organizational development. The authors discuss how cultural proficiency can help foster effective leadership in current schools and school systems in the face of growing diversity in student populations. They provide a theoretical framework of cultural proficiency and the historical context of changing school demographics, as well as tools and fictionalized case studies to help the reader understand how school leaders can collaborate with others to effect change in a school and make it a more culturally proficient organization. Although Lindsey et al. do not discuss deaf ¹education directly, they offer valuable information that administrators, teachers, and other leaders in deaf education can use to become more aware of the diversity of human experience that students who are deaf and hard of hearing bring to school.

The goal of the book is to give school leaders the understanding, insight, and resources they need to ensure that the schools they lead become places that value students regardless of their cultural backgrounds. The book is a resource for school leaders who wish to help their schools examine their cultures to determine if and how they may have inadvertently marginalized or disempowered members of minority cultures. The authors introduce four tools for cultural proficiency that will help school leaders become more successful in today’s schools:

1. 1. how to overcome the barriers to developing cultural proficiency

2. 2. nine guiding principles of cultural proficiency as an expression of values

3. 3. a cultural proficiency continuum

4. 4. essential elements of cultural proficiency

In the present review, we will attempt to illuminate how schools serving deaf students may find Cultural Proficiencyhelpful in ensuring that the education offered to the diverse deaf student population is equitable, in that it provides greater access to education for these students. We will illustrate some examples of how to apply the tools offered by the authors of the book. We will also point to areas of Deaf culture and language that merit additional consideration, in addition to the concepts put forth by the authors.

Overcoming the Barriers to Cultural Proficiency

The authors of Cultural Proficiencyidentify several barriers school leaders must recognize and overcome before they can develop cultural proficiency. The first is lack of knowledge and awareness of the systems of oppression against marginalized populations. These systems affect those who are harmed as well as those who benefit (including, presumably, the school leaders themselves). Those who benefit may be oblivious to the negative effects or may choose not to see them. The second potential barrier to development of cultural proficiency is the leader’s sense of privilege and entitlement. This sense of privilege and entitlement may cause educators and leaders to be reluctant to change for the sake of their students because they view any call for change as an outside force that is judgmental of practices that maintain their current status within the larger system.

Overcoming the Barriers to Cultural Proficiency: Implications for Deaf Education

Even though the book does not include discussion of deaf students, much of the information in the book can help school leaders see deaf students differently. An important part of the process of moving toward cultural proficiency is the effort to understand and reflect on the history and cultural context of American education and how it has resulted in continued inequities for deaf students. School leaders working with deaf students can learn how the marginalization of Deaf people, their ideas about deaf education, and their beliefs about what deaf students need in educational decisions and designs contributes to the pattern of excluding diversity and maintaining inequity in the field of teaching deaf students. The marginalization of the views and values of the Deaf community has its roots in the...