Developing Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning
New Directions for Student Leadership, Number 152
J-B SL Single Issue Student Leadership Series

The notion of culturally relevant leadership learning builds upon the ideas of developing leader identity and leadership capacity of diverse students.

Focusing on four areas of leadership learning: education, training, development, and engagement, this volume presents a model of culturally relevant leadership learning in order to develop all student leaders. It proposes infusing the leadership development process with an understanding of how systemic oppression influences educational contexts and with an engagement in and across cultural differences. Our contexts and differences influence knowledge of self, others, cultural contexts and systems, and ultimately students’ knowledge and enactment of leadership.To this end, culturally relevant leadership development programs equip all students with the knowledge and skills to navigate diverse settings and lead culturally diverse groups and teams.

Transforming the framework for how leadership programs are designed will result in contextually relevant leadership development programs and an increase in the breadth and depth of a diverse leadership cadre for our society.

The Jossey-Bass quarterly report series New Directions for Student Leadership explores leadership concepts and pedagogical topics of interest to high school and college leadership educators. Issues are grounded in scholarship and feature practical applications and best practices in youth and adult leadership education.

1. Critical Domains of Culturally Relevant Leadership Learning: A Call to Transform Leadership Programs 9
Tamara Bertrand Jones, Kathy L. Guthrie, Laura Osteen

This chapter introduces the critical domains of culturally relevant leadership learning. The model explores how capacity, identity, and efficacy of student leaders interact with dimensions of campus climate.

2. Authenticity in Leadership: Intersectionality of Identities 23
Susan R. Jones

This chapter situates leadership and the process of becoming a leader within an understanding of identity, particularly intersecting social identities and intersectionality.

3. The Practice of Freedom: Leading Through Controversy 35
Sherry K. Watt

Theoretical frameworks, specific skills for leaders, and guidance to effectively work with others across difference as well as practice freedom to facilitate transformational social movements are explored in this chapter.

4. Culturally Responsive Integrative Learning Environments: A Critical Displacement Approach 47
Antron D. Mahoney

A critical framework for developing culturally responsive integrative learning environments in leadership education is explored in this chapter.

5. Leadership Lessons from Communities of Color: Stewardship and Collective Action 61
Juana Bordas

This chapter proposes a multicultural leadership model that reflects practices and principles from Black, Latino, and American Indian communities.

6. Preparing Interfaith Leaders: Knowledge Base and Skill Set for Interfaith Leaders 75
Eboo Patel

This chapter examines the vision, knowledge base, and skill set of interfaith leadership, which are practical and critical ways for creating culturally relevant leadership learning in higher education.

7. Internalization of Dominance and Subordination: Barriers to Creative and Intellectual Fullness 87
Tanya O. Williams

This chapter explores the ways in which identities and positions of dominance or subordination in a societal system of power and privilege affect the way in which leadership is enacted.

8. Leading to Transgress: Critical Considerations for Transforming Leadership Learning 95
Laura Osteen, Kathy L. Guthrie, Tamara Bertrand Jones

The culturally relevant leadership learning model, through the lens of theory and practice, is explored to create critical questions for guiding leadership educators in the ongoing process of transforming leadership programs.

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Tamara Bertrand Jones is associate professor in the higher education program at Florida State University. She also serves as an associate director in the Center for Postsecondary Success.

Laura Osteen is director of Florida State University's Center for Leadership and Social Change. She teaches in the College of Education and serves as a research associate in the Leadership Learning Research Center.