Leadership learning for unfamiliar cultural contexts

Abstract

This article addresses a simple question in a complex environment: How do principals and teachers when coming together in an unfamiliar cultural setting, such as an Indigenous community, identify the knowledge they have, and that they may yet need to work well in that environment?

One answer is that they will need strategies to enable them to have full and frank discussions of the kind of professional and cultural issues they are likely to encounter. We illustrate this claim with reference to three important concepts from a selection of literature related to working in Indigenous contexts, concepts which informed the design of the Principals as Literacy Leaders with Indigenous Communities (PALLIC) Project. We then outline a strategy we used during that project to provide the circumstances for the creation of 'open intercultural space' in which traditional and Indigenous leadership practices ('both ways' leadership) were raised. To make our discussion of the strategy realistic in this article, we use simulated data to which we add a discussion technique called 'disciplined dialogue' showing the kind of conversations so essential to those who will need to work together in Indigenous environments. To conclude, we use a framework of concerns to ask a series of questions to help principals and teachers to reflect on their knowledge needs as they prepare themselves to work in unfamiliar cultural environments.