Leadership styles and multicultural education approaches: an exploration of their relationship

Abstract

This paper discusses the results of an exploratory study that sought to identify elementary school principals’ perspectives of diversity and multiculturalism in relation to their leadership styles. In particular, we examine the approaches to multiculturalism of a group of principals who lead multicultural schools in Cyprus and analyse the findings with regard to both multicultural and leadership theory. Semi‐structured, in‐depth interviews were conducted with 17 principals. The major findings show that almost half of the principals adopted a combination of conservative multiculturalism and transactional leadership style. However, a small number of principals took a somewhat different stance that indicated perspectives of critical multiculturalism embedded in critical and social justice leadership. The implications of this study are discussed with respect to issues of practice and leadership preparation as well as at the systemic, school and personal levels.

Notes

1. We refer to ‘multicultural schools’ to describe the schools whose student population has cultural, religious, ethnic or language diversity (Dimmock and Walker 2005). We later provide more explicit information about the student population in the context of our study.

2. Hereafter, we adopt the term ‘principal’, instead of the more general term ‘administrator’, because it is more explicit to the focus of our study.

3. While writing this paper, we are building on this study by moving into the next phase, that is an ethnographic research on how elementary school principals in selected schools deal with the challenges associated with diversity and multicultural education on an everyday basis.