Policy makers are increasingly attentive to the importance of supportive school climates, even as many students report that schools seem to be uncaring places. Using recent scholarship that foregrounds the organizational and contextual dimensions of educational caring and student engagement, we use qualitative case study interview data to examine these concepts in two schools. We find that organizational and contextual factors such as students' sense of continuity and the manner and degree of staff collaboration have important implications for caring, student engagement, and school climate writ broadly. Implications for policy makers and education leaders are discussed.
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.
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