Principals of many New Zealand (NZ) mainstream schools navigate a complex intercultural educational policy environment to address the academic challenges of Māori and Pasifika students. This inquiry sought to explore the concept of culturally responsive instructional leadership by studying the knowledge, actions, motives, perceptions, and challenges of White principals in a primary school, an intermediate school, and a high school in NZ. The emergent conceptual definition of culturally responsive instructional leadership includes those purposeful, well-intentioned, creative, and collaborative actions that a principal takes to enhance the academic engagement and achievement of minority-culture students.
This article explores how six ethnically diverse African refugee youth transcended constraining social structural forces and maintained high levels of academic engagement at a high school in a small Northeastern city. Using ethnographically contextualized case study methodology, this article examines the refugee youths' processes of acculturation and adaptation to American schooling. The article particularly examines the role of pre-resettlement social circumstances in refugee camps, home cultural influences, and parental scholastic expectations in shaping the participants' scholastic engagement. The findings suggest that the participants' resilience and optimism about the promise of American schooling in tandem with local community-wide support produced agency with which they transcended countervailing forces in schooling. This phenomenon is conceptualized in this article as agentic scholastic engagement.
<p>In this article I investigate how three ethnically diverse African refugee female adolescents navigated the intercultural complexity that contextualized their schooling in a small Northeast American city. Using ethnographically contextualized case study methodology, this article explores the participants’ perceptions of the African and American cultural milieus that they straddled as refugee adolescents. Additionally, the article examines the strategies these refugee youth had to develop in order to transcend intercultural complexity and remain academically engaged. The findings suggested that the refugee adolescents demonstrated <em>agency</em> and a considerable degree of <em>intercultural competency</em>, which I conceptually juxtaposed here as <em>Agentic Intercultural Competency</em> <em>in Schooling</em> (AGICS). The findings further suggested that the AGICS concept was critical for these socially disadvantaged female adolescents to maintain high levels of scholastic engagement in the face of intercultural complexity.</p>
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