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Professional Readings includes reviews of recent publications and highlights of reports on current issues that affect schools. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Cultural Proficiency: A Manual for School Leaders
Lindsey, R. B., Robins, K. N., and Terrell, R. D. (2003). Cultural proficiency: A manual for school leaders. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
This book is a comprehensive manual for leaders in institutions as they struggle with issues of diversity and fairness. The book contains many exercises and tools for leaders that promote new thinking about diversity.
The book describes a culturally proficient person as one who “may not know all there is about others that are different from them, but they know how to take advantage of teachable moments, how to ask questions without offending, and how to create an environment that is welcoming to diversity and change.” The book presents four tools that culturally competent individuals develop in themselves and in their organization. These tools are understanding the underlying guiding principles of cultural proficiency, knowing the essential elements for measuring cultural proficiency, understanding the barriers and how to overcome them, and understanding the cultural proficiency continuum which provides the language structure to describe cultural proficiency.
The descriptions of behaviors on the cultural proficiency continuum include the following:
- Cultural destructiveness—In this position, one would eliminate the other people’s culture. Sees the differences but wants to stomp them out.
- Cultural incapacity—Sees the differences but sees one’s own culture as a superior culture that disempowers another’s culture.
- Cultural blindness—Acts as if the cultural differences you see do not matter or does not recognize that there are differences among and between cultures.
- Cultural precompetence—Awareness of the limitations of one’s skills or an organizational practice when interacting with other cultural groups.
- Cultural competence—Interacts with other cultural groups using the essential elements of cultural proficiency as the standard for individual behavior and school practice.
- Cultural proficiency—Esteeming culture, knowing how to learn about other cultures, and ability to interact effectively in a variety of cultural environments.
The book teaches the process of developing competence in cultural proficiency. The process includes naming the differences, claiming the differences, framing the conflicts caused by differences, changing to make a difference, and training about differences. There are many activities and scenarios to draw from presented in the book.
This book is a valuable resource for anyone who seriously wants to understand the basis for cultural proficiency and wants to become culturally proficient. This book offers tools to develop the prerequisite understandings and skills in cultural proficiency.
