Cultural Proficiency

The following continuum is drawn from an article entitled, “Cultural Proficiency: Tools for Secondary School Administrators” (Nuri-Robbins, Lindsey, Terrell, & Lindsey, 2007) :

Cultural                                   Cultural                                          Cultural        

Destructiveness                      Blindness                                    Competence

  Cultural                                Cultural                                          Cultural

Incapacity                         Precompetence                                 Proficiency

Public school can be an absolute hotbed of intolerance and cultural dissonance in the absence of strong, culturally proficient leadership.  A campus and its students can be buffeted between the strongly-held beliefs of various stakeholder groups, and much too often the public school environment falls prey to the most virulent intolerances in our society.   It seems many initial efforts to acknowledge and understand diversity are marked by inappropriate overtures.  From America’s early attempts at racial integration of schools through busing to my own awkward first implementation of differentiation for mainstreamed students, part of the learning curve involves making mistakes.  We over-compensate for the slights and discriminations of the past, and in doing so we create new ones.  A teacher with the best of intentions for providing a differentiated classroom can alienate both LEP learners through too overt accommodations and content mastery, and gifted learners through a disproportionate amount of project-based and independent study.  Here no child’s academic needs are served while maintaining both her dignity and her role in the whole classroom.  My experiences in vibrant, culturally diverse campuses throughout my career have given me a real-time education in the value of embracing cultural differences, and the real risk in ignoring them.  I do believe that while entire districts can and should have policies in place to facilitate cultural proficiency, the bulk of the responsibility to this charge falls at the campus level.  Each campus has a unique set of needs and opportunities, and it is necessary for a campus administrator to assess those and implement activities and communication that will speak to her campus’ specific profile.  I struggle with my own embedded cultural mores, and I know that part of my work as an administrator would involve retooling the way I think about creating opportunities for a campus to begin dialogue about those barriers. 

I currently work in a school environment which I believe is, on the whole, at the cultural competence stage of the continuum.  We recognize the benefit in giving value to our diversity, and we look for ways that we can accomplish this.  Our weakness is that our action tends to happen in fits and starts.  We have an International Night on our campus, where many of the cultures of our campus community are given an opportunity to share information and connect with the larger community.  However, we are at times lax in taking this opportunity to continue the lessons of the moment in our classrooms and using it to springboard instruction.  We also find that, with the overwhelming pressures of district and state assessment, creating opportunities to add these cultural components to instruction does not receive all of the attention it deserves.  We have engaged in some pieces of professional development, for example Ruby Payne coursework and sessions on developing home/school relationships; yet, these opportunities have not truly turned into school-wide initiatives, acting rather as ‘consciousness-raising’ activities with inadequate follow-through.  Cultural proficiency is the gold standard for which we all strive in our classrooms and on our campus, and I think that my school does much to work proactively toward this goal in all areas.  Accepting and celebrating diversity in all of its forms is a basic tenet of our campus improvement plan, and the professional development opportunities and campus activities that I have mentioned previously are results of that focus.  I believe this goal can never be achieved completely, because there is always more to learn about others, and there are always opportunities to learn and grow as a campus and as a community.

Nuri-Robbins, K., Lindsey, D. B., Terrell, R. D., & Lindsey, R. B. (2007, September). Cultural proficiency: tools for secondary school administrators. National Association of Secondary School Principals: NASSP Principal Leadership , 8 (1), pp. 16-22.