Honoring the Treaty: School Leaders’ Embrace of Indigenous Concepts to Practice Culturally Sustaining Leadership in Aotearoa * * * Aotearoa is the Indigenous name for New Zealand.

Abstract

As a field, school leadership has maintained a colorblind stance, marginalizing practitioners’ awareness of culturally sustaining practice, and erasing the experiences of Indigenous and other minoritized groups of students, teachers, and families. Looking to research and practice that attempts to embrace racial and cultural difference in order to make schools more culturally sustaining places to be is imperative in order for the field to respond to the growing diversity in schools. This article specifically explores culturally sustaining and Indigenous school leadership practices. Using data collected from interviews with ten school leaders in Aotearoa (New Zealand) as well as school documents, this article presents new insights into the implementation of culturally sustaining school leadership, which has implications for theory and practice in the field of educational leadership, which has been too long dominated by white ways of knowing.

Keywords

culturally responsiveness leadership indigenous practices international education grounded theory empirical paper

Introduction

“Culturally responsive leadership is a general disposition rather than a paradigm of practice that also demands certain nontraditional out of school behaviors that include building bridges and crossing borders between school and community,” (Fraise & Brooks, 2015, p. 7). Unfortunately, this border crossing between school and community may not be something that comes naturally to school leaders because of the significant cultural gap between school leaders and their students. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1987, 87 percent of public school principals in the United States were white, and three decades later, in the 2017-18 school year, the percentage of white principals had declined only slightly— to 78 percent (Hill et al., 2016; U.S. Department of Education, 2019). Similarly, an OECD report (2016) showed how school leadership in Aotearoa (New Zealand) is also a white-dominated field with just over 86% of school leaders identifying as white, down from 90% almost 20 years prior in 1998. Meanwhile, both countries have increasingly diverse student populations in schools. In the United States, the 2019-2020 school year marks the first year that students of color are the majority of students, while in New Zealand the student population is only slightly over 50% white, with the percentages of Māori, Pasifika (immigrants from Pacific Island nations), and Asian populations rising each year (OECD, 2016).

Given this cultural gap, it is imperative to have school leadership that is not only culturally relevant and responsive, but sustaining (Paris, 2012). According to Paris (2012), culturally sustaining practice “requires that school staff support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence (p. 95). However, as a field, school leadership has maintained a colorblind stance, marginalizing practitioners’ awareness of culturally sustaining practice which can erase the experiences of Indigenous and other marginalized groups of students, teachers, and families or worse lead to what Joel Spring (2009) has called a process of “deculturalization”.

As a white researcher who also prepares majority-white school leaders, I am troubled by this fact and look to research and practice that attempts to embrace racial and cultural difference in order to make schools more culturally sustaining places to be (Paris & Alim, 2014; Santamaría & Santamaría, 2012, 2014). In this article, I specifically explore culturally sustaining and Indigenous school leadership practices given the context of this study. Using data collected from interviews with ten school leaders in Aotearoa as well as school documents, this article presents new insights into the implementation of culturally sustaining school leadership, which has implications for theory and practice in the field of educational leadership, which has been too long dominated by white ways of knowing (Mueller, 2017).

Background

As a scholar based in the United States, I have come to see how much schools reflect and reproduce the hierarchies established by white settler colonial history. Having spent my career in the United States and focused on the education of Black and Latinx students, I wanted to learn from other countries, where schools are also struggling to address the inequity and oppression set into motion by a white settler colonial history and baked into the practices of schools. There are important lessons to be learned by examining schooling in Aotearoa, given the interconnectedness of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black projects in settler colonial societies (Paris, 2019). After reaching out to colleagues, I was invited to spend my sabbatical in Aotearoa as visiting scholar at Victoria University of Wellington. During my first week, I was educated on the two translations and interpretations of the Treaty of Waitangi, a foundational document, one in English and one Māori (Treaty of Waitangi [Translation of Māori version], 1840). Each translation indicated something different. The English settlers thought they had sovereignty over the land in Aotearoa, while the Māori peoples thought the Treaty secured continued sovereignty for them. Shortly after, the English asserted their power over the Māori leading to a series of land wars which resulted not only in land lost, but loss of cultural connection as generations of Māori were cut off from their cultural and familial roots. Schools ensured severing of these roots by implementing English-dominant and Eurocentric curricula and prohibiting Māori language and cultural practices in schools for decades.¹

There are schools in Aoteroa which focus on Māori language and culture, but they are small in numbers. These are called Māori medium schools.

Today, many discussions are focused on “honoring the treaty,” which often translates to helping a new generation become bicultural, valuing both English/European and Indigenous cultural roots of Aotearoa. To that end, the New Zealand Ministry of Education and Indigenous scholars like Russell Bishop and Mere Berryman have urged cultural responsiveness in schools. In a report entitled Te Kotahitanga (Bishop et al., 2014), Indigenous scholars attempted to provide guidance for cultural responsiveness in schools, suggesting, among other practices, integrating Māori language and cultural practices into the schools; however, a recent Ministry report indicated that many principals were not implementing these practices widely, demonstrating that white settler colonialism remains present in schools across Aotearoa (Wylie et al., 2017).

Indigenous School Leadership Practices: A Route to Culturally Sustaining School Environments

In a 2015 article, a group of Māori and Pākehā scholars asked,

Can a mainstream education system that was historically developed to assimilate those different from the dominant group, truly deliver an education that will fulfill the aspirations of a nondominant cultural group, which is intent on maintaining and developing its own educational future? (Hynds et al., 2015, p. 19).

Fortunately, scholars, working across contexts, have highlighted several ways in which schools, even ones that have historically been developed to assimilate nondominant groups, can indeed be culturally sustaining for students, families, and communities by engaging Indigenous approaches and rejecting Western school leadership practices, which have violently stripped Indigenous people of their identities and connections to the spiritual, ethical, and cultural dimensions of life in their approach to schooling (Deloria et al., 2018).

Indigenous researchers from the United States and Aotearoa have also delineated a set of practices grounded in Indigenous approaches to school leadership (Bird et al., 2013; Bishop et al., 2014; Brayboy et al., 2015; Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2013; Garcia & Shirley, 2013; Hohepa, 2013; Santamaría, 2012; Santamaría & Santamaría, 2014). Khalifa et al. (2018) have grouped these Indigenous school leadership practices in the following categories:

The prioritization of self-knowledge and self-reflection,

The empowerment of community through self-determination,

The centering of community voices and values,

Service based in altruism and spirituality, and

Approaching collectivism through inclusive communication practices.

Self-knowledge and self-reflection ask leaders to interrogate knowledge that has been steeped in white settler colonial frameworks and requires leaders to question where knowledge comes from, while moving toward centering Indigenous knowledges and focus on the educational goals and needs of these communities (Hohepa, 2013). Closely linked to this epistemological re-centering is self-determination. In schools, this can include pedagogical approaches where Indigenous communities can co-construct or determine the knowledge valued at school. Garcia and Shirley (2013) argue Indigenous leaders and students must engage in “mutual dialogue and that schools should be considered a sacred space of engagement,” (cited in Khalifa et al., 2018, p. 29). Additionally, interconnectedness with family and community members is essential for making mutual decisions for the schools. Unlike conventional forms of family engagement, where school leaders determine the nature of the engagement (Ishimaru, 2019), centering community voices and values fosters a co-construction of school leadership that is grounded in shared values and a deep connection to community and whānau²

Whānau is the Indigenous word for family, and refers to the extended family.

(Santamaría, 2014).

Finally, a central aspect of Indigenous leadership that is absent from Western school leadership is the connection of schools to spirituality and ethics. For Indigenous communities, spirituality and making ethical and moral decisions are essential parts of being human, without which we limit the capabilities of people to become their full selves (Khalifa et al., 2018, p. 208). For Māori, the concepts of collective vision and strategy are Indigenous approaches that have significant political, cultural, and educational dimensions (Smith,1999). “Within Aotearoa New Zealand the kaupapa, or collective vision and strategy, foregrounds Māori ethnicity and culture as it is directly linked to sustaining and revitalizing te reo meona tikanga (Māori language and cultural knowledge bases) and the well-being of tribal communities” (Hynds et al., 2015, p. 4).

In Aotearoa, Māori scholar, Professor Russell Bishop and colleagues developed a model that visualizes how these practices look in schools (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Waikato University’s matrix for explaining cultural responsive school leadership practices.

Centered on the Māori concept of mauri ora, or life force, this model puts forth a symbiotic relationship between culturally sustaining relationships for responsive pedagogy, home-community-school connections, and adaptive expertise in curriculum, policies, and practices at the school. Centering Indigenous ways of seeing through mauri ora with the overlapping ideas of home and community and cultural connections, this model demonstrates the importance of Indigenous knowledges as the key ideas to how schools can be responsive and sustaining to Indigenous and other nondominant communities.

Methods

Given the struggles that many school leaders, especially those that are white, have implementing culturally sustaining practices, I sought out school leaders who were embracing culturally responsive leadership which could shed light on how school leaders, including but not limited to principals, deans, and chairs of departments, were enacting notions of culturally sustaining school leadership.

Participants

Using snowball sampling, I conducted research in a variety of Aotearoa schools in the Wellington area. There were five participating schools serving primary and secondary students, and majority Pākehā and Māori students (See Table 1).

Table 1.

Characteristics of School Studied.

	School 1	School 2	School 3	School 4	School 5
Number of Students served	448	1777	1322	522	387
Demographics	Māori 10%; Pākehā 75%; Pacific 5%; Other ethnic groups 10%	Māori 9%; NZ European/Pākehā 61%; Asian 22%; Pacific 5%; Other ethnic groups 3%	Māori 8%; NZ European/Pākehā 65%; Asian 16%; Pacific 4%; Other ethnic groups 7%	Māori 27%; Pacific 66%; Asian 3%; Pākehā 2%; Other ethnic groups 2%	Māori 63%; Pacific 19%; Pākehā 10%; Asian 5%; Other ethnic groups 3%
Location	Wellington	Wellington	Wellington	Suburban Wellington	Suburban Wellington
Primary or secondary	Primary 50% female; 50% male	Secondary. all male	Secondary 100% female	Secondary 51% male; 49% female	Secondary 53% male; 47% female

Source. Education Review Office. New Zealand Ministry of Education.

Data Collection

To understand how school leaders might be interpreting culturally sustaining leadership and/or Indigenous leadership practices, I asked three research questions: (a) What motivates school leaders to practice a culturally sustaining approach to leading their schools? (b) What are the practices that they enact in order to express culturally sustaining leadership? (c) What are the challenges that school leaders face to act in culturally sustaining ways? After working through the IRB at Victoria University in February of 2019, I interviewed ten school leaders across five schools, using semi-structured interviews, to gain an understanding of how they viewed culturally sustaining leadership, what kinds of practices they were putting in place at their schools, and how they understood the successes and challenges in their work. Seven white or pākehā school leaders and three Māori school leaders participated in interviews. Interviews lasted about 1.5 hours and were conducted on school grounds. I also conducted follow up interviews. Over the course of a three-month period (February–April 2019), I also observed classrooms, community celebrations, and meetings, and examined the schools’ Ministry reports and other school documents (i.e., curriculum samples, end of year reports by department chairs) offered to me.

Data Analysis

After collecting data, I conducted member checks to validate the data. The participants reviewed the interview transcripts as well as the coded data. After sharing interview transcripts with all participants for feedback, I went through an open coding process using NVIVO software (Saldaňa, 2012). Following the open coding process, data were also analyzed for their connection to culturally sustaining and Indigenous leadership practices that are highlighted in the literature. The coded interview data were triangulated with the documents collected so as to further validate findings. I shared my coded data with participants for a member check. This round of analysis honed the coding further, and I shared the coded data once again. Finally, I generated a series of memos using a grounded theory methodology which yielded insight into the processes which school leaders engage in to implement culturally sustaining practices, (Glaser & Strauss, 1967).

Limitations of the Study

The main limitation of this study was that it was small, and bounded by a short time. For the results to be more robust, I would need to return and replicate the study with more schools in Aotearoa. Although findings from this research are emergent and need further study, they do provide some indication of directions for further research involving more schools and looking at the schools in this study over time to understand the impact of the leadership practices on the students and communities they serve.

Findings

Critical Self, Cultural, and Social Awareness as a Leader

One of the indicators of culturally sustaining and Indigenous leadership practice is the willingness to critically reflect on who s/he/they is/are and to be aware of their identity in a larger social context (Khalifa et al., 2018). As Brooks and Watson note (2019), culturally sustaining school leaders need to unlearn what has been ingrained in them just by living in a white settler colonial and racist society in order to:

Increase awareness of their own relationship with racism, look at the forms of privilege from which they benefit and behaviors from which they may suffer, as well as developing the skills to have difficult conversations about race with students, staff, and community members. (p. 637)

This self-reflection and self-knowledge imply that leaders interrogate a white settler colonial framework and re-center an Indigenous one (Hohepa, 2013).

For white leaders, this involved a process of self-reflection and self-criticism to de-center whiteness in how they approached the work of school leadership. As one school leader indicated, she first identified her biography. She grew up as the daughter of a white educator in New Zealand, but spent time teaching in a very multiethnic, multicultural school in London. This started a process, for her, of reflection; acknowledgement that there were many other people in the world who understood their world differently than she did, and de-centering whiteness (DeMatthews & Izquierdo, 2018). What followed was a sense of humility as a Pākehā person in a predominantly Māori community returning to live into New Zealand to work. Now, as a school leader, this experience drives her to do a lot of listening. As she explained:

I just have to shut up and build relationships, and be involved with Kapa haka and go along to things they’re doing and become part of their world. You start not having relationships with people, and then you build them over time because things go wrong with their kids and you keep showing that you care, and you go ‘round to their houses and you talk to them, and over time they turn round and they say, ‘You know? You’re there for my kid.’ And you go, ‘That’s great. I’m glad we’re in that place (personal communication, white school leader, April 2019).

This school leader is a learner and a leader, embodying the Māori principle of ako (teaching and learning). She has cultivated a new stance that is humble and respectful, which has served her as she continues to work in a community that is largely Pasifika and Māori. She works intentionally with Pasifika and Māori students, faculty, and families to implement initiatives in the school, which have all centered around helping these communities see themselves in the school.

For Māori school leaders, self-reflection involves centering one’s one identity in their work. For one Māori school leader this meant reflecting on her parents’ experience with racism as a Māori-Pākehā couple, and now as an adult trying to own her Māori identity to pave the way for Māori and Pasifika students and their families. She said,

I’m shaped by the racism that my parents had to endure being who they were. And if anything inspires me, it is their story, really. My father speaks Māori and learned it as Pākehā. They tried to get me to learn Māori, but I just wanted to be like everyone else back then. It’s only when I was an adult that I started to really revisit my place and my position. And I want us to be able to support the spectrum, of our students, – we have Māori students that don’t even want to be acknowledged as Māori and don’t want anything to do with the Māori or Pasifika deans, that’s fine. And then we have the students who are immersed in Māori and that are in university in Māori and they live and breathe it – and so we’ve got the spectrum of what it is to be Māori. And I think it’s all okay. (personal communication, Māori school leader, March 2019)

This school leader was honest and reflective about her own experience, how it is a reflection of the time in which she grew up, and how it influences her as a school leader. She is grounded in her biography and clear about how it drives her to help Māori [and Pasifika] youth. By centering it and embracing this self-knowledge, she can authentically engage with and embrace the experiences of her Māori students wherever they are in the process of identity development. This is especially helpful for the high schoolers with whom she works so that they can see themselves succeed in the white-dominant environment of the school, enacting what Khalifa et al. (2018) call “empowerment of community and self-determination” (p. 3). Now she says,

I don’t think cultural responsiveness is a series of things to do. It’s a mind shift. It’s about agency, it’s about the staff understanding, accepting who we are and where we’ve come from and where we need to go before anything else really can happen (personal communication, Māori school leader, March 2019).

Connecting School to Broader Context of Structural Oppression

As Faircloth and Tippeconnic (2015) have noted, contextualization is a critical part of culturally sustaining school leadership for Indigenous students in which there is recognition of

The larger world and to make connections and recognize the relationships between education and the factors that influence how the educational system functions. This approach is in keeping with Indigenous ways of examining how individuals, organizations, and others work together holistically rather than in isolation (Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2015, p. 138).

In practice, one-way school leaders approached this was to engage in a collective reflection and to put their work in the context of the history of Māori-Pākehā relationships more generally. For example, several school leaders reported that they initiated a training on the Treaty of Waitangi for the school community, embedded within which was time to reflect on how this history impacted school staff individually and collectively. By doing this reflection, school leaders had a common language to frame discussions around topics such as academic outcome data as by-products of history and structural inequity, rather than some inherent cultural differences. School leaders took this on courageously. As one leader noted:

It was quite confronting the first time we did a training on the Treaty because we had teachers who have been here for a long time. And then we have lots of young teachers for whom the Treaty is just something normal, you know. We have to make sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of the Treaty means that we live by the principles behind the Treaty. That’s the aim, anyway (personal communication, Māori school leader, March 2019).

This school leader recognized that there are real generational differences in how the history of Māori-Pākehā relations is received. For many decades, there was little to no discussion among the dominant group of the ways in which Māori peoples were subjugated in Aotearoa society. Māori people were discouraged from learning their own history and language. Given this context, delving into this history honestly was new and potentially a little frightening. Younger teachers who grew up in a different context were more prepared for this discussion, but did not necessarily have the historical background that they needed, thus this kind of training is an essential place to start in order to get to open dialog about race, culture, and ethnicity (Harcourt, 2015). School leaders who initiated these trainings pushed their staffs to come together and to develop an understanding that Māori students, especially, need to have cultural sovereignty, not just be taught to assimilate into Pākehā culture. Brayboy et al. (2015) define cultural sovereignty as “the right to linguistic and cultural expression according to local Indigenous norms” (p. 3). The opportunity for self-determination for Māori students would go a long way toward creating a culturally sustaining space in the school for Indigenous students.

Reflecting Student Cultures in the Curriculum

I also found that school leaders were trying to shift to a more asset-based view of Māori and Pasifika students and families in schools, moving away from frameworks of white cultural superiority (Mueller, 2017). While these frameworks do not just disappear, one primary school was intentionally expanding the ways students are assessed in school in order to re-frame what it meant to be a successful student. Moving away from strictly looking only to academics to assess students to thinking about how the school could see the students more holistically, the school created a “cultural profile” of their students so that the students and the teachers could gain an understanding of who the students were culturally, what their own cultural goals were. This information helped the school to move forward. The principal described this process as follows:

The cultural profile looks at the kids in terms of themselves as a learner, but also what is it that they are creating, growing, and the cultural connection to who they are. And so, teachers looked at them in a very holistic way. And one of the things they started to notice, when they interviewed the kids and parents was that initially, the conversation was ‘I’m not Māori, my family is’ and, over time, when they saw that there was a benefit to identifying with who they were, the kids shifted, and so we had a huge percentage of them being confident that they were. Looking more at that kind of holistic perspective was a really key part of that (personal communication, white school leader, March 2019).

This was a remarkable process which one of the Māori parent leaders described as “quite profound in terms of the students’ achievement.” According to the principal, it has also made teachers more aware of the students culturally. Coupled with Māori language now offered at the school, this practice has the potential for making students feel welcome as who they are and can ensure that cultural background is at the forefront, a practice that supports cultural sovereignty. What is quite remarkable is the pride that the Māori student, described by this principal, developed after going through the process of the cultural profile, enacting what Anne Milne calls a “pedagogy of whānau,” school-wide practices used to help children see their cultural place in the world (Milne, 2013, pp. 79–80).

Other schools also tried to embrace a Māori world view by learning Te Reo Māori, the Māori language. In many schools I visited, students and staff were learning Te Reo. All of the schools in the study had it as part of the curriculum for students, but there were two schools that required it for all students. As one school leader explained learning Te Reo led to learning Tikanga, Māori cultural practices, which were necessary for the students and staff:

Providing that grounding in Te Reo as a language but also as a world view, all of our students will be having that. Our staff, actually, is going through the same process as our students as well. Now, some of our staff are further along, but we’re asking all our students who come in to have a certain amount of language and understanding of Tikanga. And I think, all our staff – if we’re asking that of our students, why on earth are we not actually asking that of our staff? So, I think our focus for professional development, this is my vision in the next five years. It’s empowering our students as well to understand and to love that part of our country that is us. It’s that fabric that kind of, you know – and I think that it’s a responsibility to deliver that to our young people. And it’s a responsibility that we, actually, if we’re going to say it, we need to do it ourselves, really (personal communication, Māori school leader, March 2019).

This effort was evidence of a commitment to centering community voices and practices, (Khalifa et al., 2018). While I heard in interviews that the interpretations of Māori customs and practices were not always as authentic as they could be, the kinds of practices I witnessed at these schools showed a sincere commitment to reflecting the students’ cultures. They were consistently asking themselves how they could be doing better, finding ways to expand their efforts at cultural responsiveness in more classrooms and in more subject areas to shift the school culture.

Working with Whānau: Room to Grow

A critical element of culturally sustaining and Indigenous school leadership is working with and creating strong bonds with families (Berryman et al., 2018; Chu et al., 2013; Ngati Kahungunu Iwi Incorporated, 2014; Khalifa et al., 2018). There was wide recognition at all of the schools that I visited that whānau was not only important, but that whānau needed to be part of the life of the school. Consequently, schools that I visited all had whānau groups to engage families in the school. The word whānau, I came to learn, is more than just family, it is an extended family that provides emotional and spiritual support; whānau provides connection and wellbeing. Whānau groups provide support for each family member, guidance for the school and the students, and can be the connective tissue between the school and community/iwi.³

Māori term for local Indigenous tribe.

The role of whānau varied across schools, however. One school had two special rooms in the school reserved for Māori and Pasifika whānau to meet. These families could make the rooms look and feel in a way that reflected the cultures of Māori and Pasifika families connected with the school and have a space to talk freely, build relationships, and share food. Another school was building a marae⁴

An Indigenous meeting house.

on their campus in conjunction with a local iwi to welcome whānau, and convey the centrality of Māori culture to the entire school community. This was a school that also employed restorative practices to resolve conflict, a practice steeped in Māori culture to restore connections to whānau after a problem. Another school had whānau groups that were just forming or that were small and growing.

Some schools made efforts to ensure that they had specific positions reserved for a Māori and Pasifika members so their perspective was always represented on their boards. As one school leader described, “I think that more so in the last few years when our parent community has become stronger and has really given itself, at the governance level, a voice” (personal communication, Māori school leader, April 2019). This worked well, but in some cases, there was conflict between whānau and the school, especially around sharing power or decision-making at the school. As one school leader communicated:

As a Māori parent tries to push in and say, ‘Well, hey, I want to have a voice,’ or, ‘I’d like to do this,’ that there’s a strained relationship of actually allowing – they’ve actually allowed – can’t think of a better word – Māori to have direction and influence on particular things within the school. We have had a Māori board member, and tried to get a second but, unfortunately, there wasn’t enough votes. I tried to talk to the board about ensuring that there’s a Māori position on the board. Not interested in that. They’re interested in diversity but not in a guaranteed, for sure position for the Treaty of Waitangi to be honored. It’s about control and giving away control and autonomy to other individuals. That comes with trust, but there’s this real idea, I think, in our schools about principals particularly being in control of the school. It’s their school. It’s not our school. It is their school (personal communication, Māori school leader, May 2019).

This made things complicated at the school in which this leader worked. The question of who has control over a school is one that plays out in many schools across the globe, and while I would argue that all of the schools in this study made efforts to include whānau, few re-examined the norms of their schools to include whānau in decision-making processes. There was a continuum of schools ranging from schools in which whānau did not feel particularly included to schools in which there was a real cultural shift to include the voices of families and local iwi in the daily practices of the schools. Some schools were sharing decision-making, while others were more reluctant to do this. In this sense, culturally responsive leadership is a challenge. Schools are institutions that emerge from a history of colonial domination, and resisting practices that subjugate minoritized communities takes a great deal of work to truly de-center whiteness and operate from a stance of “equitable collaboration,” (Ishimaru, 2019).

Discussion

This study, albeit small, demonstrated the ways in which school leaders can engage in culturally sustaining leadership practices. Through individual and collective effort and confronting historic inequities, school leaders can engage in culturally sustaining practices to support students, even in schools that were not set up historically to support Indigenous and other minoritized students. Incorporating Indigenous cultural practices and languages in school is a way to support Indigenous students and families as well as a way to communicate that there is a more than one way of knowing or seeing the world. This finding is supported by the literature on culturally responsive, sustaining education for Indigenous and minoritized communities (Bird et al., 2013; Brayboy et al., 2015; Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2013; Garcia & Shirley, 2013; Hohepa, 2013; Martin et al., 2017).

The findings further indicate that implementing culturally sustaining practices to their fullest extent, however, is challenging for school leaders working within a white settler colonial society. Even school leaders who were implementing culturally sustaining practices still struggled to share decision-making power with Māori family and community. In the schools, it was acceptable for school leaders to embrace Indigenous practices, like teaching Te Reo Māori, but it was much more difficult for Pākehā school leaders to share power with Māori families and communities. Hynds et al. (2015) also found barriers school leaders faced implementing culturally sustaining practices for Indigenous students, and that power-sharing was among them, In terms of emergent theory, therefore, this study suggests that power-sharing is perhaps the most challenging of all of the culturally sustaining practices, which reflects struggles present in the larger society. While Aotearoa is making progress by starting to honor the Treaty of Waitangi by embracing its dual identity as both Indigenous and Pākehā, for example, Māori and Pākehā still have differential access to power and resources. Likewise, at the school level culturally sustaining practices may be present, but there are still challenges to sharing power equally with Indigenous families and communities.

Conclusion

The clear implication is that much more needs to be done to cultivate more culturally sustaining leadership practice among school leaders, especially as it relates to power sharing. In schools and school systems, policy changes may be in order to ensure that school leaders are incentivized to pursue culturally sustaining practices, by using more than academic measures for school success. Using the idea of the cultural profile may be the beginning of a new kind of assessment that takes the cultural, spiritual, and communal aspects of learning into account, which would require further research and development. In terms of power sharing, since there is a clear parallel to the broader society, advocacy is an important pathway for policies that ensure equal access to power and resources as well as cooperative leadership between schools and Indigenous and minoritized communities.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biography

Jessica T. Shiller is an associate professor in the College of Education at Towson University. Her research interests include cultural responsiveness in leadership and teaching, inequity in education, and school reform.

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