Assessing intercultural competence for educational leaders: an empirical investigation.

Abstract

The growing diversity of multi-cultural student populations in public schools coupled with the persistent challenge of narrowing the racial achievement gap raises questions about the preparedness of educational leaders to meet the needs of their diverse student population. Educational leaders are facing the challenge of responding to the needs of their diverse student population without systemic strategies, knowledge, and skills necessary to succeed in multi-cultural schools. This study was designed to investigate the level of intercultural sensitivity of a group of educational leaders in a Northern Minnesota school district as measured by the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). In this study, the placement of educational leaders in the Minimization stage means that they were in a transitional stage from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. However, the results of this study indicated that a well planned training can significantly develop the intercultural competence of educational leaders. Findings from this study also demonstrated a significant disparity between the actual Developmental level and the Perceived level of intercultural competence of the participants. This could mean an overestimated and unrealistic view about the participants’ ability to effectively handle the increasing diversity of student population. Overall, demographic and background variables were not found to be significantly related to the level of intercultural competence. However, some significant relations were reported between these variables and some of the IDI subscale scores.