Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/transforma/5025859/
*Photos can be found in the pdf version of this article.
The administration of my large, urban preschool and child care center had dreams of becoming a nationally accredited program. As the program developer, I employed the principles of transformational leadership to communicate the program’s vision of high-quality care and education to our staff, who were crucial to the actualization of that goal. This was a complex task, given the context in which we gained our accreditation. The families of our program are predominately African American with some Latino/a, Hmong and white. About half of our teachers speak English as a second language. Their home languages include Arabic, Farsi, German, Spanish and Yoruba. Additionally, we are women and men of various ages, levels of education, training and experience. This culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse environment offered a unique opportunity for the administrative team to develop a high-quality center that is inclusive and nurturing to the needs of all individuals.
As the nation’s population grows more diverse, it becomes increasingly important to build a diverse teaching workforce. The need for skilled, reflective transformational leaders emerges when building high-quality inclusive, multicultural programs. In our accreditation journey, the challenge was to unify people of different backgrounds, ...