Fostering Community and Civic Engagement in Low Income Multicultural Schools through Transformative Leadership

Abstract

In this study, we examine how transformative leadership enables students from a low-income and multicultural neighbourhood to learn about democracy, re-sponsible citizenship, and community engagement at school. As part of a graduate seminar on critical pedagogy and cultural studies in education, in-depth group interviews were conducted with students in three different schools. The objective of the study was to give voice to these students and to better un-derstand how and why they had decided to become involved in a democracy-oriented school project. The paper focuses on the results obtained in one of the schools, located in a low-income multicultural neighbourhood, where the students’ authentic process of community and civic engagement was facili-tated by the transformative leadership of the principal, the assistant principals, and the teacher leaders.