Honoring Cultural Diversity in an International School: How Culturally Responsive Practices Support Teacher Collaboration

Abstract

The purpose of the participatory action research project was to use culturally responsive practices to develop and sustain relational trust, recognize and honor the assets of the school community, and cultivate a more equitable, collaborative experience for all constituents in an international school. Traditional international schools cater to culturally diverse students and families and often hire local and expatriate staff. Many international schools encourage collaboration, but the expatriate staff and their norms often dominate collaborative work. International schools are ripe for honoring the assets of their diverse local communities, but too often, these assets are either unknown or unnoticed. Engaging in participatory action research with the leaders, teachers, and instructional assistants in grades PreK-5 in an international school in Ethiopia, I explored processes that fostered personal connections across educator constituent groups to examine how to build relational trust and cultivate more equitable collaboration. As a result, I uncovered cultural dissonance as a significant barrier to our collaborative work and identified humanizing actions that diminished these cultural dissonance barriers. The study is significant because the findings inform our understanding of actions that support more equitable working environments in culturally heterogeneous schools and suggest that these processes might create more equity in diverse international schools.