A Descriptive Multicultural Phenomenology for Culturally Responsive Leadership

As public schools in the United States continue to diversify in culture, educational leaders committed to multicultural education seek qualitative research methodologies for understanding phenomena in order to build culturally responsive leadership initiatives and interventions. This paper argues that a phenomenological research methodology is appropriate and relevant to understand cultural phenomena in the 21st century school. To serve this, the authors elaborate on a descriptive multicultural phenomenological research methodology for educational leaders. A phenomenological framework positions educational leaders to understand the nature and essence of personal experience. This approach will help educational leaders better understand the experiences of the diverse children within their school. Therefore, leaders may utilize a multicultural phenomenological research methodology to build appropriate culturally responsive initiatives and interventions to meet the needs of culturally and linguistically diverse schools