Intercultural Schools: The Future of Minnesota Public Education

The Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Education Summit that was held May 25 and 26 was a significant benchmark in the transformation of Minnesota’s P-12 public education. All together, there were about one hundred participants which included school assistant superintendents, principals, assistant principals, directors of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in various school districts, education researchers from various higher education institutions (particularly teacher preparation programs), and intercultural training and coaching professionals who utilize the IDI in consulting for education organizations (including Interculturalist). It was a good mix of people from various educational and professional organizations.

We came together to discuss the challenges and visions that the education leadership in Minnesota P-12 schools are facing with regard to the continuously changing dynamics of cultural demographics. These challenges include the continuing achievement gap, the disparity between different racial and ethnic groups in disciplinary incidents. The approach at the Summit was to examine the context and situation from an intercultural perspective. The discussion revolved around what it means to integrate intercultural competence work and more traditional “antiracism” work. We now know that the challenges we face cannot be addressed solely through the lens of “eliminating racism” as this lens does not speak to greater and more complex differences among cultures. Intercultural and antiracism work must be integrated and work hand-in-hand – they should be partners in achieving the goal of creating public schools that can educate all students.

Culture plays a crucial role in determining how teachers teach, how leadership leads, and how schools engage students, families, and the surrounding community. Some of the topics discussed were: connecting educators’ continuing professional development to eliminating achievement disparities, identifying key intercultural “stress points” (for example, parent-teacher conferences), developing strategies for handling these stress points, clarifying how people with different intercultural orientations respond to these stress points, and assessing how having a more sophisticated intercultural orientation leads to better (i.e. more effective) strategies.  The Summit concluded with discussion on creating a Cultural Resource System in Minnesota, a system that would serve as a resource and support for addressing the multi-cultural needs of schools. It was exciting to see such an innovative initiative started at this scale. As a Minnesota-based intercultural firm (and parents of Minnesota public school students!), it’s special to see this new educational development emerge.