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

In this study, we examine how transformative leadership enables students from a low-income and multicultural neighbourhood to learn about democracy, responsible 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 understand 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 facilitated by the transformative leadership of the principal, the assistant principals, and the teacher leaders. (Contains 2 footnotes.)