This study describes how a culturally responsive school leader promoted equity in a racially and linguistically diverse school. The authors shadowed Faith, an assistant principal, and did follow-up interviews with her after each day of shadowing. They observed teachers in their classrooms, conducted multiple interviews with teachers and parents, and gathered artifacts from administrative offices, classrooms, and common areas. The authors found that Faith practiced culturally responsive leadership on three levels: personal, environmental, and curricular. Faith's culturally responsive leadership included six themes: caring, building relationships, being persistent and persuasive, being present and communicating, modeling cultural responsiveness, and fostering cultural responsiveness among others.

Background to the StudySince 1980, the current Zimbabwe administration made the goal of achieving access to college a central theme of its education policy as it relates to adult students across demographic groups. In the last two decades, The Zimbabwe Ministry of Education policy focused on what literature refers to as "more on college access and college completion" (Kelly, Schneider, & Carey, 2010, p. 32). The late Minister of Higher Education Dr. Stan Mudenge extended the content of the Zimbabwe Higher Education Policy to include college access by increasing the number of colleges, universities, and students who enroll for college education. Available data reveal that in some areas around Zimbabwe, due to previous education policies and uneven cultural tendencies "raising the college completion rates of poor students [may be] critical to achieving that goal" (Kelly et al., 2010, p. i). In general, experts in the field of higher education and open distance learning (ODL) in particular consistently agree that college education may best be achieved by improving the quality of education through effective instruction and allowing as many students as possible access to higher education levels (Brookfield, 2005;Kelly et al., 2010).For many years, there has been interest in the field of adult education in teacher quality, effective instruction, and the impact of these on learner success. The offices of adult education . . . in the . . . Department of Higher Education . . . play[ed] a leadership role in providing resources to enhance teacher quality and guide the improvement of adult education programs. (Center for Adult Language Acquisition Network, 2010, p. 1) 544291S GOXXX10.