Intercultural Leadership in Education

Intercultural leadership in education is a new and innovative pedagogical theme that addresses the challenges of today’s multicultural societies as well as multiform and heterogenous educational contexts. Interculturality is about pushing thought beyond the boundary, to use a symbolic term that also serves as a metaphor to orient the reflections in this book. Interculturality is a way of thinking and feeling about otherness, human relation- ships, and a profound, existential anthropological sense in which diversity is welcomed as a source of enrichment for the human condition. This awareness has prompted us to delve deeper into the topic of educational leadership, moving beyond the interpretative clichés of traditional management and organizational models in the educational sphere. The goal is to provide a different reading of leadership that is intrinsically relational and intercultural, because it is precisely in the relationship—in that prefix inter, in that being between, and being with—that we encounter the other. Finally, to fully express the potential and semantic richness of an intercultural and inclusive leadership, a new poetics of the educational relationship must be developed, one that looks at “a world of islands,” in which the archipelago becomes a physical, material, symbolic, and metaphorical place.