Inclusive Leadership

Inclusive Leadership draws on James Ryan's groundbreaking research to present a powerful new idea - leadership as an intentionally inclusive practice that values all cultures and types of students in a school. This important book shows that inclusion must encompass all types of difference in students, teachers, and parents - from the single mother to the new immigrant, from the parents working night jobs, to the homeless child, to issues of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. In four fascinating chapters, James Ryan sketches out the dimensions of exclusion, analyzes the research on inclusive leadership, and offers practical suggestions for promoting and practicing inclusive leadership.

This book is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education—a series designed to meet the demand for new ideas and insights about leadership in schools.

The Case for Inclusive Leadership

The Problem of Exclusion

The Evidence of Inclusive Leadership

Making Inclusive Leadership Work

James Ryan is professor in the Department of Theory and Policy Studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Prior to entering academia, Ryan was a teacher and administrator in schools in northern Canada. His research interests include leadership, diversity, and inclusion.

In today's schools the diversity of the educational leaders has not kept pace with the growing diversity in the student population. As a result, the culture of school is often 'Balkanized'—making effective leadership a particularly difficult challenge.

Inclusive Leadership draws on James Ryan's groundbreaking research to present a powerful new idea—leadership as an intentionally inclusive practice that values all cultures and types of students in a school. This important book shows that inclusion must encompass all types of difference in students, teachers, and parents—from the single mother to the new immigrant, from the parents working night jobs, to the homeless child, to issues of race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation. In four fascinating chapters James Ryan sketches out the dimensions of exclusion, analyzes the research on inclusive leadership, and offers practical suggestions for promoting and practicing inclusive leadership.

Inclusive Leadership is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education, a distinctive series of original, accessible, and concise books designed to address some of the most important challenges facing educational leaders.

“Learning to live with our differences and to create institutions that both respect those differences and subject them to critical scrutiny is the primary task for the twenty-first century. Inclusive Leadership presents a new and exciting paradigm for educational leadership built around this challenge. It’s a ‘must read’ for teachers, administrators, and policy makers.”-- Richard Bates, faculty of education, Deakin University, Australia

“More than simply a book about diversity, Jim Ryan’s Inclusive Leadership takes educational leadership to the next level.”-- Duncan Waite, editor, The International Journal of Leadership in Education

“This book provides practitioners and scholars with the essence of inclusive leadership, which provides all stakeholders with an opportunity to influence education.”-- Margaret Grogan, professor and chair, Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, University of Missouri-Columbia

“Educating for and with diversity is perhaps the greatest challenge facing schools today. Jim Ryan's book will help every educator think through the issues and strategies involved in meeting this challenge."-- Ben Levin, Deputy Minister of Education, Ontario, Canada