EQUITABLE Inclusive and INSTRUCTION, Culturally EMPOWERED Competent Classrooms STUDENTS A Teacher’s Guide to
Readers will: • •
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ISBN 978-1-952812-81-1 90000
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Guide to Inclusive and Culturally Competent Classrooms
EQUITABLE INSTRUCTION, EMPOWERED STUDENTS CARISSA R. McCRAY
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
A Teacher’s
Copyright © 2022 by Solution Tree Press Materials appearing here are copyrighted. With one exception, all rights are reserved. Readers may reproduce only those pages marked “Reproducible.” Otherwise, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission of the publisher. 555 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404 800.733.6786 (toll free) / 812.336.7700 FAX: 812.336.7790 email: info@SolutionTree.com SolutionTree.com Visit go.SolutionTree.com/diversityandequity to download the free reproducibles in this book. Printed in the United States of America
Names: McCray, Carissa, 1987- author. Title: Equitable instruction, empowered students : a teacher’s guide to inclusive and culturally competent classrooms / Carissa R. McCray. Description: Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022003921 (print) | LCCN 2022003922 (ebook) | ISBN 9781952812811 (paperback) | ISBN 9781952812828 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Transformative learning. | Culturally relevant pedagogy. | Cultural competence. | Educational equalization. | Classroom environment. Classification: LCC LC1100 .M33 2022 (print) | LCC LC1100 (ebook) | DDC 370.117--dc23/eng/20220301 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003921 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022003922 Solution Tree Jeffrey C. Jones, CEO Edmund M. Ackerman, President Solution Tree Press President and Publisher: Douglas M. Rife Associate Publisher: Sarah Payne-Mills Managing Production Editor: Kendra Slayton Editorial Director: Todd Brakke Art Director: Rian Anderson Copy Chief: Jessi Finn Production Editor: Paige Duke Content Development Specialist: Amy Rubenstein Acquisitions Editor: Sarah Jubar Proofreader: Evie Madsen Text Designer: Fabiana Cochran Cover Designer: Laura Cox Editorial Assistants: Charlotte Jones, Sarah Ludwig, and Elijah Oates
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Reproducible pages are in italics.
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 A Departure From the Status Quo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 What This Book Is About. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Who This Book Is For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
P art 1 B ui l d i ng a C u l tu r e o f Opp ortu ni ty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Chapter 1 Becoming Culturally Competent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Seeing Cultural Competence as a Starting Point. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Understanding Appropriateness Versus Appropriation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Adopting Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Adopting Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Adopting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Chapter 2 Transforming the Curriculum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Making the Curriculum Inclusive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Making the Curriculum Equitable. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Making the Curriculum Justice Driven. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Evaluating the Curriculum and Selecting Instruction and Assessment Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Creating a Personalized Curriculum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Designing a Justice-Driven Curriculum for Students. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
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About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
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Chapter 3 Shaping Classroom Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Making Classroom Culture Inclusive . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Initiating Teacher-Student Collaboration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Love Languages in the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Enhancing Body Language in the Classroom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
P art 2 S p e ak i n g th e L a ng u a g e of F reedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
Crafting Your Purpose. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Crafting Your Vision. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Crafting Your Mission. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Designing Your Daily Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 My Purpose, Vision, and Mission Statements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Individual Practices to Include and Exclude. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 School and Community Practices to Include and Exclude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 District or Regional Practices to Include and Exclude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 National and International Practices to Include and Exclude . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Chapter 5 Communicating With Students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Developing and Sustaining Relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 Letting the Syllabus Set the Tone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Fostering and Nurturing Student Leadership. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Reflecting on Building Relationships. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Strategies for Nurturing Student Leaders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Chapter 6 Engaging With Families . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 Getting to Know Families. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Seeing the Value of Family Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118 Exploring Engagement Strategies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Evaluate Your Family Engagement Strategies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
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Chapter 4 Articulating Your Purpose, Vision, and Mission . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
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P art 3 As s es s i n g at C u l tu r a l I nters ec ti ons . . . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter 7 Understanding Intersectionality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Defining Intersectionality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128 Incorporating Intersectional Pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Modifying Formative and Summative Assessments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Identifying Essential Assessment Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 Creating Assessments From Classroom Assignments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
Chapter 9 Committing to Reflection, Professional Development, and Modification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Reflecting on Classroom Practices. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Engaging in Professional Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Modifying Classroom Activities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Using Your Evaluation Rubric. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Epilogue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Appendix: Aligning With Teacher Evaluations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Aligning With Teacher Evaluations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 174
References and Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
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Chapter 8 Diversifying Assessments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
arissa McCray, PhD (she/her), is an English instructor in K–12 education who has worked in Duval County and rural Sumter County, Florida. With insight gained from teaching grades 6–12, including teaching corrective to advanced courses, she has refined her craft to focus on redefining the educational trajectory for students of color that addresses equitable education, rural education, and the impact of trauma.
Dr. McCray is a member of Research, Advocacy, Collaboration, and Empowerment Mentoring program, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and the American Educational Research Association. She has presented across the United States, from Massachusetts to Hawaii, on topics ranging from implementing social-emotional strategies in the classroom to culturally responsive teaching techniques with an emphasis on equitable and justice-driven education. Her ongoing scholarship and practitioner-based work are driven by creating equitable learning opportunities through the inclusion of multicultural literature, media, and curricula. Dr. McCray received her bachelor’s degree in English from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, her master’s degree in educational leadership from Walden University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her doctorate in curriculum, instruction, and assessment also from Walden University. To book Carissa R. McCray for professional development, contact pd@SolutionTree.com.
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INTRODUCTION
—Student, class of 2020
D
uring my first three years in the classroom, starting in 2009, I taught intensive reading to grades 7–8 students. More than 95 percent of students were Black, and more than 95 percent of students received free or reduced lunch. Most of my students were older than typical grades 7–8 students, ranging from fifteen to eighteen years old. Due to not performing at grade level on state assessments, these students did not have electives; they were required to take my intensive reading class without support facilitation. This meant I was the lone teacher to over twenty students with varying reading levels, required to provide an individualized education plan to each student. Many teachers are in similar settings with little to no help in navigating daily classroom interactions with students. The teacher’s edition of the intensive reading curriculum stated exactly what teachers should say and provided scenarios for the best student responses. The district had chosen this curriculum, judging it to be the best for the student population, and routinely observed and evaluated how well teachers followed the program. According to program data, teachers who followed the script with fidelity would achieve academic success. I followed the script with fidelity. My classroom library was stocked with books for all 1
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You have shown all kids of color that there is a way out of this crap.
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reading levels. If a student was a beginning reader, I had picture books or comic books of The Odyssey by Homer (1996) and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1989). If a student was a more advanced reader, I had copies of Hatchet by Gary Paulsen (1987) and Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix (1998). My collection contained over fifty different books, and I had two to five copies of each book to promote collaborative reading. My room contained a reading corner with beanbag chairs, ambient lighting, and soft music. I arranged students into small groups of no more than seven members at a time to provide differentiated instruction, scaffolding, and individualized support.
Despite the robust resources the program provided and my faithfulness in following its directives, I was still unprepared. I was the third reading teacher my students had that year. Having had two other teachers before me within a five-month time frame, they expected me to abandon them. So my students started out tough. They wanted to know if I would stay with them. And I did. When they realized they couldn’t run me away like they did the others, they finally asked: “Why we always got to read about these White people? Black people don’t write books?” It took a great amount of trust for my students to ask this question. Once they realized I was there to stay, they confided in me that they wanted to explore literature they could relate to. My students wanted to see themselves in the curriculum and trusted that I would provide the resources and strategies for representation. Supporting my students to be seen and heard was the first step to enhancing their engagement and learning. I realized then that I needed to transform my teaching. The students from my first year of teaching were tired of the script. They felt that the scripted program rendered them deficient. The lack of representation silenced their voices and ideas. To be honest, I followed the script because I thought my students didn’t know how to read, craft sentences, and interpret meaning in texts. I considered them deficient. The curriculum considered them deficient. Their behavior had reflected those expectations for years. I needed to shift the dynamic to seeing and treating my students as empowered rather than deficient. In the years since I taught that intensive reading class, I have had the privilege of traveling with my students from grade 7 to grade 12. I was able to change grades each year and travel upward with my students, crafting a robust English curriculum based on student input and school-based collaborative teams. I wanted students to feel included, and I wanted them to read broadly and deeply. I have intentionally presented students with more diverse articles, books, poems, speeches, and visual information. I began small by
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The program’s goal was that all students demonstrate growth or achieve a passing score on the state assessment. My lesson plans were complete with everything necessary for my evaluation: teacher and student scripts, differentiated instruction, accommodations or modifications for exceptional student education, higher-order-thinking questions, possible scaffolding opportunities, rubrics (program, teacher, and student made), and room in the margins for my notes.
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including a Black author in our readings or finding short excerpts by people of color that aligned with our unit expectations. I collaborated with my neighboring teacher, who is Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Black, to incorporate more interactions with and discussions about texts written by Latinx authors. I began researching and reading African, Asian, and South American authors to add to my literary canon and to use in my classroom. I started giving shout-outs and blurbs about books I was reading and asking if students wanted a copy. When they expressed interest, I bought more copies or loaned my copy. I started a book club that met before school. Sometimes students met during lunch to discuss books they wanted to read next.
Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students is about transformative education—learning that allows students to recognize and analyze injustices and barriers while creating, imple menting, and evaluating collective and cooperative plans for dismantling biases and injustices. Transformative education is a response to the ways in which the status quo fails to support teachers and empower students. Let’s examine some of the key ways transformative education seeks to transcend the status quo.
A Departure From the Status Quo Perpetuating the status quo in education has continued to widen inequities. Based on high-stakes standardized testing, the status quo dictates what type of curriculum students are allowed to learn, pay based on student performance on test scores, and resegregation of schools. Additionally, the drive toward achieving the status quo has led to data manipulation, teacher exhaustion, and staff departure. The status quo—achievement based on standardized test scores—dictates district funds, teacher placement, and what educational pedagogies, ideas, and concepts can be implemented in classrooms. The status quo is constraining and destroying education; and it is time to change that. What do inclusion and cultural competence mean in the sphere of education, and what do they have to do with creating equitable learning environments? Inclusion and cultural competence are the first steps educators must take toward creating an equitable environment. Inclusion allows all people to share their ideas. Becoming culturally competent means appreciating diverse cultures, attitudes, traditions, values, and beliefs. Creating an equitable learning environment first requires inclusion and cultural competence because
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I still have more work to do—researching, interviewing, surveying, and adapting curricula—to ensure that I provide students with diversity in reading. I am still striving to provide more inclusive literary choices for students and to expand my personal and professional reading to incorporate greater diversity. I continue to alter spaces in education to more accurately reflect our global sphere. I am on a mission to ensure that students not only feel included but also see that their perspectives can transform society in positive ways. This book was born from that desire.
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equitable learning for all prioritizes accessibility, opportunity, justice, and collaboration across curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Creating an inclusive and culturally competent classroom is a departure from the status quo in five key ways. 1. Equitable teaching recognizes and rejects assimilationist educational practices. Assimilationist educational practices do not allow for diverse cultures to thrive, as they seek to ensure equality by forcing all students to blend in with the dominant culture (Calderon-Berumen, 2019). This pedagogical practice provides little to no differentiation, limits opportunities to select students, and disregards the potential positive impacts of culturally competent pedagogies. It’s an approach that stifles students.
3. Equitable teaching acknowledges the education debt. The education debt is the accumulation of injustices that include lack of access, denied opportunity, and racial discrimination (Howard, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Zygmunt, Clark, Tancock, Mucherah, & Clausen, 2015). Pedagogical theorist and teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) coined the term to encompass the link between historical, political, and economic inequalities of minoritized individuals. The education debt illustrates how discrimination creates barriers to progressive and transformative change for historically marginalized people. Tyrone C. Howard (2019), professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, summarizes it this way: The economic debt, or the funding disparities that have existed historically and contemporarily between non-White and White schools; the historical debt, which includes social and educational inequities formed around race, class, and gender; the sociopolitical debt, which describes the exclusion of people of color from the civic process; and the moral debt, or the disparity between what we know is right and what we actually do when it comes to the just and fair treatment of all U.S. citizens. (p. 31)
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2. Equitable teaching subverts the preoccupation with the achievement gap and focuses instead on closing the opportunity gap. The achievement gap creates a narrative from data measuring how one group (based on race, ethnicity, and gender) outperforms other groups (Flores, 2018). It’s a narrative rooted in competition and pits students against students and teachers against teachers. Ultimately, focusing on the achievement gap creates a cycle of inequitable practices to gain the highest statistical scores on high-stakes standardized assessments. By shifting their focus to the opportunity gap, teachers are able to design equitable practices rooted in cooperation rather than competition.
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Faced with the opportunity gap and the education debt, educators in the United States and abroad must ask themselves, “How am I providing an equitable and justice-driven educational environment? How do my teaching practices include a focus on students threatened with erasure, students who are not taken seriously when they engage in discourse?” Practical ways to ensure an equitable and justice-driven classroom include ensuring language is positive and inclusive, understanding student needs and providing scaffolds to ensure those needs are met, teaching students skills and strategies to meet their own needs, and incorporating and integrating quality multicultural content that includes all perspectives and voices of diverse people.
While other businesses may thrive with the deficit model, education is not one of them. When schools focus solely on at-risk behaviors exhibited by students, they tend to work reactively rather than proactivity [sic]. Within a school, where the ultimate goal must be student learning and growth, this method is wildly unsuccessful. Rather, schools must focus on identifying and building up students’ assets to create positive development. . . . According to Rose (2006), a deficit model is one that focuses on what students cannot do. If a student is underachieving, those that work from a deficit model believe the failure is because that student is not trying hard enough (Lombardi, 2016). . . . On the other hand, an asset model, or abundance model, focuses on what a student can do: their strengths, skills, talents, interests, and competencies (Alber, 2013; Rose, 2006). As Weiner (2006) suggests, it is extremely important that schools encourage all educators to examine and challenge tacit assumptions. “We can make powerful changes when we break through the pervasive influence of the deficit paradigm and recognize the untapped strengths of students and teachers” (Weiner, 2006, p. 70). (p. 24)
5. Equitable teaching transcends diversity and inclusion. Speaking of diversity and inclusion is a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. It promotes surface-level interactions that allow the educational system to disenfranchise students. These surface-level interactions are the impositions of quotas rather than open-ended strategies for eliminating barriers (Barnard & Turnbull, 2019). Figure I.1 (page 6) represents professor Dafina-Lazarus Stewart’s (2017) assertion that teachers can extend the work of diversity and inclusion by striving for equity
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4. A significant facet of the status quo in education is deficit thinking. Deficit thinking shows up in the way teachers focus on what student do not have, what they cannot do, and how far behind they are rather than drawing on what students do have that can drive success. Equitable teaching disrupts a deficit model and embraces an asset model. Researchers Shannon Renkly and Katherine Bertolini (2018) explain why deficit thinking is problematic in the classroom:
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and justice through cyclical listening, engagement, and evaluation to ensure active and purposeful iterations to justice.
• Entails deep interactions Justice
• Asks who is not taken seriously • Actively engages to shift oppressive interactions
Equity
• Entails deep interactions • Asks who cannot get in • Asks who is at threat of erasure • Focuses on surface-level solutions • Asks if everyone has shared his, her, or their ideas
Diversity
• Focuses on surface-level solutions • Examines who is in the room
Source: Adapted from Stewart, 2017. FIGURE I.1: Extending from diversity and inclusion toward equity and justice.
Creating an equitable classroom not only provides students with diverse and inclusive interactions but also calls educational stakeholders to listen empathetically to the voices in the classroom and to provide the best educational environment that promotes whole-learner development. How can teachers make this shift to creating a classroom that is equitable and justice driven? They can begin by listening, paying attention, and allowing empathy to lead them. Teachers must ask whose voices are in the room and unheard and whose voices are not even in the room to be heard. Teachers must then include those voices in the classroom literature, discussions, and tasks. Teachers must ask who is not being taken seriously and ensure their classroom environment values all voices and perspectives. This work isn’t an add-on; it’s not a strategy best suited to any particular grade level or subject area. Inclusive and culturally competent teaching through transformative education is a lens that every teacher of every subject at every grade level can and should adopt in order to provide equitable instruction for all students. Let’s look more closely at what this book is about and who it’s for.
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Inclusion
Introduction
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What This Book Is About This book aims to provide an introduction to transformative education, to give teachers the knowledge and tools they need to create equitable classrooms. To that end, the book is divided into three parts.
Beginning in part 1, chapter 1 discusses why cultural competence is the starting point for creating an equitable learning environment. It introduces three pedagogies that culturally competent teachers adopt in their practice: (1) culturally relevant, (2) culturally responsive, and (3) culturally sustaining. Chapter 2 explores how teachers can modify the curriculum to become inclusive, equitable, and justice driven with students’ identities, needs, and values in mind. Readers learn tools for evaluating their curriculum and selecting instruction and assessment strategies. Chapter 3 shows how an inclusive classroom culture is at the heart of student well-being. Readers learn to center student expectations, practice behavior management, prioritize verbal communication, monitor body language, and initiate teacher-student collaboration as tools for creating an equitable learning environment where all students belong and thrive. Chapter 4 starts part 2 and guides readers to write purpose, vision, and mission statements as a way of embodying the new concepts and tools they encountered in the previous chapters. Using the statements, readers design daily practices to help them meet their goals at individual, school and community, district or regional, and national and international levels. Chapter 5 examines how an equitable learning environment nurtures positive teacher-student relationships. Readers learn to develop and sustain relationships with students, craft a syllabus that sets the tone for relational dynamics in the classroom, and foster student leadership.
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Part 1 discusses how teachers can create a culture of opportunity with students by becoming culturally competent, transforming the curriculum, and shaping classroom culture. Part 2 calls teachers to speak the language of freedom by articulating their purpose, vision, and mission; communicating with students; and engaging with families. Part 3 challenges teachers to assess at cultural intersections by understanding intersectionality; diversifying assessments; and committing to reflection, professional development, and modification. Each of the following chapters covers a fundamental aspect of educational practice and aims to answer the question of what teachers need to know and do to create an equitable classroom. To support your learning, each chapter begins by identifying learning targets and key vocabulary relevant to the main topic and concludes with a series of questions for reflection.
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Chapter 6 encourages readers to consider how culturally competent teaching affects family engagement. As teachers embrace diverse cultures, the need to form authentic and respectful bonds with students’ families becomes obvious. Readers explore the value of family engagement and learn strategies for collaborating with parents and caregivers to enhance the classroom community. Finally, in part 3, chapter 7 introduces the concept of intersectionality and encourages readers to adopt intersectional pedagogy. Readers learn how to account for intersectionality in their curriculum, instruction, and assessment to interrupt discrimination and eliminate barriers for students who hold historically marginalized identities.
Chapter 9 outlines three tasks teachers should commit to as a way of extending their work beyond the scope of this book. Through reflecting on classroom practices, engaging in professional development, and modifying classroom activities, teachers ensure they will continue to create an equitable learning environment where all students thrive. Finally, the appendix discusses how to communicate culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining strategies to administrators during teacher evaluations. It includes a tool for demonstrating how your practices align with your campus’s evaluation criteria.
Who This Book Is For The wonderful, powerful reality of transformative education is that it’s suitable for diverse teachers, students, and families. This book is relevant for educators at all levels and of every subject. It is my hope that teachers at every level will read this book, write in it, and use it to collaborate with their students and peers. I want teachers to use this book as one of their many resources to argue for cultural education. I want school administrators to use this book to promote equitable education in their schools. I want students to come together to seek diverse representation and their voices to be heard because the adults around them value their perspectives more than before. By reading this book and implementing the strategies, I want teachers to gain approaches to ensure they remain standards based and provide high-quality instruction; information to argue for the integration of culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies within the curriculum; and tools for implementation.
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Chapter 8 provides the knowledge and tools teachers need to create inclusive and equitable assessments. Readers learn how to modify formative and summative assessments to ensure diversification, collaboration, and independence. They also learn how to modify classroom assignments to become assessments.
Building a Culture of Opportunity
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Part 1
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CHAPTER 1
BECOMING CULTURALLY COMPETENT
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LEARNING TARGETS You will be able to: – – – – –
Define cultural appropriateness Understand culturally relevant pedagogy Understand culturally responsive pedagogy Understand culturally sustaining pedagogy Gain tools for adopting culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogy
KEY VOCABULARY Terms to know: – –
–
–
Cultural competence. The ability to engage, communicate, empathize, and interact with people across cultures Culturally relevant pedagogy. The incorporation of cultural competence, high expectations, and critical and sociopolitical consciousness of teachers and students to enhance student learning and academic excellence Culturally responsive pedagogy. Building student intellective capacity with cultural awareness, cultural learning partnerships, culturally diverse information processing, and community building Culturally sustaining pedagogy. Multilingual and multicultural learning within and across cultures to develop and nurture students’ sociopolitical consciousness
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Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students
Maintaining the status quo in education continues to be detrimental to students and exhausting for teachers. Government bodies, district personnel, and elected officials dictate rules, norms, and policies controlling teachers’ classroom pedagogy, instruction, and assessment practices. This status quo has been a topic of discussion since the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002, which implemented high-stakes standardized testing. An educational system rooted in excessive standardized testing has constrained curriculum, overshadowed the benefits of appropriate testing, overtaxed teachers, encouraged data manipulation, increased the privatization and segregation of schools, and relegated marginalized students to the bottom of achievement scores (Strauss, 2014; Walsh, 2017). Ultimately, the status quo falls short of providing an equitable environment for all students.
In this chapter, you’ll learn what it means to become culturally competent and understand why it’s the starting point for creating equitable learning. And I introduce three pedagogies that support the work of culturally competent teachers in the classroom: (1) culturally relevant, (2) culturally responsive, and (3) culturally sustaining. At the end of the chapter, you’ll have a chance to reflect on your learning through a series of questions.
Seeing Cultural Competence as a Starting Point Teachers striving to implement culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies in their classrooms must understand that cultural appropriateness is the first step to creating an equitable and just classroom. Cultural appropriateness—the ability to engage, communicate, empathize, and interact with people across cultures—is the lowest level of relationship among people of different cultures. Cultural appropriateness requires that people treat one another with respect, that they interact with others with empathy and understanding. This is a vital value for teachers to adopt in the classroom. By seeking to learn more about students’ dialect, participation structures, narrative and questioning styles, and preferred peer groups, teachers will have an advantage and will gain the capital to engage
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Culturally relevant, culturally responsive, and culturally sustainable pedagogies aim to disrupt the status quo and rebrand education as equitable, justice oriented, and student driven. Culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies provide teachers with professional tools to improve the learning of all students through curricula, instruction, and assessment methods. These pedagogies are transformative. Teachers impact the education of generations of children with each student who enters their classrooms. As teachers, we want our students to become lifelong learners and be accountable for their continued growth. We provide students with strategies that translate to skills they will use for the rest of their lives. Culturally competent pedagogy provides teachers the tools to support all students in achieving that goal.
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with students and to prompt students to engage in learning (Banks, 2016). To clarify, participation structures and narrative and questioning styles allow students to guide the discussion; question one another, themselves, and the teacher to gain deeper understanding; and engage in movement to prompt additional learning. In her seminal work The Dreamkeepers, pedagogical theorist and educator Gloria Ladson-Billings (2009) acknowledges that by incorporating discussions, educational structures, and learning based on at-home or cultural communication styles, schools increase their accessibility to culturally diverse learners. The interactions with students must be culturally appropriate, and educators must incorporate students’ social and cultural backgrounds to facilitate and maximize student learning (Banks, 2019).
Pause and reflect for a moment on how this approach is different from the traditional teacher-student dynamic. When cultural competence is the starting point, this means recognizing students’ identity and intersectionality, cultivating culturally appropriate relationships, and recognizing the need for personal reflection. Let’s look at each of these elements in more detail.
Identity and Intersectionality In order to understand students, teachers must recognize and respect students’ identities and the complex ways in which intersections of their identities—gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other defining social characteristics—inform their experience and worldview. Professor and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the legal term intersectionality in 1989 to describe how social identities interact or overlap. In an interview published in Time magazine, Crenshaw explains what the term has come to mean to her in the years since: It’s basically a lens, a prism, for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other. We tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on
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Teachers must build relationships with their students to understand students’ social and cultural backgrounds. It is important to note that this form of relationship is different from the typical teacher-student relationship in which the teacher is the hierarchal leader. A culturally appropriate relationship focuses on developing a learner-learner relationship. It is teachers’ responsibility to recognize they are learning from their students as well. Teachers learn which strategies best meet students’ needs, how to effectively communicate with students, and how to ensure mutual listening regarding the content area. When teachers understand students, they will know what strategies they can use to meet students’ needs as learners and deliberately and intentionally teach based on students’ interests, goals, needs, and culture.
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Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students gender, class, sexuality or immigrant status. What’s often missing is how some people are subject to all of these, and the experience is not just the sum of its parts. (as cited in Steinmetz, 2020)
How does intersectionality affect classroom dynamics then? It affirms that the intersections of a person’s identities impact how others perceive, understand, and treat him, her, or them. Teachers can use intersectionality as a lens through which to ensure affirmation, advocacy, and agency. For educators, intersectionality should not just be a concept that alters their thinking or perceptions but also requires them to change their interactions with students to ensure equity and justice. We discuss intersectionality in more detail in chapter 7 (page 127).
What does it look like to cultivate relationships with students through this lens? It means recognizing that students are not empty vessels. They have various identities that influence how they perceive the world, how they interact with others, and how others perceive and interact with them. It means recognizing that diverse students learn in many different ways, bring a variety of gifts and skills to the classroom, and have unique pathways to optimized learning. With an empowered and enlightened knowledge of their students, teachers become empathetic classroom facilitators who allow students to engage in various content, processes, and products in the classroom to improve learning. Let’s take a closer look at each of these. • Using various content might look like offering oral and visual supports as well as opportunities for enrichment and remediation. • Using various processes might entail suggesting notetaking, collaborative and buddy work, student-led presentations, and independent practice. • Using various products might mean allowing students multiple ways to demonstrate learning, such as project-based products, multiple-choice assessments, extended writing, presentations, technological activities, and illustrative products. When teachers design various tasks across content, processes, and products, they honor the diversity of their students and empower them to take ownership of their learning. Figure 1.1 illustrates the culturally appropriate practices of building relationships; designing empowering tasks; understanding and practicing intersectionality; and creating and using diverse and inclusive content, processes, and products in the learning environments (Crenshaw, 1989; Howard, 2019).
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Culturally Appropriate Relationships
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Build relationships.
Culturally
Appropriate Practices
Design empowering tasks.
Understand and practice intersectionality.
FIGURE 1.1: Elements of culturally appropriate practices.
When teachers know who their students are, they are empowered to interact in ways that honor students’ identities, cultural backgrounds, and interests. Culturally appropriate educator-student interactions will include a variety of empowering tasks such as telling stories, collaborating, empathizing with multiple perspectives, and empowering students to share their thoughts and experiences as their various identities inform them. The following list suggests six activities teachers can incorporate into the classroom as they seek to build culturally appropriate relationships with students. 1. Spend time in reflection: Consider your school and classroom demographics. 2. Create an open-ended interest survey about movies, music, books, technology, and so on: Provide opportunities for students to illustrate their answer. Allow them to share with other classmates—this affords you the opportunity to notice trends. 3. Read from authors at diverse intersections: Consider diversity of race, culture, religion, ability, and ethnicity—to name a few—when choosing works. 4. Engage students in their learning: Ask students, “How do you learn best?” “What do you want to learn about?” and “How can I help you understand this?”
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Create and use diverse and inclusive content, processes, and products in the learning environment.
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5. Incorporate text-based discussions among students: Ask open-ended questions and encourage students to refer back to the text as they answer (Socratic seminar). 6. Research social media, and use its techniques to facilitate learning: Social media provides information in small increments of time, capitalizing on users’ short attention span. Find creative ways to condense information into thirty-second to two-minute intervals to improve student learning.
The Need for Personal Reflection Teachers must understand their own cultural lens by identifying their cultural references. They must question their surface, shallow, and deep cultural values of communication, schooling, motivation, and effort. And they must ask how they want their students to exhibit those behaviors (Gay, 2018; Hammond, 2015; Howard, 2019). To do this, it is important that educators question their own histories, biases, and interactions with diverse people. Paying attention to our thoughts and behaviors when we encounter our privilege or biases influences how we communicate with our students. Our interactions with our friends, acquaintances, and even opponents can offer us a window into the dynamics we create with students. Creating spaces for alternative explanations, understanding and addressing their assumptions and reactions, and using technological advancements to their advantages, teachers can widen their interpretation of students’ behaviors, communicative techniques, and learning expectations (Hammond, 2015). I saw an example of this as I observed another teacher. Her approach was a simple yet powerful one: she allowed students time to talk. Each class started with a period of five minutes when students could just be—they could talk, play games on their phone, and ask random questions. She stated that this was her teambuilding activity: five minutes at the start of each class to promote family, to communicate, to share experiences. Observing this practice later in the year, I noticed the teacher had extended the time to ten minutes. However, students weren’t just playing games or talking about last night’s basketball game. They were talking about the previous assignment, helping one another solve problems, asking clarifying questions, and making up missing work. When this teacher created an environment that nourished community, it branched into a learning community.
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Pause to reflect on your response to this list. What thoughts and feelings do you notice? It is natural for teachers to experience strong feelings as they strive to adopt culturally appropriate practices to better understand their students and provide for their diverse learning needs. Committing to a practice of deep personal reflection can support teachers in examining these feelings, understanding the dynamics that give rise to them, and making conscious choices about how to respond.
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When I asked the teacher how she was able to create this learning environment, she said her goal was to make students feel comfortable in the class. She prioritized getting to know her students and allowing brain breaks to encourage student well-being. She also addressed her bias as a teacher—in this case, questioning the effectiveness of students always being on the go. Students were expected to have bell-to-bell instruction (with the exception of a thirty-minute lunch break). She realized this thinking did not consider the perspective of students who cannot take elective courses due to not passing state exams. Those students were exhausted and needed opportunities to just exist, to just breathe. Offering students this space allowed them to focus on self-management and work toward meeting attainable goals once she removed the high-stakes mentality.
TABLE 1.1: Engaging in Personal Reflection Focus Intent
Purpose
Sample Questions
Builds stamina and courage to
Sample questions include:
begin the work of becoming
Why do I want to learn more
culturally relevant, responsive,
about my students’ and
sustaining educators
others’ cultures? What is the purpose of my learning?
Biases
Addresses implicit biases
Sample questions include:
that impact our students’
What are my surface,
cognitive, cultural,
shallow, and deep cultural
psychological, ethical, and
values? How do my
emotional development
cultural values shape my interactions and expectations with my students? What perspectives am I missing, and which may I be devaluing? What do I see? How do I interpret what I see? How can I view this from different perspectives? What are the outcomes? continued
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When you take time for reflection, what surprising observations come up for you? What student needs do you notice? What creative avenues do you recognize for connecting with your students and offering them space? Table 1.1 illustrates how teachers can reflect on their intent, biases, emotional self-management, and action plan.
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Focus
Purpose
Sample Questions
Emotional self-management
Ensures that we do not let our
Sample questions include:
emotions lead our behavior
What are my triggers
nor infect our students with
(someone standing next to me
our emotions
while I’m sitting, discussing racial differences)? What makes me defensive? How do I respond to these triggers? What am I trying to control?
Action plan
Sample questions include:
solving to prevent becoming
What strategies can I use
emotionally unstable from
to ensure I am an equitable
fear, anger, hurt, or anxiety
and social justice–driven teacher? How will I diffuse toxic or threatening situations, especially the ones I create?
Engaging in self-reflection prompts us as teachers to question our actions. It encourages us to have honest discussions with ourselves about our intent, actions, behaviors, and biases. With honest personal reflection, teachers can begin to transform their practices away from the educational status quo and toward culturally appropriate pedagogies.
Understanding Appropriateness Versus Appropriation It’s important here to discuss the difference between striving for cultural appropriateness versus veering into cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the adoption of another’s cultural norms and elements to exploit that culture’s identity for one’s own gain (Matthes, 2019). And yes, as a teacher, you can become exploitative. For example, a non-Black teacher using hip-hop music and its jargon to get Black students to believe he, she, or they are one of them is exploitative. It is exploitative for a teacher to wear a sari and a bindi to demonstrate to Indian students that he, she, or they are embracing their culture and preparing them for the next book by an Indian author. Notice the teacher’s motive in each example: it is self-focused. Culturally relevant pedagogy is concerned with empowering students. How can teachers disrupt cultural appropriation? They must commit to a continuous practice of self-reflection. They must uproot the exploitative impulse to reach their students. This is why it is necessary to create a positive and affirming classroom environment in which students can lead discussions related to their own cultural values. Teachers can create
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Ensures effective problem
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assignments that allow students the freedom of discussion, inquiry, and interpretation without taking on a role that would be inappropriate to the classroom environment. For example, ask students to engage in a music review. Instruct them to pick a song, follow your instructions, and interpret the music. Students can then work in collaborative groups and share their interpretations with the class. Students are in charge of the conversations while the teacher facilitates to ensure respect and dignity. This strategy is just one way to commit to empowering students to share their own culture and histories. How could you modify this assignment for your class or use the basic principle to create your own?
Adopting Culturally Relevant Pedagogy For teachers striving to create an equitable environment for all students, culturally relevant pedagogy offers a helpful framework. This framework, which Gloria Ladson-Billings introduced in the 1990s, proposes three main components: (1) academic excellence, (2) cultural competence, and (3) critical social consciousness (California Department of Education, 2020a). Academic excellence is the demonstration of mastery of standards and skills that relate to scholastic activities. Cultural competence allows students to build cultural intrapersonal and interpersonal awareness while cultivating collaboration. Critical social consciousness allows students to work toward developing a justice-driven society to alleviate the harm that social, systemic barriers have created. Let’s take a closer look at what culturally relevant pedagogy aims to achieve and how it works in practice. The goal of culturally relevant pedagogy is more than just increased student engagement and achievement; it envisions the combined academic, social, sociopolitical, and cultural successes of students across various intersectional identifications (Byrd, 2016; Howard, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2000, 2006). It moves beyond the status quo of passing district- or state-based high-stakes assessments; it dares to envision an educational system where students are empowered to fulfill some of their wildest dreams. Culturally relevant pedagogy calls educators to see students as more than test scores, to look at how we can holistically improve their future. By creating a classroom focused on addressing intersectional relationships that build on the social, sociopolitical, cultural, and academic success of students, teachers are not just creating great test-takers, they are nurturing and
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Finally, teachers must understand that they cannot be culturally neutral (Gay, 2018; Ginsberg & Glenn, 2019). Subconsciously, we evoke our culture in how we think, what we say, how we communicate, what we believe, how we behave, and most significantly how we interact with our students (García & Ortiz, 2013; Gay, 2018; Howard, 2019). Teachers often act with the best of intentions. However, good intentions do not always translate to positive, healthy, nurturing, and safe implementation, especially when teachers view students through a sympathetic or deficient lens. Remember that cultural pedagogy calls teachers to move from deficit thinking to asset thinking.
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providing empowering avenues for students to grow into their fullest, brightest, best, and most empathetic person.
Educators should:
Affirm and celebrate who students are
Allow students to choose songs for their work time
Demonstrate that you are not policing their choices
Connect learning to what students know
Use hairstyles—parting, cutting, shaping, and braiding—to teach mathematics
Demonstrate that skills taught in school are relevant
Legitimize students’ real-life experiences
Ask students to compare readings to their experiences
Demonstrate that you value student voices
Encourage students to question and search for answers
Teach students to interact with the internet to promote individualized learning
Demonstrate how to evaluate information
Maintain high expectations for all students
Provide students with multiple opportunities for success
Demonstrate that all students can learn
Progress toward cultural excellence to fight against mediocre status quo
Provide various diverse opportunities to demonstrate success
Source: Adapted from Ladson-Billings, 2009. FIGURE 1.2: Culturally relevant classroom strategies.
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Tenets of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Classroom Strategies
Culturally relevant pedagogy allows the teacher to create and establish various manifestations of different cultures within the framework students prefer to learn. This means that students will be leaders in their education with a focus on understanding their own cultures and the cultures of others through collaborative frameworks. Once teachers establish students as leaders of their learning, inquiry will lead toward justice-driven, solutions-based problem-solving projects. Culturally relevant pedagogy requires teachers to hold high expectations, prioritize real-life experiences, and affirm students’ authentic selves. What does this look like in practice? Figure 1.2 illustrates classroom strategies derived from Ladson-Billings’s (2009) tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy.
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Now that you know what culturally relevant pedagogy is, how it aims to support students, and how it informs classroom strategies, let’s explore how teachers may incorporate it into their work. One strategy I’ve found success with is allowing students to map their journey across standards and skills. Students use weekly learning logs to note their strengths and weaknesses. They write about what they’re learning, what they like or dislike, and what is helpful or not helpful in mastering the material. Additionally, students record pre- and post-test scores from multiple-choice assessments to document their growth across standards. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods of student evaluation is necessary. It provides students with the opportunity to visualize their growth and engage in metacognition as they discuss what works for them to achieve success.
This is challenging work, and it takes time, dedication, and courage! The culturally relevant teacher must recognize and embrace opportunities to critique the system to become an agent of change instead of defending and perpetuating the status quo. Teachers become cultural organizers who understand how culture translates into the classroom environment and create opportunities to hear, embrace, and incorporate students’ voices in lessons and assessments (Gay, 2018). The teacher is responsible for establishing and maintaining a tone and environment of safety and affirmation. How do teachers do this? One essential way is by adjusting the curriculum to reflect students’ diverse identities. Multicultural education provides a helpful avenue for achieving this, as it seeks to “ensure educational equity for members of diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic groups, and to facilitate their participation as critical and reflective citizens in an inclusive national civic culture” (Education Encyclopedia, n.d.). James A. Banks (1999), the father of multicultural education, identifies four approaches to multicultural curriculum reform: (1) contribution, (2) additive, (3) transformation, and (4) action. Teachers may begin with Bloom’s (1956) taxonomy, a familiar starting point, and develop their curriculum through the multicultural lens. Professor, consultant, author, and advocate Donna Y. Ford (2011b) created the Ford-Harris/Bloom-Banks Matrix for this purpose. Visit www.drdonnayford.com/resources-galleryPageFigure to view
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As you become adept at helping students take ownership of their learning individually, you can expand your efforts to guiding students to think collectively. There are three dimensions teachers must explore when implementing and creating a culturally relevant classroom: (1) an understanding of perceptions of self and others, (2) use of diverse classroom structural interactions, and (3) the perception of knowledge as “recreated, recycled, and shared” (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. 340). When teachers see knowledge as the sharing of information, they understand that students come to them with a knowledge base of their own and the goal is to use a sociopolitical framework to assist them in understanding, articulating, and transforming the contrasts of injustices on others (Ladson-Billings, 2014).
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the matrix and download a blank version to guide you in designing curriculum that is both rigorous and culturally relevant. Culturally relevant pedagogies promote a foundation for students to acknowledge their own strengths to become independent learners, feel included and represented in the classroom, and grow into strong learners and leaders.
Adopting Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Culturally responsive pedagogy is an asset-oriented pedagogy. It suggests that students’ identities, skills, and values create unique opportunities for them to flourish rather than barriers to conforming them to the status quo. The Educators Team at Understood (n.d.) explains: [Culturally responsive teaching] connects students’ cultures, languages, and life experiences with what they learn in school. These connections help students access rigorous curriculum and develop higher-level academic skills. . . . Students bring [background] knowledge to the classroom every day. But for students of color, English language learners (ELLs), and other underserved student populations, those assets are often overlooked. When that happens, educators miss the chance to use them to support learning.
To develop and nurture independent students, teachers must demonstrate that what the student knows is important, recognize and respect student experiences, and incorporate the student’s individualized abilities into instructional strategies (Gay, 2018). Teachers must begin to see their students through the lens of asset thinking rather than deficit thinking. Culturally responsive pedagogy allows teachers to see that students and their
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Although culturally responsive pedagogy is similar to culturally relevant pedagogy, it is different in that it is a powerful tool for accelerating student learning with the direct purpose to move students from dependent learners to independent learners (Hammond, 2015). Dependent learners are those students who struggle and then shut down because they do not have the emotional or cognitive skills to tackle difficult tasks. A dependent learner is a student who relies on the teacher to carry the bulk of the cognitive load, is unable to complete a task without scaffolds, waits for the teacher to intervene, and struggles to retain information (Colton & Shahid, 2018). By contrast, an independent learner is one who uses various strategies to complete tasks. The independent learner does not just complete tasks with ease, rather, when they encounter complex and difficult tasks, they figure out how to solve the problem. Let’s take a closer look at what culturally responsive pedagogy aims to do and how it looks in practice.
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families are not to blame or somehow deficient. Instead, it insists that teachers name and hold accountable the harmful systems that continuously damage students through systemic structures rooted in sexism, racism, homophobia, elitism, and ableism. When the teacher celebrates students’ diverse cultures, rather than silence or deem them deficient, students’ daily lives and their education become linked in the classroom. Students should be free to use a variety of forms to express themselves as independent learners rather than remaining dependent learners who must assimilate into the dominant culture before they can demonstrate proficiency (Ladson-Billings, 2009).
As his teacher, you could use the following strategies to nurture Chris as an independent learner. • Ask Chris to write or record one of his narratives. • Use the transcribed or written narrative as an opportunity to teach a new skill or reinforce skills. –
Analyze the impact of the author’s choices when introducing Character A versus Character B. Explain what the author wants the audience to feel toward each character. How does this impact the central idea of the text?
–
Determine the meaning of author use this word instead of using this word rather than tone of the text?
. Why would the ? How does transform the
Not only have you provided Chris with attention but you have also demonstrated that his knowledge, experiences, and learning are valuable to you. He feels appreciated, heard, and empowered to connect the standards-based instruction to his experiences. This also illustrates to other students that they can bring their full selves into the classroom without being stigmatized or ostracized by educators. Empowered students are accountable students. Creating a classroom and school environment of awareness, trust, and learning partnerships requires that teachers mind their interactions with students in the way they act, look, and speak to them. Hammond (2015) shows that the brain has negativity bias and will remember and respond to “negative experiences up to three times more than positive experiences” (p. 113) that respond to not just explicit biases, but implicit biases and microaggressions (statements or actions that intentionally or unintentionally communicate
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Let us take Chris for example. Chris is a Black sixteen-year-old student in eleventh grade and a struggling reader. Chris refuses to read anything you give him and is always talking about unrelated activities that happen at school, at home, or in the community. He enjoys Marvel movies and other action-packed films. Chris thrives when he is the center of attention, and when you ask for his attention, he causes a scene. What is Chris’s asset? He has a strong ability to tell an engaging and captivating story.
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hostile or negative attitudes). Negative interactions with students create a culture counterproductive of learning. Students should feel as if they belong to an academic community that values them, one where they can succeed and grow (Dweck, 2016; Hammond, 2015). Teachers should strive for holistic educational aims to: • Create an environment in which every student is understood • Respect students’ individualized identities • Provide students with skills to deepen their learning • Celebrate students’ successes
TABLE 1.2: Principles of Learning Principle Similarity
Characteristic
Classroom Application
Sees that student knowledge is best
Discover what students are
for introducing new information
interested in. Learn about their experiences. Use music; grocery shopping experiences; journaling; quotes; photographs, memes, and artwork; sports; and other interests to connect to their lived experience.
Efficacy
Uses previous successes to create
Provide diverse opportunities
more successes (This demonstrates
for students to meet high
to students they are capable of
expectations: collaborative tasks,
achieving goals and provides
dialogue, creative tasks, and
them with motivation, scaffolds,
graphic organizers.
and strategies to engage in challenging tasks.)
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Professor of education Geneva Gay (2018) determines that scaffolding, contextualizing, and bridging information in a culturally responsive classroom addresses several principles of learning (see table 1.2). These principles of learning assist in creating and nurturing relationships with students to garner understanding, meet their needs, and promote independent and collaborative learning. The use of these principles also assists in cultivating knowledge and ensuring information is accessible to all students with a focus on challenging students to high expectations, diverse information, and inquiry. When interpreting the principles of learning, teachers should understand the role of differentiation in making modifications, changes, and alterations.
Becoming Culturally Competent
Congruity
Ensures new knowledge is
Use diverse opportunities to
maintained when connected to
reinforce a skill: fiction, nonfiction,
various frames of reference
storytelling, illustration, poetry,
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dance, and music. Familiarity
Reduces the threat students may feel
Teach students how to chunk
when they encounter new material
information into smaller pieces, talk to the text (questions, underlining, or symbols), and engage in multiple interactions with the text.
Transactionalism
Teach students metacognitive
students to feel empowered and
strategies and practice them
become independent learners
regularly: previewing; identifying purpose; paragraphing; using graphic organizers, outlines, flashcards; taking notes; teaching the material to an imagined audience; working collaboratively; creating practice exams.
Cognitive mapping
Maximizes student learning through
Use a standards-based graphic
the organization of information
organizer: three-column charts, story map, or spider map.
Confidence
Provides students with competent
Allow students to talk through
support systems to ensure learning
difficulties, use tiered questioning to solicit stronger answers, and gather specific feedback.
Holistic
education
Looks at school achievement as
Determine student motivation
representing cognitive, cultural,
or goal. Ask students how they
psychological, ethical, and
would like to improve each of the
emotional developments
categories to achieve that goal. Create a rubric that monitors and assesses personalized growth.
Scaffolding
Incorporates knowledge students
Ask students to engage in their
gain outside school as assets to
own inquiry-based projects; allow
learning in school
students to create products to demonstrate learning.
As teachers adopt culturally responsive pedagogy, students become empowered toward justice, equity, and rapport. Next, let’s look at how another cultural pedagogy, culturally sustaining pedagogy, pushes this work one step further.
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Creates learning structures for
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Adopting Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy Though creating an equitable classroom begins with cultural competence, it doesn’t end there. Justice-driven pedagogy calls educators to transcend competence, appropriateness, relevance, and responsiveness—ultimately, to strive for culturally sustaining teaching. The California Department of Education (2020b) describes culturally sustaining pedagogy as follows:
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy promotes equality across racial and ethnic communities and seeks to ensure access and opportunity. Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy also supports students to critique and question dominant power structures in societies.
Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to extend culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies by ensuring that students’ cultures are sustained and further developed in the classroom environment to strengthen generational ties to all forms of culture across race, ability, ethnicities, gender, sexuality, and age (Alim & Paris, 2017; Paris, 2012; Waitoller & Thorius, 2016). When Django Paris (2012), professor of multicultural education at the University of Washington, introduced the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy, the emphasis was on sustaining multilingualism and multiculturalism that discussed both in-culture and transcultural practices. With multilingual and multicultural practices, students learn and use varied languages and various aspects within their cultures to engage in learning. Through the sustaining of multiple languages and cultures in the classroom, students create relationships with those similar to their languages and cultures, while engaging in transcultural sharing in which they learn about diverse cultures in respectful and collaborative ways. The origins of this theory also stress the importance of viewing culture as dynamic, always changing to meet the population’s needs within that culture (Paris, 2012). For educators, this means seeing students as purveyors of information who educate others as well as receive education.
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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds on decades of asset-based pedagogical research including Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings) and Culturally Responsive (Gay and Hammond). . . . [It] affirms and respects the key components of the Asset-Based Pedagogies that preceded it, but also takes them to the next level. Instead of just accepting or affirming the backgrounds of students of color as seen in Culturally Relevant Pedagogy; or connecting to students’ cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and frames of reference as we see in Culturally Responsive Pedagogy; Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy views schools as places where the cultural ways of being in communities of color are sustained, rather than eradicated.
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Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to dismantle teaching methods that seem to render students incapable by providing students with a sociopolitical platform to lead the charge against their oppression (Alim & Paris, 2017). To begin engaging in a culturally sustaining pedagogical approach, teachers must ask what they are attempting to sustain (Alim & Paris, 2017). They should look to this question to guide their curriculum choices, instructional strategies, and assessment development. By using this question as a guide, teachers can see their biases, check them, and work toward removing them, not just from their classroom but their interactions outside the classroom as well.
Educators embody one of the most important roles in society by preparing students to become active, knowledgeable, and successful world citizens. As teachers, we are responsible for ensuring our students engage, understand, synthesize, and utilize the information and strategies we give them as we transform standards from abstract ideas to accessible and concrete concepts. Students are in the educational system for a minimum of thirteen years with over thirty-thousand hours of instructional time. A first step teachers can take toward transformative education is to pursue satisfaction, enjoyment, and purpose in their career (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Miller, Ramirez, & Murdock, 2017). Teachers seem to be at the lowest end of the educated employment sector spectrum. They receive lower pay than most educated workers and receive blame from parents, districts, states, and politicians for many of the ails in our world: lack of employment, low salary, poor reading and mathematics skills, and others (Borrero, Ziauddin, & Ahn, 2018). While educators do not always receive the esteem that they deserve, they are the leaders in our world. As teachers, we create future leaders, entertainers, activists, and business owners, among others. And it’s our responsibility to ensure that they become empathetic, creative, problem-solving, and nurturing global citizens.
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Let’s consider an imaginary classroom with twenty-three students. Twelve students are considered English learners because English is not their first language. The various languages represented in the class are Haitian Creole, Spanish, Vietnamese, and English. In a typical status quo classroom, students must use English because the high-stakes standardized test is in English. There is no transcultural sharing, there is no sustaining of diverse culture and language. In the culturally sustaining classroom, the teacher promotes the use of native languages by allowing students to read books in their native language, record presentations in their native languages (providing the recording for transcription), and work with peers of similar culture and language. In the culturally sustaining classroom, students work in collaborative groups of diverse cultures and languages to create assignments that foster transcultural sharing. These assignments might include music, play, storytelling, familial traditions, and project-based learning that seeks to solve global real-world issues.
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Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students
REFLECTION QUESTIONS Consider the following questions independently or with your collaborative teams. What responses came up for me as I read about culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies?
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What are my first steps as an educator to prepare for implementation?
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What challenges do I face in adopting culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining pedagogies?
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
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EQUITABLE Inclusive and INSTRUCTION, Culturally EMPOWERED Competent Classrooms STUDENTS A Teacher’s Guide to
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