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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
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
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.
