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Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students
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.
