Seeing Cultural Competence as a Starting Point

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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).

Culturally Appropriate Relationships

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).

Build relationships.

Create and use diverse and inclusive content, processes, and products in the learning environment.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TABLE 1.1: Engaging in Personal Reflection

Intent Focus

Biases Purpose

Builds stamina and courage to begin the work of becoming culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining educators Sample questions include: Why do I want to learn more about my students’ and others’ cultures? What is the purpose of my learning?

Addresses implicit biases that impact our students’ cognitive, cultural, psychological, ethical, and emotional development Sample questions include: What are my surface, shallow, and deep cultural values? How do my 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?

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Sample Questions