Reflective Questions

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally responsive teaching also provides a lens on how we chart the course. The sixth principle of culturally responsive teaching is reshaping the curriculum (Ladson-Billings, 1994, 2021). The imperative of curricular work is well articulated by professor emerita of language, literacy, and culture Sonia Nieto (1996), who asserts that educators must:

Take a serious look at their curriculum, pedagogy, retention and tracking policies, testing, hiring practices, and all the other policies and practices that create a school climate that is either empowering or disempowering for those who work and learn there.

Nieto (1996) proposes that educators must look critically at their curriculum to ensure that all students see themselves in it and that it supports every student, expanding how they make meaning, build understanding, and develop as learners. On the landscape, this looks like paying attention to the cultures that students bring with them, how those cultures interact, and how they may provide context for learning. A specific example is the idea of seasons as taught in the Common Core standards. Winter, spring, summer, and fall are important concepts that simply don’t exist as presented in the standards in certain places close to the equator, and therefore the concepts don’t exist in certain cultures (NGSS, n.d.). A culturally responsive version of this standard might look like exploring what role latitude plays in the Hawaiian language having one word for a hot dry season, and another word for a cool wet season, and using this as a starting point to explore seasons in science.

These three elements make up the landscape model. Together, they provide a framework from which we can explore and share strategies that are concrete, tangible, and effective. The authors believe that this deceptively simple reimagining of education, from the racetrack to the landscape, will allow educators to think very differently about education, to see students more fully as individuals, and to see learning as a journey from where students are to where their talents, passions, and real experiences might take them, toward a horizon they’ve been involved in defining, on a pathway they own as the central protagonists of their learning journeys.

Reflective Questions

Respond to the following questions alone or with your school team. • How are you already finding ways to get to know your students’ broader contexts and understand what they bring into the learning ecosystem with them? What strategies have worked, and how might you learn