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What is culturally responsive teaching?



On their blog Cult of Pedagogy, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews and records the discussion with Zaretta Hammond about the true meaning of culturally responsive teaching. The article has made me reflect on my own emerging practices in culturally responsive teaching: an approach that ensures that ALL demographics within your classroom accomplish academic growth and achievement.

Read the complete article here

The article explains, "Culturally Responsive Teaching 'is about building the learning capacity of the individual student,' Hammond says. 'There is a focus on leveraging the affective and the cognitive scaffolding that students bring with them.' The simplest way to judge whether your teaching is culturally responsive is whether your diverse students—students of color, English language learners, immigrant students—are learning. If they are not succeeding academically within your classroom norms, your approach might need to be more culturally responsive" (Gonzalez & Hammond, 2017).

Therefore, culturally responsive teaching is our ability (the educators) to notice the strengths of each individual student and leverage those strengths to achieve academic growth/performance.

The article continues to explains various misconceptions that many of us might have about culturally responsive teaching.

"MISCONCEPTION 1: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IS THE SAME AS MULTICULTURAL OR SOCIAL JUSTICE EDUCATION." (2017)

Multicultural teaching includes perspectives and products about a variety of cultures, Social Justice teaching provides an emphasis on power, inequity, and pathways to advocate for change. Culturally responsive teaching discovers the unique abilities of each student and ensures instruction, curriculum, and assessment that equitably supports all student learning and achievement.

"MISCONCEPTION 2: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING MUST START WITH ADDRESSING IMPLICIT BIAS." (2017)

Although understanding and deconstructing our own biases is important, our work must focus primarily on the academic growth and achievement of all students. Student growth, equitable among all demographics, is the first and last goal.

"MISCONCEPTION 3: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IS ALL ABOUT BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS AND SELF-ESTEEM." (2017)

Culturally responsive teachers develop close relationships with all students to facilitate their SEL development and self-esteem support, which is important for school/community climate and culture. Additionally, it provides the foundation of a relationship where educators can challenge a student while being sensitive to their unique struggles. However, SEL and self esteem is not the end goal, but rather equitable student growth across all demographics.
 

"MISCONCEPTION 4: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING IS ABOUT CHOOSING THE RIGHT STRATEGIES." (2017)

There is no easy "plug and play" solution nor any singular proven approach. Rather, culturally responsive teaching often looks like good teaching that might not even includes major cultural elements. Rather, again, the focus is on developing curriculum, instruction, and assessment that facilitates academic growth/achievement for ALL students.

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