Culturally Responsive Teaching

This Brown University website addresses the different principles of culturally responsive pedagogy. Different characteristics of culturally responsive teaching include positive perspectives on parents and families, communication of high expectations, learning within the context of culture, student-centered instruction, culturally mediated instruction, reshaping the curriculum, and teacher as facilitator.

This site contains various lists for culturally relevant teaching strategies in the following areas: Preconditions for culturally relevant teaching, culturally relevant teacher characteristics, and culturally relevant teaching strategies.

Do not be fooled by this website! It’s not a place to order coffee. It is, however, a site that offers information about strategies and curriculum for enhancing culturally relevant teaching and curriculum in the area of English Language Arts.

After unwrapping myths about multicultural education, such as the idea that it is for other cultures, that it goes against western tradition, and that it will “divide the nation”, this article goes on to explain how multicultural education has made progress, and the various dimensions of multicultural education, which include content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture.

In this podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez interviews Zaretta Hammond, author of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain (2015). After explaining common misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching, Hammond goes onto emphasize that culturally responsive teaching is about learning, and thus instruction is at the core. The central question in assessing how culturally responsive one’s teaching is centers around how effectively the teacher can learn about how students are processing information so that learning can be leveraged.

In this educational podcast, Dr. Chris Plum interviews George Tomey, an educator, leader, and social worker with 50 years of experience, about the impact culturally responsive teaching can have on moving students from dependent to independent learners. Expanding on the work of Zaretta Hammond, Tomey takes it one step further, acknowledging the role that Hammond’s “misconceptions” play in becoming a more culturally responsive teacher.