Sources on Culturally Responsive Curriculum
This source looks at different aspects of diversity, the benefits for practicing diversity through social connections, and how people can learn to cultivate diversity. This source lends itself to the discussion for why creating curriculum that covers diverse people and acknowledging diversity in our teaching is becoming increasingly important practices.
With roots of public education stemming from the Enlightenment, and the need to further enrich education and make it more culturally relevant, made necessary through globalization, the article’s thesis focuses on the need “to assess the success of public education in terms of the extent to which it prepares people to understand the world, and to improve it”.
This source challenges educators to take a critical look into the forms of bias that are present in instructional materials. Once educators have detected biases in the curriculum, they become more equipped to provide a more thorough and factual instruction. Furthermore, questioning bias becomes an approach to learning that should be taught in the classroom as well.
As the movement for a more inclusive or diverse curriculum that also confronts social issues is gaining increased attention, there are concerns about certain curricula programs that are, perhaps, going too far. Some critics of this curriculum cite issues of bias and concerns over whether the materials are “unapologetically activist -- and jargony”. Another issue confronted in the article, which has sparked increased debate in California, is which “groups” and whose “histories” should be included. Finally, in diverse settings, is this curriculum the answer to get less involved students, who may be from different backgrounds, more engaged in the classroom?
This source starts by questioning the lack of presence of Latin America in World History curriculum, even though the region is comprised of ten percent of the world’s population. Furthermore, when covered, Latin America is only looked at through the lens of the region’s experience with the West, or “when the history is one of failure or collapse.” To support their argument of this region’s absence from historical content, the authors reference that practices of social democracy and liberal multiculturalism, which became widespread and during the New Deal era, actually emanated from Latin America in the early 1900s. New scholarship looks at leaders of the Cuban Revolution as less of an “anti-colonial insurgency” and instead looks at the “dynamic attempts” by Castro and Guavera to “maintain and expand existing notions of social democracy from attempts by outsiders to reshape it along neoliberal lines.” The rest of the source covers the efforts of Social Studies teachers, armed with new scholarship, to improve the teaching of recent Latin American History.
Similar to Sadker’s piece on questioning bias in instructional materials, this source emphasizes the importance of critiquing images and messages that are conveyed to younger students through children’s literature, and other media in elementary school classrooms. It is now the responsibility of elementary school teachers to consider not only the stories they tell, but also who is responsible for the story, and who is being left out, and how this lack of involvement in the story does not accurately “represent a reality of those groups’ lived experiences.”