Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

The WHY and the 3 Tenets

Why?

At the most basic level, culturally relevant pedagogy and culturally responsive teaching are important for student learning because of how the brain processes information and how the brain learns. Specifically:

Culture influences how our brains process information. Educators can create academic routines that favor the two most common cultural archetypes to support information processing.
Culture influences our background knowledge. Educators can make learning more meaningful, engaging, and relevant by carefully planning the context of new learning.
Culture influences how our brains perceive safety and threats. By getting to know students and what influences their connection to adults, educators can maximize relationships with all students to improve learning.

Culturally relevant pedagogy helps create environments, curricula, and instructional methods that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, and experiences of all students. Teachers who use culturally responsive teaching apply interactive, collaborative teaching methods, strategies, and ways of interacting that support students’ cultural, linguistic, and racial experiences and integrate the methods with evidence-based practices.

Getting started: The following might serve as a learning trajectory. This trajectory provides tools and is sequenced to build on learning while ensuring understanding of the WHY, HOW, and WHAT.

Use the Courageous Conversations Framework to support discussions.
Look to the end! Read this page to become familiar with Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and related terms.
Review Hammond’s Ready for Rigor Framework. While these quadrants act in unison, start with- and continually return to - Awareness, which is critical to the success of a culturally responsive practitioner (see Chapters 1-4 in Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain). Here is a Book Study guide to support teams.

Ensure a shared understanding of Culture, Cultural Identity and Cultural Archetypes.
Make connections to how the brain learns: Review how culture programs the brain. (See also brain basics and brain processes information, memory and retention).
Understand culturally responsive teaching as a primary component of Tier I instruction by making Connections to SRBI.
Ensure you are using working definitions of race and ethnicity.
Review Essential Vocabulary to ensure understanding as a foundation.

Use the Ready for Rigor Framework resources (first sub-page in this section) to ground on-going research and exploration of strategies.
Navigate the other sub-pages in this section to further consider implications for practice:

Resources for Culturally Responsive and Sustaining Practices

Culturally responsive classroom management

Curriculum and Instruction through a culturally responsive lens

Practices and policies that support equitable literacy education

Culturally responsive read aloud and identity work

Supporting multilingual learners through culturally relevant pedagogy

WHAT: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Culturally Responsive Teaching

There are a variety of terms associated with cultural responsiveness. Consider the distinction between these terms:

Pedagogy: Formed by a set of beliefs, pedagogy refers to the method of how teachers teach, in theory and in practice (the art and science). It is the entire study of how we teach.
Teaching is the implementation part of the pedagogical process.

(see Teaching VS Pedagogy by Muhammed Ayinla)

In order to implement culturally responsive teaching, one must understand the pedagogy from which it stems.

"For decades, researchers have found that teachers in public schools have undervalued the potential for academic success among students of color, setting low expectations for them and thinking of cultural differences as barriers rather than assets to learning.

In response, scholars developed teaching methods and practices—broadly known as asset-based pedagogies—that incorporate students’ cultural identities and lived experiences into the classroom as tools for effective instruction. The terms for these approaches to teaching vary, from culturally responsive teaching and culturally sustaining pedagogy to the more foundational culturally relevant pedagogy. Though each term has its own components defined by different researchers over time, all these approaches to teaching center the knowledge of traditionally marginalized communities in classroom instruction. As a result, all students, and in particular students of color, are empowered to become lifelong learners and critical thinkers.

Culturally responsive teaching stems from the framework of culturally relevant pedagogy, which was introduced by scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings in the 1990s.

Culturally responsive teaching means using students’ customs, characteristics, experience, and perspectives as tools for better classroom instruction." (What is Culturally Responsive Teaching by Madeline Will & Ileana Najarro)

Tenets of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Academic Success: Focus on student learning and students' intellectual growth
Cultural Competence: Skills that support students to affirm and appreciate their culture of origin while being mindful of access to mainstream culture
Sociopolitical Consciousness: Improve students' ability to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems, especially those that result in inequities

How to Practice Culturally Relevant Pedagogy This article from Teach for America provides an overview of CRP and the 3 tenets.

Border Crossing

Key to Success - Mindset!

"Academic achievement, the first pillar, acknowledges that the primary function of a teacher’s role is to cultivate the minds of their students. Culturally relevant teachers hold high and transparent academic expectations and meet students where they are. They know the content, they know the learner, and they know how to teach the content to the learner. They think deeply about what they teach, why they are teaching it, and how they are going to teach it based on who their students are as people and as learners." (Barbara Escudero, 2019 - How to Practice Culturally Relevant Pedagogy)

In order to focus on adult actions that result in academic success for all students, it is important to focus on asset-based thinking. Alternatively, Deficit Thinking is a ubiquitous and harmful mindset that views individuals outside the “norm” as being individually responsible for any perceived shortcomings.

“Deficit thinking ignores students' cultural strengths, diminishes the value of their lived experiences, and falsely validates negative perceptions of students' families or their communities.” (It's Not a Deficit. And You Don't Need to "Fix" It)

"Cultural competence requires that teachers understand culture and its role in education, that they take responsibility for learning about their students’ culture and community and that they interrogate their own identity, culture, biases, and privilege to critically assess and strengthen their instructional practice. When cultural competence is playing out as it should, the classroom can be described as full of mirrors and windows— students see themselves reflected in the classroom (mirrors) and have opportunities to learn more about and see into the lived experiences of others (windows). The teacher uses their students’ culture as the basis for learning, helps students recognize and honor their own cultural beliefs and practices while accessing and learning about the wider world." (Barbara Escudero, 2019 - How to Practice Culturally Relevant Pedagogy)

In developing cultural competence, is is important to consider Border Crossing, the patterns that exist when students transition between different “worlds” such as the subcultures of their personal lives and school. They use the terms “boundaries and borders [to] refer to the real or perceived lines or barriers between worlds” (Phelan, 1991). See Crossing Borders/Border Crossings by Carrie Kilman

"Sociopolitical consciousness requires that teachers actively educate themselves and their students on the personal and sociopolitical issues that impact their students, their students’ communities, and the world—and, that they incorporate this into their teaching. This also inherently means that teachers encourage students to think about and consistently question why things are the way they are and encourage students to see themselves as agents of social change and transformation. Students are therefore empowered to think and act in ways that challenge the inequitable status quo among people, within communities, and in society at large." (Barbara Escudero, 2019 - How to Practice Culturally Relevant Pedagogy)

Educator Beliefs and Actions: Help or Hinder growth and achievement of diverse students?

Teachers want students to learn, and many make an effort to be particularly responsive to racially and ethnically diverse students. Many of the beliefs we hold and lessons we are taught about racially and ethnically diverse students and how best to facilitate their learning have positive effects. Others, however, while seemingly sensible and well intended, can have negative consequences.

Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) has developed a professional learning tool to help teachers examine commonly held beliefs about racially and ethnically diverse students and the kinds of things we may say in conversations about how to meet the learning needs of all students. Click here to learn more and participate.

Page updated

Report abuse