Culturally Responsive Teaching

Preparing for Inclusivity and Empowerment in Curriculum and Practice

Internal Reflection & Work:

Previous Coursework:

My first step in preparing for this work was to review the coursework I had previously completed throughout my degree. An important point of reflection was the Cultural Self Study I completed for Effective Practices II. I examined my own role and identity in this assignment, especially in terms of my awareness and reckoning with sexuality and gender identity, as well as the ways these aspects of my own awareness may impact my classroom. This assignment is included below. My takeaways from my self study focus on the intersection of my identity and my power as an educator to impact systemic change at the school level on behalf of my students. While I cannot support LGBTQ+ students through a lens of shared experience, I can do intentional work to make sure these students feel safe and protected within my classroom. My self study and the resources I used also underscored the dynamics between staff, students, and administrators that can place students' wellbeing and comfort at school as an afterthought in order to cater to antiquated viewpoints of parents and community members. This has been a theme at my school throughout the year, particularly in regards to the school's willingness (or lack thereof) to publicly celebrate its LGTBQ+ students and community. This is part of why examining my own biases is a crucial step in ensuring that I am not subconsciously perpetuating the larger issues happening at my school. While my implicit bias tests did not indicate bias against gay or transgender people, it is important to take these results with a grain of salt and not equate this to a "pass" or a confirmed absence of subconscious bias. Combating biases and staying informed on best practices to support groups of students is a continual process that requires daily commitment, which was underscored by my work in my Cultural Self Study.

Implicit Bias Tests:

Next, it was important for me to examine my own implicit biases as a step to understand the function of my classroom and the ways in which I need to be aware and combat those biases. These results were interesting and provided important information for my teaching practice in terms of supporting and understanding all students. You can view my Implicit Bias Test results, reflection, and next steps here.

Creating an Environment of Respect and Understanding through Community and Relationship Building

Exercises that aim to build the community environment of my classroom exist in many different formats. It is crucial that students feel comfortable with one another as peers and classmates on the most basic level so that throughout the year, students can move to deeper and more reflective places with one another. This starts with simple building blocks of relationship building, both between students and myself as the teacher and between students and their classmates. My classes are diverse in terms of language, culture, and race, and expanding my scope of what students believe is appropriate or a cultural display is an important piece of creating a culturally-responsive environment. In order to gain more insight into this and instill principles of restorative justice into student learning, I had my classes complete a number of community and relationship building exercises, listed below.

1. Lokomaika'i Exercise

2. Student Conferences and RTI

3. Co-Constructed Class Norms

4. SEL & Fun Activities!

Planning for CRT in Lesson and Unit Plans:

Included below is previous coursework that demonstrates my advanced planning for culturally responsive practices in my lesson and unit plans.

Word Wall

A place that I pinpointed to make my classroom more inclusive and culturally relevant was our collective understanding of language. Of course, in an ELA class, there is a focus on grammatical conventions and vocabulary, and it can be easy to subconsciously slip into a framework of "proper" English where forms of slang and vernacular are penalized. Beyond this, I am also aware that there are many students in my class who are current English Language Learners or who speak a language other than English at home. I began searching for a collaborative way that could work as a space for students to share about their own cultures and learn from each other alongside our ELA content.

I landed on the creation of two Word Walls: the first focuses on our class vocabulary, and the second is a place for students to share a word or phrase from their culture or life that represents a piece of themselves. My preparation for this exercise involved studying my students and creating clear expectations for the freedom that students had in completing this exercise. I also prepared a lesson on the importance of language and celebrating all languages, not just English, in our classroom. This worked as an instructional strategy within my classroom by introducing students to the home base for vocabulary acquisition throughout the quarter as well as involving the class in reflections about their identities and the importance of celebrating linguistic diversity. This initial step exposed students to new information and content both in terms of the importance of celebrating language and the acquisition and understanding of the word used in my own example and reflection on my identity. This also exposed students to information on the existence and importance of Hawaiian Pidgin as well as other languages, as students were not previously aware of the linguistic diversity in our classroom and what sorts of cultural displays and varieties of learning were deemed acceptable prior to me explicitly creating a norm that the notion of "academic language" should not and will not only encompass English in my classroom. The slides I prepared for this lesson are attached below.

I also knew that students would be nervous to present and would likely need an example to understand the expectations of this assignment. I decided to begin the exercise by sharing my own word, which meant that I needed to think critically about my own identity and how to represent it to my students. I began to reflect on my own upbringing and the words that were spoken in my home. I was raised in a home that spoke only in English, but in the past five years have had a reckoning with the importance that Jewish culture played in my upbringing and identity. Though I do not practice the faith, it took me a long time to come to terms with the ways in which a Jewish identity carries an important cultural component and the ways that having a Jewish last name changed the way others (especially other Jewish people) perceived my own identity. I grew up in rural Vermont and only had three other Jewish peers, so this was not something I was remotely familiar with until I attended the University of Michigan and was suddenly being invited to Hillel events and Shabbat dinners. Upon reflection and many years, I have realized that my father's cultural and Jewish identity shaped who I am. Not only did I develop an appreciation for chicken liver at a young age, but upon doing my own research for the word wall exercise, I realized that so many of the words used in my house actually were not English, but Yiddish. I then started to think critically about the similarities I could draw between Yiddish and Hawaiian Pidgin as forms of creole or vernaculars of ancient languages.

The final step was selecting my word. I wanted to be intentional about the freedom of students to choose any word, and that the word itself did not have to carry some intense or emotional meaning. My final pick was "schmutz," mostly because it is simply impossible for me to read the word without hearing it in my dad's thick New York accent, and also because it reminded me of the many times he used the word in our home. I decided that this was the lesson and example I would give my students, and prepared the following slide to present. This exposed students to new information both regarding my identity and what the Yiddish language is and its symbolic importance for many Jewish people. I was able to scaffold this new information and content for students by drawing a comparison between Yiddish and Hawaiian Pidgin. This also involved information about what the words pidgin and slang mean and examples of each.

Securing Funding for Books

The next CRT layer that I had to prepare for was implementing a more relevant and engaging curriculum. This preparation started in the spring of 2021, as the ELA department presented individual teachers with the option to use the SpringBoard curriculum and textbooks for their class or to create their own curriculum. As a first year teacher at the time, creating my own curriculum was overwhelming and scary, but I had also spent a year teaching my students lessons and texts aligned to the SpringBoard curriculum and had grown deeply displeased with the ideas being presented. Following many conversations with my co-teachers, mentors, and colleagues outside of the ELA department, I decided to design my own curriculum, knowing I had a summer with a heavy workload ahead.

The first unit of our year was personal narratives, and I had my eye on the fact that Trevor Noah's Born a Crime had recently been adapted for young readers. I purchased the young reader's adaptation and decided upon reading it that it was the perfect example for a personal narrative and decided that I would scan copies of the text for my students if I could not secure funding for additional copies of books. Beyond securing the books, I also needed to prepare curriculum aligned both to the elements of personal narratives and developing students' historical and political understandings of apartheid and cultural understandings of racial and ethnic groups in South Africa.

I also knew that our last unit of the year was a non-negotiable unit on Shakespeare. While the SpringBoard curriculum teaches Macbeth, I got verbal approval from the head of the English department to instead teach Twelfth Night. I then sought out modern and/or culturally relevant adaptations to work as instructional tools for the original text. I landed on the film adaptation She's the Man (one of my favorite movies as a middle schooler) and a Manga re-telling of the play with the original language intact but supported by visual aids in a Manga style book. Again, I purchased this book with my own funds with the backup plan in mind that my students could read scans of the text if need be. This was certainly not my preference, as I know the difficulties that reading off of a computer screen can pose for engagement, comprehension, and completion based on the feedback students gave during virtual learning in the 2020-2021 school year. So, I began to research funding opportunities for these texts.

In late July, I was made aware of the following grant opportunity from the Hawai'i Department of Education.

The guidelines to receive funding were the following: submit your project by August 3rd and be explicit about how this project would help your students adapt or adjust to the learning environment following the impacts of COVID-19. Even if you met those guidelines, funding was limited and there was no guarantee that I would receive it. The next step was to create a compelling project and calculate exactly what was feasible with the limits of the funding I was hoping to receive. The final project that I wrote from scratch and submitted for DOE funding is included below.

Executing Inclusivity and Empowerment in Curriculum and Practice

This unit also required an ongoing and daily commitment to scaffolding and explaining questions as they came up regarding South Africa. Daily questions that were addressed in the moment spanned from South Africa specific-content such as "Who is Nelson Mandela?" and the need to explain the meaning of Bantu education policies to relevant vocabulary acquisition such as democratic versus authoritarian or militant. There were also moments during the implementation of this curriculum that I head to tread carefully, such as when a student connected Dutch colonization and the power of Afrikaners to Haoles, a term used to describe white foreigners in Hawai'i or when a parent complained about the discussion of race in school.

That said, this commitment and work led to clear benefits and an impressive amount of student growth. By the end of the unit, students were able to grapple with complex vocabulary and social topics such as oppression and segregation with nearly 80% of students on average across all periods correctly identifying the definition of apartheid on the vocabulary quiz and student responses to homework and field trip prompts making connections and critical realizations, both shown below.

Work on Bias and Character Representations

One of the year-long goals of my 7th grade classroom was to improve students' higher order thinking skills through reflections on bias, history, and representation. For instance, students built from reflections on the importance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the voting age in the United States to reflections on bias in texts and the way that bias can play out in character representations. This represents implementation of culturally informed teaching strategies by focusing on building students' skills and guiding students to reflective and action-oriented positions to take on injustice in their own communities and lives. This work was conducted over the course of the entire school year and required continual attention to detail and use of culturally responsive strategies to scaffold rigorous and complex content and concepts for my students.

Students also completed a great deal of work on bias and character representations throughout the year. The initial exercise students completed on bias involved learning about bias and deciding if a passage written by me was biased or not. This helped students work through the toolkit or framework for finding bias with an author who they were already familiar with and obviously knew details about the author's upbringing. This helped scaffold the exercise for students so that they could focus solely on new vocabulary acquisition. This type of scaffolding works as a culturally responsive strategy by providing students with a familiar aspect of content as they also work through new ideas, such as understanding the personal opinion and experience of the author (me) as they navigate new skills detecting bias. The slides and prompts for this part of the lesson are included below.

Students worked through this question as the toolkit for finding bias was put in the chat of our Google Meet. Students worked synchronously in online journal documents that I had viewing and editing access to. Included below is an example of a student response to this exercise.

After students completed the above work detecting bias in my own writing, I felt that they were ready to move on to a higher-order thinking demand and complete a lesson that asked students to connect author bias to character representation and development in texts. The lesson plan used for this is included below. Culturally responsive practices were used in the planning of this lesson by intentionally scaffolding acquisition of new skills through guided and group practice before students moved onto independent practice and reflection. Students completed a complex journal prompt as their independent practice that asked them to grapple both with new content from the video and connect it to previous content on bias and injustice. I also scaffolded this through individual instruction provided in breakout rooms and via private chat for students who were unsure where to begin.

Students then completed a reflection on character representation and bias in texts. These questions were complex and displayed visually along with the quotes that I pulled for students throughout their journal time on the following slide. Pulling the quotes and displaying them for the students also acted as a scaffold by not placing the time and knowledge demand on students to find the relevant moment in the video when representation and other culturally relevant topics were discussed. This is a clear demonstration in increasing the knowledge demands and higher-order thinking skills as students progressed throughout the year. Students began with reflections on injustice and their own passions, then progressed to detecting bias, and then connected bias to representations of diverse characters and the ways in which historical injustice plays into those representations and authenticity. Included below are student responses to the prompts as well as the visual display that students saw as they worked in their journal documents. The student responses demonstrate a clear increase in students' higher-order thinking skills as students are correctly connecting the importance of descriptive details and character traits to authenticity and representation within texts. Students were also able to explicitly connect their own knowledge of bias to quotes in the video.

Creating Our Word Wall: Lesson

The creation of our word wall was a two lesson process that began with the lesson on the importance of celebrating languages and my example, both of which are included in the above sections. After I presented my word, students completed the following write, turn, and talk. The creation of the word wall and the processes that students underwent for their preparation acted as a culturally responsive instructional strategy for several reasons. First, this exercise exposed students to direct instruction that intentionally combated the notion that pidgin and other forms of creoles or languages other than English have less validity in academic and professional settings. This opened doors for students to understand and display a variety of types of cultural norms and learning strategies. Additionally, this exercise exposed students to resources that they may have not previously used and situated students in an academic understanding of language while also providing the opportunity to celebrate their identities and cultural displays of identity. For instance, many students used Google Translate as a resource, either to translate their word in their first language into English or to further understand the words that their classmates had chosen. This acted as an instructional strategy that both created a classroom community by asking students to listen and learn from one another as they shared pieces of their identities and scaffolded higher-order thinking skills by encouraging students to go beyond understanding the meaning or translation of the words on the wall and to reflect on why these words carry an importance either to the student or the student's classmates. Furthermore, on the most basic level, this exercise worked as an instructional strategy that was intended to bolster students' linguistic understandings both of English and other languages that they may encounter in the classroom or in their lives.

After completing their brainstorm and turn and talk, students then worked individually on a final reflection about the importance of the word wall and celebrating each other's cultures. The slide for this portion of the lesson and student responses are included below. The final reflection step of the word wall exposed students to new content by scaffolding higher-order knowledge demands and encouraging students to reflect on the importance of celebrating diversity and ensuring that certain languages are not pushed out of academic and professional spaces. Students reflected both on the importance of preserving and celebrating language and culture in a group setting as well as the symbolic importance that words can represent.

Creating Our Word Wall: Student Additions

In the second day of the lesson, students were asked to come to class ready to present a word that was important to them. This was homework from the previous lesson. The guidelines for that homework are included below. If students did not come to class prepared to do so, they had 10 minutes of writing time to create their addition to the board before presentations began.

I started the sharing process by providing my presentation and showing students my example to put on the board, which has been included below. Though I shared and presented my word to the class in the previous lesson, I went through this process again to open up the space and make students less nervous about sharing their words. My example is included below. The presentation step of the process exposed students to new content regarding acquisition of terms and linguistic understandings as their classmates presented elements of their culture, identity, and lifestyle that were represented by words that students may have not been previously familiar with. This also worked as a way to extend the holistic understanding of displays of culture and social interaction in the classroom by providing each student with a space to present in a way that made them feel most comfortable as they shared a piece of their identity.

A student presents her word in Tagalog to the class by sharing the meaning of the word, the importance of the word to her personally, and showing classmates what she has prepared to put on the wall. This student selected the word maganda, which means beautiful, and spoke about how it reminds her of her father and grandmother calling her beautiful at home. This student was the first to present and the space was open and welcoming -- her classmates gave her applause and compliments when she finished presenting without and direction from me to do so. This along with students taking the time to add their own additions to the word wall exposed students to new content by also providing a visual opportunity for them to increase their linguistic understandings and learn words in different languages. This was especially helpful for ELL students in my classroom, who may have struggled to fully understand the context and meaning of a word in a language they do not speak being translated into English when it was presented verbally.

Student additions to the word wall in Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, Spanish, Marshallese, Samoan, Japanese, English, and Jamaican.

The Final Product: Our Word Wall

Pictured below is the current final product of the word wall. Students also decorated and drew on the wall, so student names have been obscured where other students wrote letters or uplifting messages and named their classmates. My hope is to continue to build on this wall, but it is a great visual reminder of the space that we have created and the ability to celebrate our differences in a way that empower students in their identity and improves the overall learning environment. This space acts as a continual reminder of our work community building and understanding the linguistic and cultural diversity that is present in our classroom. This also works to continue to expose students to new ideas and content as they can refer back to the wall and the additions from their peers at any time.

Takeaways and Next Steps

The preparation and implementation of the two above examples were time consuming and required a high level of attention to detail and planning. This is the reality of culturally relevant pedagogy, especially as a white educator who has come into a community that is not my own. There are no shortcuts one can or should take when it comes to creating a space that is culturally relevant and celebrates each student's unique identity and worldview. That said, my largest takeaway from this work is that when the teacher puts in the effort and brings enthusiasm and transparency about the importance of these exercises or content, students will demonstrate the ability to go far beyond your expectations.

My 6th graders were soon grappling with complex institutional dynamics such as oppression and segregation, both during apartheid and in their own worlds. Apartheid typically does not appear in Common Core Standards until high school Social Studies, but with scaffolds and patience, 6th graders demonstrated the capacity to understand and apply the concepts of injustice and racial oppression to their learning and their lives. Students freely wrote about the themes of segregation and Noah's struggle with his own identity as a biracial child. Beyond this, students clearly connected their learning and understanding of injustice and were better prepared to tackle the topics and activities aligned to the advocacy work we completed. This also speaks to the nature in which the pillars of this capstone, or of teaching in general, build upon each other to develop our students' abilities to tackle real world issues and empower these capacities within a safe learning space.

Going into the creation of the word wall, I was well aware that my students were a linguistically and culturally diverse group. That said, I was surprised by how linguistically diverse my classes truly were. In the first class that completed the word wall exercise alone, responses (including my own) represented ten different languages or creoles: English, Hawaiian, Hawaiian Pidgin, Tagalog, Marshallese, Samoan, Spanish, Yiddish, Jamaican Patois, Japanese, and Chinese. In this first class, 18 students presented such a wide variety of words, languages, and cultures, each of which offered insight into a piece of their identity. This forced me to realize that I had underlying biases that became apparent when I realized the true level of linguistic diversity among my class. For instance, I assumed that many of my students who are not ELL students would present a word in English, which was completely oblivious to the obvious fact that students can speak languages other than English at home while still being fluent in English. Not only was this a learning moment, but I would also by lying if I said learning moments like this one don't occur semi-frequently in my classroom. While Implicit Bias Tests are useful tools, they cannot tell us all that we need to know about our bias. This also underscores the never-ending nature of CRT in preparation and execution. While I am proud of the successes that took place during the implementation of these examples, there is still much work left to be done. Not only do I commit to continual self-education, reflection, and improvement, I also commit to knowing my students' cultures and identities and putting in effort to understanding who they are as people. This is true both for the rest of the year and will start over from the beginning with the students I will teach in future years.