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Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culturally Responsive Teaching
An Environment that communicates care
An Environment that communicates care
Physical contact (when proper barriers are perceived and respected) is a common feature of African American culture that can facilitate bonding and trust. I have used it to good effect in my teaching to create an environment that transparently communicates care and belonging in a way that is clearly recognizable to my students; it is among the losses to be endured during the prevailing pandemic.
Overview of CRT Objective
Overview of CRT Objective
Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is a pedagogical principle that affirms the importance of making close connections between educational content and the cultures, languages and life experiences of students, that highlights the relevance between what students learn in school and their actual lives. This is a guiding principle of my teaching practice.
In order to be a culturally responsive teacher, on must have adequate insight into one's cultural conditioning and be self-reflective about the cultural lenses through which one views the world. In this section I shall demonstrate my knowledge of my own cultural conditioning and the expansion of my interpretations of student behavior to encompass different cultural displays of learning and social interaction. I shall also demonstrate my utilization of culturally-informed strategies as a conduit to connect student knowledge to new concepts and content in my classroom.
This section shall show the inner processing of cultural notions that have influenced me personally and professionally and have shaped my sociopolitical consciousness. It shall illustrate the multifarious ways in which I continually reflect upon those factors that influence my beliefs about cultural diversity. I shall show how I have leveraged my own culturally-inflected intellectual development to strengthen and expand my students' intellectual capacity. My analysis shall demonstrate how I built trust with students across differences in race, class and ability/disability status aided, in part, by the expansion of my ability to empathically identify with the experiences of others--an ability I attribute to consistent interrogation of my own potential cultural biases and my committment to self-improvement through lifelong learning.
CRT Section Conclusion & Reflection
CRT Section Conclusion & Reflection
The culturally responsive teacher demonstrates that they engage in self-examination, careful classroom planning, and subject themselves to ongoing reflection. In this section I have demonstrated how I have repeatedly and continually reflected upon my own cultural background and brought these reflections to bear in creating a curriculum, classroom, and extra-curricular experiences that is both relevant to my students’ culture and challenges them to expand and enrich their own cultural understanding through lifelong learning, self-analysis, and self-discipline. Importantly, I have modeled these behaviors for my students in my own daily life—a practice that my students readily observe. It is this insistence upon a close correspondence between espoused ideals and actual behavior that I seek to inculcate in my students so thoroughly that it becomes an integral aspect of their own self-constructed culture, as it is mine. I have always taught through example, and always shall.
Works Cited
Amen-Ra, N. (2014). The Amen Anti-Addiction Intervention: Theoretical Foundations of a Novel Neurotrophic Protocol for the Prevention and Treatment of Addiction. Neuroscience & Medicine, 5(2), 79-85.
Bernal, M. (1987). Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick, NJ USA: Rutgers University Press.
Diop, C. A. (1991). Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology. Brooklyn, NY USA: Lawrence Hill Books.
Diop, C. A. (1974). The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. Chicago, Illinois USA: Lawrence Hill & Co.
Douglass, F. (1845, 1994). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York, NY USA: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Corwin.
Veblen, T. (1899, 1912). The Theory of the Leisure Class. London, UK: The Macmillan Company.
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