Execution: Culturally Responsive Teaching in Practice

CRTClassroom Plan_Amen-Ra (Revised Fall 2020).docx

Culturally Responsive Teaching Classroom Plan

An illustration of the practical implementation of my culturally-informed pedagogic practice.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Classroom Plan

Completed in the context of the course, Effective Practices Part II, this artifact is a comprehensive illustration of the manner in which I have actually implemented culturally responsive teaching in my pedagogic practice. It highlights various instances wherein I brought to bear principles presented in the Preparation segment and in my lived experience and clearly demonstrates an expansion of my interpretation and evaluation of student behavior in ways culturally specific to my students and designed to prepare them for the unique and often life-threatening dangers that they face all-too-frequently.

StudentProfiles_NAmen-Ra (Redacted).pdf

Student Profiles: An Essay Eliciting Self-Examination

A demonstration of my culturally aware approach to accomodating and bonding with students displaying distintive differences from the norm.

Student Profiles: An Essay Eliciting Self-Examination

Culturally responsive teachers consistently engage in self-examination. The artifact featured herein is the product of an essay completed in the course of this program that prompted considerable self-analysis. It exposits my reflections and actions in addressing a less apparent aspect of culturally-responsive teaching: namely, disability. My concerted, conscientious effort to accommodate those students with pronounced physical and psycho-social limitations was more than a professional duty from my vantage. It was a learning experience for me that greatly increased my empathy (owing to the degree to which I bonded with these students) and has made me a more effective teacher, appreciably expanding my interpretations of student behavior to encompass different cultural displays of learning and social interaction.

Scientific & Pseudo-Scientific Underpinnings of Eugenics.docx

Lesson on Eugenics: the (Un)scientific Origins of Race Theory

A highly culturally relevant lesson exploring the role of eugenics in lending legitimacy to racism.

Eugenics: the (Un)scientific Origins of Race Theory

Few phenomena are more culturally relevant to the collective experience of African Americans as racism. Racism has roots that must be adequately explored in order to be understood and ultimately dismantled. In the lesson illustrated in this section, I exposed my students to basic information on the scientific foundations of Darwinism. Darwinism is integral to Social Darwinism and the latter led directly to Eugenic theory. In this lesson I employed a rigorous text as well as an article from the biomedical database, PubMed, the topic of which was the Tuskegee study. This infamous investigation has had lingering ill effects on the African American psyche, whose mistrust of Medicine has been maintained to degrees that can be considered collectively and individually detrimental.

The racism to which African Americans and other marginalized racial and ethnic groups have been subject has historically been undergirded by a semblance of scientific legitimacy lent by learned men and by uninformed ideologues alike. Moreover, misinterpretations of straightforward science on the part of ostensibly unbiased individuals can often contribute to the continuance of racist ideologies and policies. If a science educator wishes to enable marginalized minority students to actualize themselves and to introject an anti-racist awareness, it is essential to be culturally aware oneself and arm learners with knowledge of the origins, execution, and perpetuation of pseudo-scientific race theory and its main manifestation: Eugenics. This is the multifaceted approach I took in formulating a series of lessons, lectures, discussions and a field trip intended to counteract the remnants of racial oppression in a culturally relevant, rational and rigorous way.

Museum of African American History: A Model of Culturally Relevant, Consciousness-Raising Content

Museum of African American History: Interactive/Archival Exhibit

My students are intensely focused on an interactive exhibit wherein we were able to record videos of our impressions of the museum. The recording of this video, I was informed by its curator/archivist, is to be preserved for posterity in the museum’s digital archives.

Student Reflections on Trip to African American Museum of History.docx

Student Reflections on Trip to Museum of African American History

A classroom conversation recorded upon our return from the Museum.

Slave Quarters

Students stunned by the small size of the slave cabin exhibited at the Museum

Overview of Trip to Museum of African American History

There are few single sites in the entirety of the United States that features such a wealth of information, images, and artifacts chronicling the Black experience as the Museum of African American History in Washington, DC. When the opportunity arose for my students to visit this extraordinary institution I assuredly seized it, seeing it as an ideal way to reinforce and expand the culturally laden learning that I had been propounding to my pupils. This informative and emotionally evocative experience served as a bi-directional scaffold to connect my students to new concepts that I had not explored in my classroom and to simultaneously concretize topics taught in several lessons, thereby enhancing their salience. This increased salience was evident in the attention and focus displayed on the faces of my students, their hushed tones (quite uncharacteristic of my vociferous charges) and several such statements as ‘now I see what they went through’; ‘now I see why Black people are so mistrustful of the medical field’ and ‘now I see why it is so important to understand your history’. There was no way to assimilate all the information extant in the museum’s extensive exhibits. It is hoped that subsequent visits to the site (virtual and actual) will continue to connect my students to culturally-relevant information and make them more culturally-informed determinators of their own educational development.

Student Reflections on Trip to Museum of African American History

This artifact captures a classroom conversation conducted upon our return from the Museum of African American History. Culturally responsive teaching is above all else relevant and related to the experiences and sentiments of students. As this exchange indicates, there is much that my students saw at the Museum that was moving and highly relevant to their lives.

Slave Quarters: A Most Moving Image from the Museum of African American History

Connections are a critical component of culturally responsive teaching. My students made many connections to their lives by making close contact with artifacts at the Museum. As the above exchange indicated, among the exhibits that my students found most moving was the wholly reconstructed cabin constituting common slave quarters. They were surprised and saddened by its small size and inevitable exposure to the elements, remarking that it was scarcely fit to accommodate animals. Not soon shall this salient experience be erased from our memory.

Culturally Responsive Compliments to Conventional Teaching

Group Counseling: A Culturally-Responsive Alternative to Conventional Disciplinary Deterents

This image captures a group counseling session conducted outdoors.

A 'Detention' that Cultivates Self-Control & Discipline

This image captures a yogic exercise session followed by meditation and conversation for a student undergoing extreme emotional upheaval due to dealing with tremendous family issues.

Group Counseling: A Culturally Responsive Alternative to Conventional Disciplinary Deterrents

Redirecting maladaptive behavior is more effective, I find, from an empathetic, culturally responsive framework. In my experience, much misbehavior among African American adolescents especially stems from an inability to regulate emotions. When this inability to exert control over one's inner state is compounded by external constrains over which one largely lacks control, the mental misery--anxiety, depression, aggression--can be magnified and manifested in destructive ways. While this conception does not cause me to condone the misdeeds of my pupils, it does incline me to embrace less punitive, more therapeutic approaches to behavior modification. I employ several techniques in my approach to student counseling: contemplation, meditation, exertion and immersion. In guided contemplation I compell my students to consider what caused them to behave in a particular manner. In guided meditation I condition my students to gradually exert active control over the content of their consciousness. Through physical exertion I endeavor to reduce the level of stress hormones coursing in my students' systems, which are probable contributors to emotional outbursts and negative affect. Ideally, immersion in Nature (or the unsullied outdoors) can induce a state of relaxation that is itself quasi-therapeutic and facilitates the relaxed, reflective state of mind that is aim of my intervention.

In addition to my regular role as counselor, my school judiciouly enabled me to offer students therapy instead of detention or suspension. I observed a definite improvement in the behavior (and often academic performance) of students who regularly received counseling from me and these observations on my part were often reinforced by feedback from teachers, administrators and particularly parents. Indeed, several of the mothers of my students shared with me that they had specifically sought Black male therapists for their sons, considering that the cultural connection might enable them to mutually relate. Unfortunately, few succeeded in finding counselors with their kids could most easily identify. They expressed their gratitude at my ability to cultivate connections with their children that were clearly evident to them. This therapeutic element, augmented by cultural identification, has resulted in a healthier community of learners.

A 'Detention' that Cultivates Self-Control & Discipline

The issues confronting the student featured in this artifact would have been difficult to discern were it not for the counseling sessions and alternative detentions I was able to offer.

Aggression is an irrepressible element of the cultural expression of the urban adolescents that I teach. My students often incur irreconcilable messages that aggression is abhorrent within the walls of the school and home and yet utterly indispensable to ensure survival on the streets of their unforgiving environs. I affirm to my students that aggression is an understandable, adaptive, self-preservative response to perceived threats. Unfortunately, many of my students seldom see their space as devoid of threats. Thus, they are routinely hyper-vigilant. Such excessive vigilance induces elevated stress and is ruinous for physical and psychological health. Self-control is the key to enabling my students to mentally manage the need to be alert and responsive to real threats and simultaneously avoiding directing destructive aggression ineffectually against innocuous individuals or even at those actively interested in their improvement.

In my capacities as a teacher, mentor, counselor, and physical fitness instructor, I have been able to offer my students a holistic, culturally-attuned way of balancing the unfairly difficult demands of being Black boys in a world that is hostile to them and presents dangers from every direction. I afford my students opportunities to channel their energy and aggression through structured exercise and training in martial arts, yoga, meditation, and individual and group counseling sessions.

Because altercations are a frequent cause of disruptions in the learning environment, consequences for flagrant disciplinary infractions are important to enforce. Further, it is incumbent upon educators to ensure a safe learning environment for students. Unduly harsh consequences for disciplinary breaches can be detrimental in themselves. With this in mind I have made creative alternatives to conventional punishments such as detention by offering students instead the opportunity for counseling, exercise, meditation, and even writing lines in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Admittedly, it is no easy task for a single teacher to effectively administer such a breadth of services to students. However, a culturally-responsive teacher recognizes that every available resource aught be marshaled in the interest of advancing student growth. I am therefore willing to devote every resource at my disposal.

Communicating in Culturally Relevant Language

These images (left) illustrate the way in which I incorporate Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs into my instruction to broaden the cultural perspectives of my students and ground them in their own cultural heritage.

Communicating in Culturally Relevant Language

Though my pedagogical ambitions are more circumscribed than some scholars, I am no less convinced of the cognitive, culturally affirmative power that mastering a classical African script such as Ancient Egyptian holds for dedicated African American students. It is for this reason that I have intentionally integrated elements of Ancient Egyptian into every lesson (such as our name for the “Do Now”, Ir At), encouraged students to write their names in Hieroglyphs and created a classroom culture containing elements of the Ancient Egyptian language and civilization.

Language affirms the cultural identity of a people. The fractured history of African Americans makes solidarity through a common language inherently difficult. However, there is no rational reason to regard Greek as more organic to Germanic or Slavic peoples or Latin as more organic to Anglo-Saxon or Celtic peoples than Ancient Egyptian (an Afro-Semitic idiom) to Africans of the Diaspora or continent. Indeed, such Afro-centric scholars as Martin Bernal (1987) in his three-volume work, Black Athena, and C. Anta Diop (1981) in his Civilization or Barbarism have contributed to the conception that resurrecting the language of Ancient Egyptian among the Black intelligentsia can serve a culturally cementing function among people of African Ancestry (especially the descendants of slaves) and effect an intellectual transformation no less profound in potential than the European Renaissance.

While I am expansive in my conception of what constitutes science sensu stricto, I also acknowlege my primary charge of cleaving to a curriculum that covers scientific concepts and standards considered important for secondary education. As such, I do not seek to surreptitiously 'smuggle in' extraneous information into formal instruction. Instead, I offer my students appropriate opportunities to expand their knowledge and make lingustic/cultural connections by translating some scientific terms (e.g. power, force, energy, cell, organ, chemical, medicine, calculation) into their semantic equivalents in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and sometimes explaining the hypothesized Afro-Asiatic roots of such terms as chemistry (from the Egyptian root Khem = 'black') and math (from the Egyptian word Maat = 'balance, order'). It must also be appreciated that in an extended school day that often spanned 8-9 hours, there were ample opportunities to integrate intellectual activites of a more diverse nature. I often used such opportunties to expose my students to literature and lessons on language. "Free time" in my classroom is always an opportunity to expand the mind. Importantly, my students were also able to experience one of the most salutary benefits of my lifestyle; namely, my daily fasting and the energy and time it inevitably frees up for intellectual or physical activity. Because I never eat during the day, I spent every lunch break either meditating, exercising or engaging in language study. As more and more of my students observed this, more of them desired to join me in this pursuit. I welcomed their fellowship even at the expense of the solitude that I so cherish. It is noteworthy that the students who eagerly elected to join me first grudgingly then gladly forfeited feeding (for food was not allowed in our Shenet Sebayet = Scholastic Circle, as we so styled it). This had the several-fold felicitous effect of familiarizing them with (and inuring them to) fasting and accordingly heightening their health in ways that were increasingly clear to them intellectually, separating some students from the comparatively chaotic conditions of the caferteria, and giving them time to persue the study of a language that many came to love. The degree to which my students enjoyed this opportunity is evident in multiple ways, including the astounding fact that they often opted for “detention” to practice their Egyptian orthography and proudly presented their writings to their parents. Connecting my students to culturally-expanding knowledge is a significant source of personal and professional satisfaction to me.

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