Fully engaging in an equity framework in education requires teachers to rethink their relationship with their students. All students bring cultural value to school and educators must design environments to close the racial, achievement, opportunity and acknowledgement gaps through recognizing and celebrating cultural value by designing in cultural inclusivity.
The following components in an equity-minded syllabus promoting cultural inclusivity includes:
A welcome packet. A welcome letter and/or welcome video, and a student-centered teaching philosophy is a great way to welcome students and create excitement about your class
A learning-centered tone for what information and tools are included to promote intellectual development
Intentionally crafted support that communicates high expectations and confidence that the student can successfully complete the course. Be sure to communicate that the course includes tools and resources to help students meet those high expectations.
They can see themselves as learners in the class.
A powerful tool/strategy in promoting cultural inclusivity is Culturally Responsive Teaching & Learning (CRTL). CRTL enables us to:
frame our overall objective as equitable educators
design courses and coursework that guide all students to develop their own voice
enable learning through each student's cultural filter and become enable all students to become independent learners
develop cognitive resources for all students
create environments in which students "lean-in" intrinsically rather than fleeing away due to stress, fear, and disconnection
eliminate the racial, achievement, Opportunity and acknowledgment gap through cultural bridge building
invite students as learners.
Practitioners of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning become the cultural translators or cultural bridge builders. Teachers take the prior cultural experiences from their students and connect between what is known and what is to be taught and understood. The underlying premise of CRTL is based on the notion that the dilemma in the achievement and opportunity gap is the incompatibility between the cultural filters used to send instructional messages to students from the school frame of reference and how students receive messages through their own set of cultural filters. If they do not connect with the instructional messages, then learning doesn't happen. We are not equitizing our communication when our instructional messages do not connect. We'd like to suggest that we need to create Ratatouille Moments in our courses.
Okay, we admit that this may need an explanation! A Ratatouille Moment is what Chef David Chang calls a moment in which something takes us back to a familiar place, a safe place, and a happy place. Just like we described a smell, touch, sound, look, sight of home in our first greeting to one another, we are able to connect to a place of familiarity. Chang states, "The easiest way to accomplish this is just to cook something that people have eaten a million times. But it’s much more powerful to evoke those taste memories while cooking something that seems unfamiliar—to hold those base patterns constant while completely changing the context." In short, when our students are engaging in complex, unfamiliar topics, we need to intentionally evoke cultural connections and build bridges between the unfamiliar to the familiar--we need to construct a Ratatouille Moment. David Chang’s Unified Theory of Deliciousness
Let's watch Anton Ego, the famously mean food critic, eat the ratatouille made by Remy, the rat. The dish is the crux of the entire story, hence the title of the film, Ratatouille.
In this 48 second video, Remy’s transformative eating experience connects him with a familiar, safe, and happy place. Think about how our teaching can create powerful moments of learning, engagement, and transformation when effort is made to build connection between the cultural experiences of our students--what they know--and what is being taught.
Our goal to develop strategies to eliminate achievement and opportunity gaps by addressing learning barriers. Thinking about how students receive and filter information through a cultural frame will help you develop insights into building connections to content.
Imagine that the ratatouille is a lesson, Anton is the student, and the emotion of connection is that moment our student gets "unstuck." How can we get there?
