CRRP

Defining Culturally Relevant and Responsive Pedagogy

Capacity Building Series:

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

That's Just Good Teaching!

The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Video: Socio-Cultural Consciousness

1. What socio-cultural context did I grow up within? (Ex: Class, race, culture, economic status, etc.). In what way did that context impact my learning?

2. What socio-cultural contexts exist in the school where I teach? In what ways do these contexts impact my students’ learning?

3. How aware of these contexts are the staff members serving in my school? Do we as a staff currently work toward continuing to build this awareness? In what ways?

4. How might a strong awareness of the socio-cultural contexts within my school improve the learning experiences for our students?

The sky's the limit ! Unless you're limiting their sky. Think about that one.

The Necessity of Having High Expectations

For an equitable educator, it’s not only possible but imperative to be both compassionate and rigorous. It’s what students need from us, and what they want. Kids can tell when we’re lowering the bar. They want to reach high standards, and our compassion is an essential ingredient to get them there.

Effective teaching demands that we strive to boost the achievement of marginalized students. Neither high expectations nor kind hearts can do the job alone. Zaretta Hammond calls the ideal educator a “warm demander”—one who focuses on building strong relationships with students, then draws on that wellspring of trust to hold students to high standards of deep engagement with course content.

Empowering Students as Change Agents

As students look inward and consider what it means to stand up for what they believe in, what impact a person can have, and what motivates people to create social change, ELA teachers can engage students with examples from history and can build a classroom culture that empowers students to be great change agents themselves.

When students use complex texts, class discussion, and assignments to deepen their understanding of how change occurs, they become better equipped to cultivate their own roles in civic engagement. This creates the perfect opportunity for independent research: teachers can ask students to research the impact of a teen change agent whom they admire and who is advancing a cause the students care about. This assignment prompts students to drive their own learning and grasp the myriad ways young people can effect change.

5 Ways to Employ Constructivist Activities

1. Ask students to construct their own definition

Provide materials they can use to build their definition, such as words and images that illustrate feelings, reactions, and concepts.

2. Ask students to draw their own connections between concepts

To help students build expansive mental models, prompt students with questions to help them think outside of the box. Define in advance how much detail they should provide.

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It is easy to dismiss the importance of "knowing your students" as either a vacuous platitude or a statement of the obvious. However, the process of coming to know students as learners is often difficult and challenging, particularly if the students are struggling with schoolwork. Knowing students means more than merely acquiring social or administrative information—students' names and ages, something about their friendship circles, a bit about their family backgrounds, a few statistics from their academic record. To maximize learning, we need to dig deeper than this superficial acquaintance.

How to Teach Now, by William Powell and Ochan Kusuma-Powell - Chapter 1: ASCD

"We investigate the mathematics that is inherent in traditional Indigenous cultural activities. For example, students are taught different types of beading including looming, medallion making and the peyote stitch. They learn moccasin making and how to create dream catchers. As the students learn, they help us to uncover the mathematical thinking in the activity including multiplicative, algebraic and spatial reasoning, geometric transformations, measurement and estimation. " - Exploring Indigenous Culturally Responsive Practices in Mathematics (Ruth Beatty 2016)

Active from 2006 to 2014, the Historical Thinking Project provided social studies departments, local boards, provincial ministries of education, publishers and public history agencies with models of more meaningful history teaching, assessment, and learning for their students and audiences.

Applying the Big 6 to Indigenous History

The Ontario Black History Society (OBHS) is a non-profit organization in Toronto, established in 1978 to preserve and promote the contributions of Black peoples in Ontario, and Canada at large. The Society provides research materials for professional development, as well as exhibits and Black History Speaker presentations to schools, organizations and libraries to promote the understanding of Black heritage in Ontario

Natasha Henry is an educator, historian and curriculum consultant specializing in the development of learning materials that focus on the African diasporic experience. Natasha has written several entries for The Canadian Encyclopedia on African Canadian history. Natasha has developed the educational resources for several exhibits and web-based projects on the Black experience in Canada, including the CBC miniseries The Book of Negroes. Natasha is a PhD student in history at York University.

"Have we read our own authors such as Dionne Brand, Afua Cooper and George Elliott Clarke? Do we know that the story of African-Canadians spans four hundred years, and includes slavery, abolition, pioneering, urban growth, segregation, the civil rights movement and a long engagement in civic life?"

— Lawrence Hill