Culturally Responsive Teaching

One of the first ways in which I examined and reflected upon my personal cultural identity was to consider my lines of difference and how these identities have resulted in my perception of education and the world around me. As a dual-certified educator in both Special and General Education, it is important to ensure that I am aware of my biases towards portions of the student population that I serve in order to consider how these biases impact my decision-making in the classroom and interactions with students who may have learning differences. To this end, I have engaged in several activities which were designed for me to reflect about my own identity, how it impacts my teaching in the classroom and how it impacts the students that I serve.

In one of these cultural self-studies, I focused exclusively upon my unintended biases towards individuals with disabilities and took the IAT to measure my implicit bias and preference between abled and disabled persons. As a twice-exceptional (2e) individual, I was interested to find that I held a slight preference for abled people compared to disabled people as a result of this assessment. In reflection, I considered how my own experiences in education as a child and a differently-abled adult have resulted in internalized feelings of shame, embarrassment, and negative perceptions of self due to the pervasive nature of bias against individuals with disabilities. This was a valuable tool that would later inform some of the practices in my classroom to appropriately challenge and affirm the identities of the differently-abled students that I serve in my classroom. For educators of diverse students, introspection is one of the most important tools and strategies one can use to improve their practice and increase their effectiveness with their students. By considering one's identity and unintended biases, educators can more meaningfully consider strategic classroom decisions which emphasize a shared humanity of all students and validate the lived experiences of all children who enter into the classroom.

Another way in which I examined and reflected upon my personal cultural identity was to conduct a secondary cultural self-study which examined my experiences as a Black cis-woman. In public education, many Black women have shared that their value in the school community is usually relegated to that of disciplinarian and that they are more likely to be viewed as experts in classroom culture rather than experts in pedagogy and instructional practice. A recent city-commissioned study found that the DCPS evaluation system, known as IMPACT demonstrated statistically significant levels of racial bias, with "white teachers on average receiving higher scores on their evaluations than their Black and Hispanic colleagues" (Stein, 2021). In my personal experience as a Black female educator, I have felt that my identity and contributions in the classroom are often marginalized and minimalized, and that many of the structures which exist in the educational system of my district are not designed to reflect the rich contributions that African-American teachers possess as members of the Black community. I wondered, if I am experiencing marginalization and minimalization of my identity within the structures of my employment in the school district, does this same marginalization and minimalization also exist for the Black and Brown students that I teach?

It was at this point that I decided to set several goals for myself as a culturally-responsive educator: 1) determine the passions and interests of my incoming class over the summer to plan for their learning styles and needs, 2) build familiarity with students out of the classroom to see different aspects of their personalities and 3), design classroom activities and learning assignments with student interests and passions at the center. I determined that a meaningful way to leverage my cultural identity in the classroom would be to conduct student interest surveys prior to the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year for my incoming 5th grade class and spend the summer anticipating their passions and interests and planning experiences which reflect their unique cultural identities. To anticipate meeting the specific cultural needs of my incoming class of collectivist community of learners, I asked for their 4th grade teachers to administer an interest survey using the Renzulli Profiler prior to the end of the school year.

This student is utilizing a light board, a tool used by visual artists to construct precise depictions of characters in animated art. As a student who indicated on her interest profile that visual arts are a passion of hers, watching her use the same equipment as a professional mangaka was a special moment for all of us.

As the cluster progressed, students began owners of knowledge and eagerly sought out opportunities to teach me, their novice artist educator. In this photo, a student can be seen critiquing my artwork to teach me a new proportion technique to improve my (poor) sketch of a character.

To honor my students' cultural ways of communicating, I have increased my amount of classroom discourse and collaborative work time in my lessons. Because my classroom consists of many students who are English Language learners, providing these students with the opportunity to practice speaking and listening with their peers improves their language proficiency and ensures they are able to experience success beyond the classroom.

In this video, two students collaborate with one another to determine the theme to several short stories. Using specific details form the text to support their answers and analysis, they were able to share their ideas aloud with one another first before being asked to construct a written response. These two students are able to practice using the core lesson vocabulary related to the targeted lesson skill verbally, using sentence starters, which make engaging in conversations more successful for ELLs. As a culturally-responsive educator, I validate the lived experiences of my newcomer and ELL students by including these activities as must-have components of daily instruction.

In this photograph, a student who struggles to read texts independently is paired with a classmate who is a proficient and fluent reader for a reading comprehension assignment. In my classroom, I encourage students to express their learning needs and I both affirm and validate their identities by honoring various classroom scaffolds, accommodations, and flexibility of assignments and collaboration. As a result, these two students advocated to work together to support the learning needs of the one experiencing difficulty.

This photo highlights a core practice in my classroom: student-requested partner work. This option allows the creation of organic heterogeneous groups during small group rotations by the students and not the teacher. It has improved the effectivness of my teaching because voluntary pairing in heterogenous group can make the learning activities less confusing for the struggling student and more on-task and enjoyable. It also promotes student advocacy, because students can ask one another for support within the classroom and lean on one another's understanding, which is a core tenant of the collectivist cultural experience of the Black and Brown students that I serve.