Culturally Responsive Teaching

This section therefore focuses on how I build a classroom environment that validates their cultural heritage, while also offering a greater sense of expanded horizons than students might otherwise develop under an entirely local teacher.

This page contains three main sections. The first section describes the preparation and observation of student culture(s), and my own cultural background(s), with evidence related to reflection and identification of areas in which to demonstrate cultural responsiveness during the 2022-2023 academic year. The second section includes a description of the physical environment of my classroom, which is designed to provide culturally- and individually-responsive 'nudges' to help students become efficacious and independent learners. As culturally-responsive teachers, "we have a particular duty to help dependent learners build their intellective capacity so that they are able to do more independent learning and higher order thinking" (Hammond, 2014, p. 89), and the physical design of the classroom should provide structures which students can independently utilize to take charge of their learning. The final section narrates a particular culturally-responsive project: building a classroom library that responds to student needs, interests, and cultural backgrounds.

The structure of this page is designed to illustrate the move from reflection to action, which follows Freire's idea of praxis as considered action, where "human activity consists of action and reflection: it is praxis; it is transformation of the world" in the mind of the student and in the classroom itself (Freire, 2014, p. 125).

Reflection & Observation

This section consists of two portions: the pre-teaching refection documents, and the planning to teach preparation documents. The preparation documents consist of a self-reflection, a general classroom landscape document, and a 'target student' deep dive; the latter two documents outline instructional strategies. The planning to teach documents consist of a readout sheet of ongoing professional development sessions related to DEI & CRT topics, completed through my Teach for America program, and preparatory notes for how to instruct Emerging Bilingual (formerly English Language Learning) students in how to write well, with attached examples of students using those strategies in their writing. Because teaching and relationship-building are recursive processes, and because they form the basis of planning for my class, evidence related to student relationship-building and student input into class design is also included here.

To complete this Capstone project, I was strongly advised to take an implicit biases test; I took the Harvard Race IAT. The results (above) suggest that I have "a moderate automatic preference for African Americans over European Americans." This seems exceedingly unlikely considering my geographic background--my childhood home of Cabell County, West Virginia, is about 90% white (US Census Bureau, 2021). The result is, however, consistent with research that shows that the IAT lacks temporal stability, that "implicit measures show lower stability over time than explicit measures" of similar phenomena (Gawronski, 2017), and that "[o]verall, simple explicit measures of bias yielded predictions no worse than the IATs" (Oswald et al., 2013, p. 18). In other words: this is a temporary result that has more to do with the quirks of when I'm taking the test (in the same week that I'm reading the excellent history White Malice, by Susan Williams), than any temporally stable personality trait. This is to say that this portion can be safely disregarded, and my work in the classroom, which is assessed over the course of two years, can be held as a much more reliable and stable measure of the cultural relevance of my teaching practice.

I was also very strongly encouraged by my Capstone coach to include a reflection that consisted of discussion of my identity along one of the 'usual' axes of analysis (race, gender, sexuality, etc.). This is an interesting dilemma, because I'm not out at school. This was a decision made based on two factors. The first is that Texas does not have legal protections for queer persons in employment (Human Rights Campaign, n.d.), and I have minimal confidence in the faithful enforcement by authorities in rural Texas of the relevant federal provisions which do exist. The second is that many similarly-situated teachers have been dismissed, or had to fight attempted dismissals, for being out at work (see Andu, 2020; G, 2020; Hauser, 2018; Kingkade, 2022; Malaea, 2018), including a teacher in the district next to mine (G, 2020). This Texas trend is similar to a national-level push to limit discussion of LGBTQ topics in the classroom, with ABC News reporting that "more than 190 'educational gag orders'--or bills designed to limit academic and educational speech or discussions--have been introduced in at least 41 states since 2021" (Jones, 2022). There is also the reality that queer spaces have been repeatedly targeted by gunmen and other violent attacks (see Them's Staff Writer, 2022 for a quick rundown of the past several weeks, including a mass shooting in Colorado Springs); there is an increasing sense that queer spaces and people outside of major metropolitan bubbles are under violent threat.

Nevertheless, this choice does deprive my students of an outwardly queer role model. Like many teachers, I'm of the opinion that "[s]tudents have the right to explore their own identity, and this curiosity shouldn’t be thwarted due to an outdated law" (Carlisle, 2021). I'm also of the opinion that students benefit from the availability of a diversity of role models. Particularly for queer youth, "the power of proximal role models lies in the opportunity for youth to leverage these relationships into mentorship, allowing them to reap psychosocial benefits of having a supportive ally" (Bird et al., 2012). Unfortunately, despite this being a real benefit for students, the lack of institutional support in my workplace and university renders it a financially-unrealistic option to take.

The first image also evidences a relationship-building strategy I use. My bookshelf has a handful of stuffed animals on it; each class gets a 'mascot' to name, and to introduce itself to (this is how I learn names at the beginning of the year). A handful of students, every year, will use the mascot as an occasional security blanket when they're having a difficult day. (It is often not the students you expect: last year, one of my football players, normally full of machismo, consistently sat with the stuffed camel whenever he was asked to write, and this notably improved his fluency and focus). This class named their turtle after a character in the Kung Fu Panda movies; several of the boys whittled a staff for him that, unfortunately, looks to have been unintentionally cleaned out during the summer. This demonstrates that I set up a classroom culture which values student input, interests, and a sense of autonomy and fun.

This practice is culturally relevant, since it gives students the opportunity to do public art, and (on my back board) to create pieces of public art reminiscent of Mexican muralism (see ArtInContext, 2022, for a discussion of the roots of this movement). In other words, students decorating the room helps to build a communicative and validating culture for students in my classroom.

A recurrent theme in these letters is that students feel relaxed and comfortable in my class; this speaks to the deliberate design of my room (see below) and the careful enforcement of the class agreements made at the beginning of the year (see above). Some students found the class easy, some found it difficult; you can also see students examine their own actions in class (especially as regards procrastination), which speaks to their feelings of comfort and support about taking accountability for their own learning. There are also several places which indicate partial acquisition of English, with characteristic errors from EB students; that they were comfortable taking the linguistic risks that lead to these errors indicates that my class structures and instructional practices are effective in lowering their affective filters and encouraging them to write with an increased degree of fluency.

Planning & Preparing to Teach: Concluding Remarks

The documents above show a process of considering the importance of local context & culture, the particular contexts and culture(s) of my students, and considering how to apply specific instructional decisions which respond to these contexts and cultures. The student relationship documents show a before-and-after snapshot indicating that the preparation and enforcement of a few key agreements and attitudes resulted in student feelings of comfort and engagement in my class.

This reflects a commitment to teaching as praxis: the combination of reflection and action. In this view, teaching "cannot be purely intellectual but must involve action; nor can it be limited to mere activism, but must include serious reflection: only then will it be a praxis" (Freire, 2014, p. 65). Utilizing specific instructional strategies to increase students' intellectual and writing capacity constitutes action which will, over the course of their education, help students become liberated and reflective actors.

These artifacts demonstrate that I have spent time establishing deliberate norms around respect and creativity in my classroom (encouraging both); this has created a classroom where students feel positively about their abilities, their classmates, and their teacher. In other words, students have formed both horizontal student-student relationships and vertical student-teacher relationships, centered around academic rigor and personal support.

Classroom Environment: Culturally-Responsive Design

There is strong evidence that the physical design of a classroom impacts both how well students learn, and how comfortable they feel while learning; "[o]ur goal is to help culturally and linguistically diverse students easily reach a state of relaxed alertness" (Hammond, 2014, p. 50). Therefore, one of the ways I want to demonstrate cultural responsiveness to my students is to highlight the physical design of my room.

The design has a few major considerations.

The first consideration is both cultural and physical. My students are accustomed to a rather traditional kind of school--the teacher lectures, students take notes, and then regurgitate those notes on the test. This implies two constraints: students are rather denuded of interaction with each other, and students are deprived of opportunities for physical movement for much of the day. These constraints can actually impede learning, and physical movement can actually aid learning (Kohl et al., 2013). The design of my room is meant to liberate students from constant sitting and introduce mild elements of physical movement. Half the room is given over to group work tables, which may be used sitting or standing, and students are expected to move between their individual desks and the group work areas flexibly throughout the class. This provides opportunities for both social interaction in an academically-focused context and for physical movement.

The second consideration is a promotion of student autonomy. Each student has a designated & numbered desk that functions as their 'home base' in class. However, there are the group work tables, dedicated computer desks, and special isolation desks for students to use when they need space to process, de-stress, or feel a bunch of emotions (I teach early adolescents, and this is a common socio-biological need). Allowing students some level of autonomy in choosing their physical environment allows them to take ownership of their participation in class, and is an important step in promoting their social-emotional development; while not a routine in the formalized sense of the word, creating the expectation that students self-manage their physical movement around the classroom means that students "can nurture a sense of ownership and community in [our] classroom" (Hammond, 2014, p. 146).

The final consideration is that the environment should be resource-rich and de-stigmatizing. I work at a magnet school in a poor area (US Census Bureau, 2021); this means that students come from both the upper crust of the district, and from some of the poorest areas of the district. The physical design of my room includes several 'resource caches' that students are able to access easily and as a routine part of class. This includes the classroom library, which offers students chances to read books they might not otherwise find or be able to access, the supply table, which contains school supplies that are free for students to take, and the snack drawer & table I keep stocked for students to access throughout class. All these resources are run on a take-as-you-need basis, without means testing or without any particular tracking of who's getting what (with the exception of the classroom library, where I do track circulation for future purchases). This helps soften class distinctions between students who insist on only their favorite brand of pen or composition notebook and those whose parents can't afford to give them any extra school supplies, and it ensures that all students, regardless of background, have the same basic level of in-class access to resources. This creates a more equitable and egalitarian environment for my students.

Classroom Library Project: Responding to Student Interests, Culture, & Need

As an ELAR teacher, I identified that the lack of a school library would be particularly deleterious to my students, and that a responsive action would be to ensure they have the resources they need. This identification relied on three principles: 1) that many of my students come from economically-disadvantaged backgrounds that render large purchases of leisure reading materials unlikely (Evans et al., 2010), 2) that self-selected leisure reading is a major predictor of literacy growth and school engagement (McGill-Franzen et al., 2017), and 3) that easy access to leisure reading materials makes it more likely that students will engage in leisure reading (McGill-Franzen et al., 2017). There is also the political reality that Texas is in the process of a full book banning campaign (Lopez, 2022), and this makes the provisioning of a diverse and responsive literature of particular import to students. There are several volumes on my shelves that are, to say the least, ripe for targeting.

This project is particularly important because, as DuBois & Greene noted, "gifted Latinx English language learners must have access to deep and complex materials and high-impact instructional moves" (2021, p. 68). The ability to engage in leisure reading with those sorts of materials is one of the most important opportunities for both language acquisition and general cognitive development that can be provided to students, and so teachers must be sure to provide it.

My first impulse was to simply build out my classroom library for students to read and borrow from. Unfortunately, I subsist on the salary of a non-unionized teacher, and the per-credit fee for classes at Johns Hopkins is $972 (JHU School of Education, 2022). This hardly leaves room for discretionary purchases, and in any case the American habit of expecting teachers to pay out of their own pocket to provide classroom resources is internationally unusual, at least among developed economies. As a stopgap measure, I sourced a mix of reading material, including YA and middle-grades titles, from members of my extended family and hometown community.

Discussions with my Assistant Principal indicated that campus funds were also not earmarked and were in any case insufficient to buy classroom libraries, beyond the curricular texts, for students to read. She suggested a DonorsChoose fundraiser, noting that she had gotten good responses from donors when doing her own fundraisers as an English teacher. This suggested the idea of outside funding, but I confess that I am not much of a fundraiser, and so I went in another direction.

As a first-year member of Teach for America, I was in the process of receiving my certification in the state of Texas. In correspondence with officers from my alternative certification program, ACTRGV, a grant-funding program for new teachers to engage in classroom setup was mentioned (see Texas Association of Certification Officers, 2020, for a publicly-available copy of the grant application form; the one I used a year later is functionally identical).

I asked the students to note preferred genres, since I wanted to collect titles which were similar to what they had read before, without only providing them with books they had already read. I also asked students to list some of their favorite titles, since re-reading has been shown to improve reading fluency (Shanahan, 2017), and if titles have already proven popular with a section of students this year, it’s also likely that they’ll prove popular with similarly-situated students in years to come. This is one way to respond to the particularities of youth culture--by treating young people as a particular cultural group with its own tastes (Fasick, 1984, p. 155). Please note that some of these titles should be treated with a certain degree of skepticism– I doubt, for example, that 8th grade students have read It, by Stephen King, so much as they have seen the recent movie and know that it’s based on a book.

CRT Section Conclusion & Reflection

This section shows a process of reflecting on and planning for a culturally responsive environment for my students, facilitated by personal reflection and deliberate classroom design. It also demonstrates the development and deployment of specific instructional strategies which respond to the culturally- and linguistically-informed needs and assets of my student population.

The reflection and professional development artifacts demonstrate serious self-examination and self-development in preparation to safely teach in my particular context. The artifacts related to planning for EB student success in writing assignments demonstrates explicit planning for culturally-responsive instruction, and culturally-informed scaffolds for student success, which is demonstrated in the student writing samples.

The artifacts in the middle sections demonstrate that I build relationships with students, take their backgrounds and viewpoints into account, and adjust instruction to meet their needs. The artifacts around classroom agreements and decorations show that I engage students in deliberate culture-building, including inviting them to significantly contribute to the routines, norms, and physical appearance of the classroom; this represents a emotionally-safe environment, and the student-provided decorations indicate strong personal relationships with students. The classroom library projects demonstrates a specific adjustment to the limits placed on students' reading interests at my campus, and a culturally-informed response that allows students to engage with reading materials in their own way and on their own time.