Culturally Responsive Teaching : An Emerging Field

After reading Geneva Gay’s article Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching I realized my pedagogy is culturally responsive in many ways. For one, I always

According to Geneva Gay (2000), “Culturally responsive teaching is defined as using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively.” (p.106) It acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of different ethnic groups, it builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions, it uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles, and incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills taught in schools.

Culturally Relevant Education was created to reach out to students and to focus on educational needs. However, it has served well with higher education. It has become a benefit for students while gaining successful knowledge. Different higher education classes and programs are becoming more diverse. This encourages the professors to develop better teaching strategies and methods that are more effective with student learning. This specific pedagogy is helping our educators prepare for student engagement since diversity is becoming a big deal. Culturally relevant pedagogy and multicultural education must be more than a feel-good or obligatory addition to teacher preparation (Lynn, 2014, para.4). The main goal for educators is simply to

Classrooms are getting more and more diverse. The most significant student diversities include: cultural, linguistic, that involving exceptionalities, and socioeconomic status. Because of these diversities in the classroom, students are on different academic, social and physical levels. In order for teachers to make a lesson more responsive for all students in their classroom, it is important for the teacher to take the time to learn the culture, history, backgrounds, and traditions of all the represented groups in their classroom. Teachers can teach students to understand and appreciate their own and others’ cultural heritages by incorporating such content in their lessons. Also, by understanding students’ strengths and contributions of individuals

You have some great ideas for lesson planning when it comes to culturally responsive teaching. Also, you are correct with stating that diverse students need to feel and know that they are part of the class community. I think having field trips during certain culture times is a great way for students to learn about how cultures are similar and different. I truly like that you would have parents come into the class when talking about families and culture.

Teachers need to acquire a knowledge base about ethnic and cultural diversity also, teachers need to learn how to convert this information into culturally responsive curriculum. Different opportunities for teaching cultural diversity can come up during the course of a student’s day.

Most of teachers have their cultural prejudice. This prejudice influences teachers decide what kind of education show to their students. In Culturally responsive teaching(CRT), teachers have to take care of everything. I think, The most important thing for teacher's role in The CRT consider value of diversity, historic experience and the current status of various students in class. It is important to understand that the differentiation among students comes from a different cultural, social and political background. School and political systems, cultural norms and values about education differ from culture to culture and therefore it is important as a teacher to try to discover these backgrounds as best as possible in order to better understand

The focus of this research is to explore the role of culturally responsive instruction and its effect on student achievement. Cultural responsive teaching has been described to some educators as the “pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, and politically” to most students. In this particular setting, teachers are to teach, create curriculum and standards based on a way that is comprehensive to a student’s background. This means teachers are incorporating students’ daily environment and lives into the classroom, such as: language (slang), music, extracurricular activities, and students’ interest. Classroom management along with culturally responsive teaching is a highly effective way of not only increasing student achievement but also student engagement.

2. The Best Practices in Culturally Responsive Teaching: The second part of the study will focus on providing teaching strategies and frameworks that utilize culturally responsive teaching methods. This method includes teaching that integrates students’ backgrounds and experiences into the curriculum and learning experiences that take place in the classrooms. In doing so, teachers must: 1) hold high expectations for all learners, 2) assist students in developing cultural awareness and tolerance, 3) providing room for all students to make meaningful connections to learning

training, an additional assumption is that many in-service teachers lack practicum experience with culturally and linguistically diverse students during the preparatory course to work directly with culturally diverse students (Atwater et al., 2010; Castro, 2012; Jackson, 2013). Therefore, each of the participants will have different behaviors in regards to the phenomenon, based on their individual experiences.

Still, while it is important to understand how cultural patterns can affect one’s learning, it is also crucial to realize that no pattern applies to all individuals within a culture. In order to be culturally sensitive, one must also be sensitive to individual students as well. Seeing each student as their own person requires an avoidance of expectations and stereotyping of a student based solely off of their cultural background. After all, a student’s learning is shaped not only by their culture, but also by his or her home life, personal talents, developments, and a variety of other factors as well. Tamara Lucas, author of the article “Preparing teachers for linguistically diverse classrooms: a resource for teacher educators” uses the example

In 2000, Professor Geneva Gay wrote that culturally responsive teaching connects students by their cultural knowledge, prior life experiences, in a way that legitimized and validated what students already know. By embracing all socio-cultural realities and having a thorough understanding allows the culturally responsive teacher to negotiate the classrooms with their students and have an accurate reflection of their communities where students develop and prosper.

Teachers must be aware and can identify the different levels of knowledge which goes hand to hand with Bloom’s taxonomy. According, to “Center for Teaching” this concept includes a maximum of six different levels such as understanding, remember, or evaluate. However, knowledge is the basis of these six cognitive processes allowing a teacher to categorize where the student exist and what it takes to improve their knowledge. In chapter 3-5 the author relates to the knowledge of the teacher by outlining the characteristics of culturally relevant teaching by providing classroom demonstrations and teacher observations. Cultural relevant is “responsive teaching is a pedagogy grounded in teachers ' displaying cultural competence (Jabbar, Abdul 2013).” This allows students to connect their prior knowledge to what is presented in the classroom. In relations to the teacher it serves as a guide to help teachers connect with their students by knowing and incorporating the student’s culture into instructional activities. This type of teacher views knowledge as something that is continuously re-created, recycles and shared. Various teachers were interviewed on how knowledge is valued in the classroom. They viewed education and knowledge as vehicles for “emancipation.” These teachers consistently found ways to bring African American customs and other viewpoints into class discussions.

With society becoming more culturally diverse, so are the makeups of classrooms, there are students from varied cultural backgrounds. Meeting the needs of all students can become a challenge; it is a teacher’s responsibility to effectively teach a class that is made up of diversity in culture. According to Gonzales (2009) diverse individuals commonly find themselves challenged with understanding a different language and also with new ways of life they have yet to understand and accept. There are three main challenges that accompany the appropriate teaching strategies for cultural diverse children, these consist of; cultural disproportionality with teachers and students, cultural responsiveness classroom management (CRCM) and overcoming stereotypes in the learning process.

The typical American classroom setting has undergone dramatic changes in the recent past, and with these changes we must acknowledge that our teaching strategies must be reformed in a way that reflects our current student population. In order to properly recognize and appreciate cultural variance in the classroom, educators must learn about and look for learning patterns that reflect students’ cultures, while also making a conscious effort to get to know each individual child in the class. It can be helpful to think about student’s cultural and learning differences as being on a variety of spectrums, such as individualistic to collectivist or reserved to expressive, while also maintaining the idea that the goal is to teach all along the spectrum, and not just to a few specific students or points on it. With this in mind, educators should choose a few continuums to focus on at first and plan utilize them to encourage and facilitate diverse learning in the classroom, making adjustments as needed. In doing this, educators will be able to actively encourage diversity in the classroom, in a way that will encourage learning and understanding.