Culturally Successful Educator

Education has been one of the most developed over recent years with diverse cultures being explored and valued within the curriculum. ‘Schools and colleges now include studies in a wide range of cultures and languages. The education system has also benefited from people from different backgrounds reaching management positions and making positive changes in relation to diversity. The inclusion of equality, diversity and rights training in the health and social care profession has increased and has become an important part of the professional training programme. All organisations are required by law to train their staff in equality, diversity and rights, usually under the equal opportunities framework. Education is

Einstein said: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Now imagine the various students that enter the classroom. They come from all walks of life with different backgrounds and stories to tell. If educators don’t recognize that these differences do in fact exist then some of the fish that pass through those school doors will leave the building believing that they are incapable because of the trees presented for them to climb. Enter culturally responsive teaching. This method or pedagogical device is the answer to bridging this gap that students may encounter when they are not given the opportunity to show their particular geniuses or to act as their own agent in their education.

Culturally Responsive Teaching is an emerging field that focuses on student cultural backgrounds and experiences in the development of pedagogy. According to Kea (2013) cultural difference is the single largest difference in U.S. schools and also the most neglected. The goal of Culturally Responsive Teaching is to provide an equal opportunity for all students to learn in school, regardless of their gender, social class, ethnic, racial or cultural characteristics (Banks 2005). Ladson-Billings (1994) suggest that the historic failings of educators in educating non-white students is that educators attempt to insert culture into education rather than insert education into the culture. In other words, educators are not providing an equal multi-culturally relevant education by bringing tokens of culture such as food, national flags, or maps from around the world into the classroom alone. Although these actions promote a sense of multiculturalism, an education that is relative to a diversity of cultures is not necessarily being provided. Culturally Responsive Teaching attempts to bring the various experiences of the student’s cultural home life into the classroom. Schmidt (2005) identifies seven characteristics that must be incorporated into curriculum in order to provide culturally responsive instruction. These characteristics are high expectations,

If a staff member chooses not to follow guidelines and training on equality and diversity, they could become abusive- either emotionally or physically. This would endanger the children in their care, as in the long term, abusive behaviour can have lasting effects and immediate injuries may be inflicted on the child. This would also cause psychological stress for the infant’s carers and they would then most likely lack faith in the health and social care services.

Julie- educator 2 is a white Australian female in her late 20’s. She is a qualified group leader currently working in a Kindy room with children aged 2.5- 2.5 years; she is also assistant director (2IC) of her centre that she has worked at for the past ten years. The interview was a one on one scenario, conducted in her staff room after work, the interview was recorded. Both educators signed a letter of consent to participate in this research project, allowing the interviewee to explore the educators’ experiences and personal beliefs in relation to diversity and difference with the families and children in their centres.(As seen in Appendix 1 & 2). Key aspects and issues in relation to families, diversity and difference were considered essential data to be analysed for this research report.

Critical analysis of your own values and beliefs and the assumptions that are made is the first step to becoming culturally competent. It is an ongoing learning process. In practice, it involves talking with families and learning what their culture, beliefs and values are and what aspirations they have for their children, how and what they expect their children to achieve and learn while at the centre. It involves looking at the broader community, what cultural groups are represented, looking at what diversity looks like in the early childhood centre and how the families and their culture is represented, and if it is not, looking for ways that it could be. It is having a commitment to ongoing learning, reflection and continued improvement.

Reflections on the reading The Culturally Inclusive Educator: Preparing for a Multicultural World by Dena Samuelson

As an ESL instructor, I teach a diverse classroom full of migrants with a variety of backgrounds. It’s as multicultural as a classroom can be! I try to incorporate my students’ cultures into our lessons. After all, everything we know and understand comes from the lens of our culture. Take for example our own education. Think about how much influence our point of view had on our education. Now, how much is our point of view affected by culture? I try to be as culturally responsive as possible. However, I know that there is always room for improvement.

My strengths as a teacher are utilizing culturally responsive pedagogy, using data to inform decisions, and building community in my classroom. Culturally responsive pedagogy is evident by my desire to educate the whole child. I make an intentional effort to get to know my students and their families so that I can incorporate each culture in my classroom. I use this as method to support and nurture my students socially and academically. This practice is also used to adapt and meet the needs of the students in my classroom.

In the last 30 years there is significantly more Hispanic, Asian, and African American students enrolling in college. (US Dept. of Education) With the ever-changing demographical makeup, the need for inclusive teaching practices is evident. Preito (2011), declares the necessity for a scale in order to measure how well professors are integrating cultural competence into the classroom, creating the Multicultural Teaching Competencies Inventory as a feedback tool. While previous literature on multicultural professors' has been studied, conclusions focused on how students' were evaluating with regards to ethnicity of the professor. (Lee, 2010; Bavishi, Hebl, & Madera, 2010) Though focusing on students perceptions of their professors ethnicity remains

Culture in short terms makes you, you; everyone has it. Culture is a shared representation of who you are and value, it deals with your identity, traditions, and it develops over time. Culture is ever changing. However, culture is sometimes hard to understand. A great teacher needs to be culturally diverse, they need to respect each others differences. A culturally competent teacher understands one’s own bias and cultural identity. As a teacher, it’s important to be get to know your student and become educated about their background. Our country is changing and becoming extremely diverse, this is why we need to continue to educate ourselves. When a teacher becomes culturally competent, they increase their ability to support their students and

We (educators) need to put social clichés and stereotypes aside and provide fair, non-discriminative and welcoming environment for all children within the service (and avoiding any tokenistic approaches). As I have discussed earlier (in the Module 3 Part 1 of this Assessment), ‘respect for diversity’ and ‘cultural competency’ are key aspects of the National Quality Standards (NQS) and the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF). Since supporting children to follow their cultural traditions and to participate in cultural activities enhances their wellbeing and can contribute to their resilience, social confidence and protection from prolonged isolation, emotional trauma or exclusion (EYLF: Outcome 1- Children have a strong sense of identity & Outcome 2 - Children are connected with and contribute to their world). Australian government today provides number of policies, projects and programs to celebrate diversity and inclusion for Indigenous Australian (and other communities) (like Aboriginal Children Support and Parent Awareness – ASSPA Program, National Indigenous English Literacy and Numeracy Strategy and Indigenous Education Ambassadors Program) (Price, 2015). However, apart from

I choose 2 themes from the article “culturally relevant pedagogy” one was “Cultural competence” and the example provided by Ann Lewis. The example was to use their home language in class and then translated in English. I also like the idea of code-switching; it gave me a new perspective of how I can improve my future classroom. It would allow the children to learn English faster and also understand the class. When I came to the U.S. it took me longer to learn the language because I was placed in a subtractive bilingualism classroom. And I don’t want that for my students I want them to learn each lesson and also learn the language to facilitate their learning.

Culturally Responsible teaching, a term used by many future educators, but, what does it really mean? To some, it means understanding slang terms and new age lingo to stop bullying between students, others may think that it is keeping students fair and just to one another to ensure a harmonious classroom setting. Now, although these are all a side qualities of culturally responsible teaching they are not the core beliefs; instead, at its simplest it means for a teacher to put all of their previous thoughts and stereotypical ideas about a certain group of people or race aside, so that fair and just teaching can be achieved. “ According to this model of teaching, all the motivational conditions contribute to student engagement.” (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg), this is the ultimate goal of the teaching style, and as discussed further in the book and article, there are mainly four components to meeting this goal. Stereotypes, prejudices ideas, and attitudes towards a group of people will change how a teacher motivates students, and thusly, things like this must be changed or dropped altogether in a classroom, to ensure the proper learning of students. Because the vast majority of methods used to employ culturally responsible teaching come in the forms of including students or encouraging students to do something, it means all negative ideas about a student need to be dropped, this way one’s attitude is not altered toward different students. An example of how this can be used in a

As a licensed educator and applied behavior analyst working with a diverse group of high