I think people when they use the term
culturally responsive
or culturally relevant pedagogy
forget that the base of
the word is culture.
So culture has to do with world
views, beliefs, language.
It has to do with values.
Culture to me at its essence
are the things
that, um, those filters that
help us as human beings
make sense out of the most ordinary things
Culture can be grouped into
two different kinds of categories.
You can talk about
visible culture and indivisible culture.
Or tangible and intangible.
The tangible I would translate that to say
the crafts, the music, the art,
the technology.
And those are important,
but I think the more important
are the intangible-
and these are values, beliefs, feelings,
opinions, perspectives, assumptions.
So culturally relevant pedagogy
one of the primary premises is
that teachers take student's everyday
lived cultural experiences
and make the appropriate
linkages between what the students
know and do and understand.
And come up with examples,
comparisons and contrasts.
They make the connections,
they're cultural translators.
They're cultural bridge builders.
I think when we talk about
culturally responsive pedagogy,
we have to remember that students
approach learning
not as cultural blank slates.
So they bring into the classroom
all of those cultural experiences.
And so it is very compatible with what
we know about good teaching.
Culturally responsive pedagogy
builds on student's
prior knowledge.
In this case, we're talking
about prior culture knowledge,
making connections between what is known
and what is to be taught and understood.
So part of the argument of
culturally responsive teaching
is the limit has been an incompatibility
between the cultural filters
that have been used to
send instructional messages to students,
that is coming from
a school frame of reference,
and when kids from different
ethnic backgrounds
are trying to learn that, they are trying
to receive what we said from school
through another set of cultural filters.
And if they don't match,
then nothing is happening.
So culturally responsive teaching then
says is that rather than
always insisting that the students
adapt to the culture of the school,
the school needs to adapt and modify
some of its sending messages,
its sending mechanism.
When we think about what
matters most about culture...
I think the first thing to remember is
that students are not mere
representatives of a cultural ethnic group
And first and foremost
they're individual students
who have individual needs
and interests etc.
Students who belong to an ethnic group,
their attachment and bonds
to the group vary.
For example, in terms of how long they
have been in this country,
social class, and their own experiences in
their community and neighborhood.
Because if we think about student's
culture we make culture a trait
of that individual based on
his or her membership in a
particular community.
Conflating race and
ethnicity with culture.
We don't take race off the table, at all,
but we are really pulling apart
what culture is, and making sure
we don't conflate it because if we do then
we make cultural practices a trait of that
person's membership in that particular
community. And that leads us, of course,
to make very-easily
slip into one size fits all.
That my Latino children learn this way,
or my African American children
need "X", right? And so it's making
culture a trait of the individual.
It's been very problematic in the
implementation of
culturally relevant pedagogy.