Introduction to Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Uploaded on Jun 17, 2010

Education experts Jackie Jordan Irvine, Geneva Gay and Kris Gutierrez explain how to make culturally relevant pedagogy a reality in your classroom.

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.