Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies and Pedagogy

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally responsive teaching is a pedagogical theory that is all about broadening the cultural mindset of classrooms to allow students from a wide range of backgrounds to feel included. Essentially, culturally responsive teaching is a way for educators to understand their students' experiences and bring students' cultures into an academic environment in a respectful and meaningful way.

It is becoming a more common pedagogical practice as the benefits of multicultural responsiveness are better studied and understood. Culturally responsive teaching is part of a broader shift in education in which teachers and other education professionals are questioning the assumptions that have long made up the core of pedagogy in America and other parts of the world.

The term culturally responsive teaching was first coined by the researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings over twenty years ago. Ladson-Billings studied educational outcomes for Black students in America and created her theory of culturally responsive teaching as a way to improve the educational experience for those students.

She broke teaching down into three main goals and explored how cultural responsiveness could help teachers achieve them. Teaching, Ladson-Billings said, must result in academic success, help students positively develop their cultural identities, and help them understand and deconstruct social inequalities. Culturally responsive teaching foregrounds those goals to make school a more positive and well-rounded environment for all students.

Since Ladson-Billings first proposed the term, other scholars have also researched cultural responsiveness in education, further elaborating on how teachers can integrate this theory into their class environments. Geneva Gay and Django Paris are two other scholars of note who have contributed to the theory of culturally responsive teaching in recent years.

Before the development of culturally responsive teaching, it was common to think of students from minority cultural backgrounds as experiencing deficits in education. Culturally responsive teaching tries to reframe that viewpoint, instead seeing students' cultural backgrounds as assets that can enrich student experiences and the classroom at large.

Cultural Responsiveness in Education

Cultural responsiveness in the classroom is a holistic approach to looking at students as individuals. It rejects the idea that students are blank slates that need to adjust to normative educational practices. Instead, students come to school with a whole background that includes their past experiences, their native language, their family, their religion, their cultural practices, and much more.

Culturally responsive teaching is about bringing those elements of students' lives into the classroom in a respectful way. Students' cultures and perspectives can become parts of their lessons and can inform the projects they create and the essays they write.

One of the primary areas of consideration for teachers interested in cultural responsiveness is the established curriculum itself. Literature is a great example. When looking at the literature that most American students read in high school, the list will be overwhelmingly written by white, usually male authors, largely from Britain and America: William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so on. Culturally responsive teaching understands that there is nothing wrong with teaching those texts—indeed, they are valuable contributions to the literary canon. However, they are not the only meaningful contributions.

A culturally responsive curriculum could intersperse these more commonly read books with others by writers whose perspectives are less often heard. James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, and N. Scott Momaday could be inspiring options for bringing more diverse cultural perspectives into a literature curriculum.

The point of culturally responsive teaching is not to erase or overwrite the existing curriculum. Instead, the idea is to bring in other cultural perspectives as well, ultimately creating a more well-rounded view of the world for students. Students whose cultures are underrepresented in mainstream curricula get the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the educational landscape, and all students get to learn more about cultures that they might not previously have known much about.

Cultural responsiveness can also deliberately tailor curricula to be relevant to students' personal histories and cultural landscape while providing crucial foundations that students will use throughout their lives.

Elements of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Culturally responsive pedagogy takes many different forms. It begins with educators and requires interested teachers to extensively research the cultural elements they want to bring into the classroom. Teachers can develop increased cultural competence, meaning they have an extensive knowledge base to draw from while teaching. That knowledge base then becomes the backdrop for any lesson plans they develop, allowing for more nuanced teaching that is less likely to rely on outdated stereotypes or limited information.

The next element of culturally responsive pedagogy is student learning. Culturally responsive curricula must be designed to provide thorough, detailed information to students that they can then integrate into their understanding of the world. Cultural elements should not be an afterthought in the curriculum; they should be emphasized whenever possible and appropriate. That often means looking at the same phenomenon from varying angles or perspectives.

For instance, during a lesson about various holidays, teachers could make a point to incorporate non-Christian holidays celebrated in the United States and around the world. They could also ask students to provide input on their own family traditions, allowing students to bring their expertise into the classroom and promote cultural bridge-building.

Finally, culturally responsive pedagogy intends to help students develop critical consciousness. It is a strategy that teaches students to ask questions and challenge assumptions. During a history lesson, students might learn to ask: Who wrote this particular historical document? What were their motivations for doing so? What were their cultural biases? Whose history is being told, and whose history is being left out?

Learning to ask these questions can help students learn basic historiography while also learning to challenge established social systems in service of a more just and equitable world. Culturally responsive teaching is not just about increasing cultural awareness. It is also about teaching students critical thinking so that they are better equipped to work for justice and more interested in and informed about the lived experiences of those around them.

Why Is Culturally Responsive Teaching Important?

Culturally responsive teaching was originally discussed as a way to improve academic outcomes for Black students and other students of color, and that remains one of its primary goals. There is a long-documented history of achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups in the United States. These disparities are partly due to systemic inequality in America, including deep wage gaps and differences in upward economic mobility.

There is also evidence that students of color have higher levels of academic success when they work with teachers of color. Respecting and incorporating a student's cultural background in the classroom does seem to make students feel more comfortable in an educational environment and makes them more likely to succeed.

Culturally responsive teaching aims to make school an accessible environment for all students, bridging that achievement gap and promoting a greater sense of belonging for all.

Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies

There are many strategies for culturally responsive teaching that can help educators bring this theory into their classrooms. Culturally responsive classrooms have several attributes in common, though they will vary based on the backgrounds of the students in a given class. Some strategies include:

• Engaging with students' prior knowledge
• Foregrounding students' expertise
• Incorporating various perspectives into the curriculum
• Encouraging a culture of respect in the classroom

Prior Knowledge

To begin with, after teachers have passed their certification exams like the Praxis test or the CBEST exam, teachers who want to implement culturally responsive teaching strategies should try to engage with their students' prior knowledge. Students come into the classroom with their unique histories and expertise; allowing them to utilize that understanding is a crucial way of valuing their cultural knowledge in an educational environment. Teaching students how to make connections with what they already know is an essential practice for teachers who want their students to thrive inside and outside the classroom.

Student Expertise

Another valuable teaching strategy is to focus on what students do know—not what they don't know—when incorporating cultural responsiveness. That means that while schools aim to provide students with new information, there is much to be gained from building on students' expertise.

Perhaps some students in a classroom are Muslim, while most other students are Christian. As a project, students could create a short presentation about holidays associated with different religions. Giving Muslim students the opportunity to talk about their religious background is a great way to allow them to use their cultural expertise while also enriching the social studies curriculum for the entire classroom.

It is worth noting that when incorporating students' cultural backgrounds into the classroom, teachers should do their best to avoid tokenizing students. That means that although students may have expertise on a particular topic, they may or may not feel comfortable sharing that knowledge with the class and may be more interested in presenting on a different topic. They should not be pigeonholed into only working on some kinds of projects, and teachers should try not to make assumptions about students' interests or beliefs.

Striking the right balance between foregrounding students' cultures without tokenizing them can be challenging, but it is worth keeping in mind. Cultural responsiveness is all about seeing students as complex individuals with their own approaches to the world around them.

Diverse Perspectives

As previously noted, teachers can improve their cultural responsiveness by looking at the curriculum they are teaching and the books available in the classroom. That means considering various perspectives that might not be immediately intuitive. It is not necessarily possible to incorporate every perspective at all times. However, teachers should look at their curriculum and course material holistically and ask some of the following questions:

• Does this curriculum represent people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds?
• Do these books emphasize self-determination, or do they rely on stereotypes?
• Does this curriculum reflect various religions and cultural practices?
• Do the available books include perspectives from members of the LGBTQ community?
• Do the perspectives shown in this curriculum feature people with disabilities?
• How could this curriculum be improved to be more culturally responsive?

One of the best ways to improve cultural responsiveness is to be open-minded. Teachers can speak with students about what kinds of perspectives or the available books they would like to see incorporated into the curriculum and then educators can work on integrating their suggestions. A fully culturally responsive classroom is not going to develop all at once, but it can improve dramatically over time.

A Culture of Respect

At the heart of cultural responsiveness is respect. The theory champions respecting and elevating diverse perspectives so that students and teachers can better understand each other and everyone gets the most out of their education.

Teachers can work on teaching students how to respectfully ask questions about cultures, celebrate each other's differences, and find similarities. Although the theory was originally designed to serve students who are more likely to be left behind in the education system, cultural responsiveness can benefit everyone. It is a prolonged practice of empathy and compassion that can help build lasting relationships.

Examples of Culturally Responsive Teaching

Culturally responsive teaching can take many different forms. It all depends on the students in a given classroom and what their needs are when it comes to education. Because cultural responsiveness is influenced by the makeup of a given classroom, it is reliant on a teacher's adaptability.

There is always more to learn and explore, and culturally responsive teaching provides a framework through which that learning can take place. The following are example situations that would lend themselves well to cultural responsiveness in the classroom. They are by no means the only ways that teachers could integrate culturally responsive teaching into their curricula; this pedagogical theory is infinitely flexible.

Culturally Responsive Teaching and ELLs

English language learners, or ELLs, are students whose first language is not English. Sometimes, these students will be in specialized English education and taught by ESL teachers, but often they will integrate into standard classrooms. That can present several challenges, particularly for students who have only recently moved to the United States and might be adjusting both culturally and linguistically. Teachers who want to use culturally responsive teaching to help ELLs integrate into the classroom have several options.

They could provide students with assignments that allow them to build on their existing cultural knowledge simultaneously with their English skills. Another option would be to create assignments that directly compare English and the ELLs' native languages. Understanding how different languages are constructed is a great way to strengthen English skills while also learning more about another language and culture.

For instance, teachers could provide an introductory lesson, and then all students could make a list of similarities that they can find between the two languages. This lesson could tie in with English grammar lessons and would allow ELLs to build connections with native English speakers that rely on both of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

As with all examples of culturally responsive teaching, teachers should be careful not to embarrass ELLs or put them on the spot, particularly if they are very new to the class or very shy.

Racial Justice in the Classroom

Culturally responsive teaching was originally designed with students of color in mind and that remains one of its primary functions. In an American classroom, teachers might be working with students who are white, Black, Hispanic, Native American, or other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

An engaging way to help students better understand each other's cultural perspectives could be a genealogy assignment where students research their family trees and write about their ancestry. Some students might have generations-long ties to America, while others may only have arrived recently. Looking at these family trees could be a great way to help students understand the different perspectives they have grown up with and how those perspectives inform their lives in the present day.

As always, when dealing with sensitive topics like family history, teachers must be careful to respect students' experiences. Some students may be unable to complete genealogy assignments in the same amount of detail as others because of their family history. They might be adopted (although adoptive families are perfectly valid to include on a family tree), immigrated from countries where genealogical records are harder to access, or have serious traumas in their families that make it harder to discuss genealogical background.

In those cases, it is helpful for teachers to have backup assignments or potential solutions so that all students can participate; this understanding of varying backgrounds is part of culturally responsive teaching.

Cultural Responsiveness and Disability

Not all forms of culturally responsive teaching are about a student's racial or national background. Cultural responsiveness is about accessibility and inclusivity, which includes students with disabilities.

A great example of a way to integrate culturally responsive teaching could arise if any students in the class use American sign language (ASL). Students who are members of the Deaf community may speak ASL as their primary language, even if they also speak, read, and write in English.

Incorporating a few basic signs into the culture of the classroom is a great way to include Deaf students and explore their culture while also teaching other students about a cultural perspective that they might not otherwise have considered. Some Deaf students may even feel comfortable giving presentations (in English, ASL, or both) about Deaf culture and history, an important cultural perspective many other students might not have considered before.