If anybody had an education like me, there wasn't much variety in how content was being taught. It was as if education had to fit into a nice, neat, little box. Desks were usually positioned in rows. Everyone was facing the same direction. The teacher taught from the front of the classroom and students were expected to remember and reproduce what the teacher had been teaching. There wasn't much room for deviation inside the box of education. There wasn't much room for creativity. There wasn't much room for flexibility.
There wasn't room for demonstration.
There wasn't room for story telling.
There wasn't room for research.
There wasn't room for trial and error.
The box was completely void of culturally responsive teaching.
Up until this point in my life, I didn't know much about culturally responsive teaching. What I did know revolved around race and ethnicity. I assumed that if I were going to be a good culturally responsive teacher, then I would make sure my students could accept and appreciate the different races and ethnicities that made up the classroom. I would instill pride in each of my students for who they are and where they came from. I would use resources in the classroom that looked like, acted like, spoke like my students.
While these things aren't bad and should be included in the classroom, they miss the point of what culturally responsive teaching is.
As the great Zaretta Hammond puts it, "culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools." These learning styles come from the adults in their lives that were teaching them before a teacher ever came along. They make up the culture that the students grow up in.
Using cultural icons and images in teaching is like using the easy approach to culturally responsive teaching. Anybody can make observations about culture from afar. You don't really have to come into "contact" with another culture to reference its icons and images. To understand learning styles and tools though, is to dig deep into what makes a culture tick.
Consider those students that learn well by telling and sharing stories. What does this say about their culture? In many cases it highlights the importance of community and heritage. It shows that relating things to the past teaches us about the future. It shows that retelling stories always has some kind of lesson associated with it. Culturally responsive teaching invites culture into the classroom instead of the two being separate.
As a teacher, I need to recognize that education can no longer fit into a box. It draws from methods and learning styles seen in cultures from all around the world. It allows the box to overflow with new and exciting things.
Great post - very thought provoking, James! I do think it's important to differentiate instruction based on the different brain dominance types (demonstration, trial & error, story telling, and research). I wonder how much research there is about the friction between these overlapping learning styles in the classroom. For example, for a trial and error dominant brain, being in a story telling classroom could be overwhelming or agitating. While this could be true from a student's perspective, I wonder how a teacher's brain dominance impacts her classroom? Addressing the unspoken bias in a classroom is so important, and that bias could be from curriculum, students, or teachers. Being an educator requires us to not only be aware of our students but also to be aware of our own deficits and biases - tough stuff! Kids are going to be very lucky to have you as their teacher, James! :)
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