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Culturally responsive teaching is:
Validating,
Comprehensive,
Multidimensional,
Empowering,
Transformative,
and Emancipatory (Gay, 2000).
Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Validating
Gay (2000) defines culturally responsive teaching
as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance
styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and
effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these
students. Gay (2000) also describes culturally responsive teaching
as having these characteristics:
- It acknowledges the legitimacy of the cultural heritages of
different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students'
dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy
content to be taught in the formal curriculum.
- It builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school
experiences as well as between academic abstractions and lived
sociocultural realities.
- It uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are
connected to different learning styles.
- It teaches students to know and praise their own and each others'
cultural heritages.
- It incorporates multicultural information, resources, and
materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools
(p. 29).
Using these characteristics to improve culturally
responsive teaching would involve considerations to the classroom
environment. Literature in the classroom would reflect multiple
ethnic perspectives and literary genres. Math instruction would
incorporate everyday-life concepts, such as economics, employment,
consumer habits, of various ethnic groups. In order to teach to
the different learning styles of students, activities would reflect a
variety of sensory opportunities-visual, auditory, tactile (Gay, 2000).
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Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Comprehensive
Ladson-Billings (1992) explains that culturally
responsive teachers develop intellectual, social, emotional, and
political learning by "using cultural referents to impart
knowledge, skills, and attitudes" (p. 382). In a sense,
culturally responsive teachers teach the whole child (Gay, 2000).
Hollins (1996) adds that education designed specifically for students of
color incorporates "culturally mediated cognition, culturally
appropriate social situations for learning, and culturally valued
knowledge in curriculum content" (p. 13). Culturally
responsive teachers realize not only the importance of academic
achievement, but also the maintaining of cultural identity and heritage
(Gay, 2000).
Ladson-Billings (1994) studied actual instruction
in elementary classrooms and observed these values being demonstrated.
She saw that when students were part of a more collective effort
designed to encourage academic and cultural excellence, expectations
were clearly expressed, skills taught, and interpersonal relations were
exhibited. Students behaved like members of an extended
family-assisting, supporting, and encouraging each other. Students
were held accountable as part of a larger group, and it was everyone's
task to make certain that each individual member of the group was
successful. By promoting this academic community of learners,
teachers responded to the students' need for a sense of belonging,
honored their human dignity, and promoted their individual self-concepts
(Gay, 2000).
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Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Multidimensional
Multidimensional culturally responsive teaching
involves many things: curriculum content, learning context, classroom
climate, student-teacher relationships, instructional techniques, and
performance assessments. Teacher from various disciplines (lanuage
arts, science, social studies, music) may collaborate in teaching a
single cultural concept, such as protest. Students can also participate
actively in their own performance evaluations (Gay, 2000).
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Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Empowering
Culturally responsive teaching enables students to
be better human beings and more successful learners. Empowerment
can be described as academic competence, self-efficacy, and
initiative. Students must believe they can succeed in learning
tasks and have motivation to persevere. Teachers must demonstrate
ambitious and appropriate expectations and exhibit support for students
in their efforts toward academic achievement. This can be done
through attribution retraining, providing resources and personal
assistance, modeling positive self-efficacy beliefs, and celebrating
individual and collective accomplishments (Gay, 2000).
Shor (1992) characterizes empowering education as:
- a critical-democratic pedagogy for self and social change.
It is a student-centered program for multicultural
democracy in school and society. It approaches individual
growth as an active, cooperative, and social process, because the
self and society create each other. . . The goals of this pedagogy
are to relate personal growth to public life, to develop strong
skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical
curiosity about society, power, inequality, and change. . . The
learning process is negotiated, requiring leadership by the teacher,
and mutual teacher-student authority. In addition, . . . the
empowering class does not teach students to seek self-centered gain
while ignoring public welfare. (pp. 15-16)
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Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Transformative
Culturally responsive teaching does not
incorporate traditional educational practices with respect to students
of color (Gay, 2000). It means respecting the cultures and
experiences of various groups and then uses these as resources for
teaching and learning. It appreciates the existing strengths and
accomplishments of all students and develops them further in
instruction. For example, the verbal creativity and story-telling
that is unique among some African Americans in informal social
interactions is acknowledged as a gift and contribution and used to
teach writing skills. Other ethnic groups of students prefer
to study together in small groups. More opportunities for them and
other students to participate in cooperative learning can be provided in
the classroom. Banks (1991) asserts that if education is to empower
marginalized groups, it must be transformative. Being
transformative involves helping "students to develop the knowledge,
skills, and values needed to become social critics who can make
reflective decisions and implement their decisions in effective
personal, social, political, and economic action" (p. 131).
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Culturally Responsive Teaching is
Emancipatory
Culturally responsive teaching is liberating (Asante,
1991/1992; Au, 1993; Erickson, 1987; Gordon, 1993; Lipman, 1995;
Pewewardy, 1994; Philips, 1983). It guides students in
understanding that no single version of "truth" is total and
permanent. It does not solely prescribe to mainstream ways of
knowing. In order to accomplish this, teachers make authentic
knowledge about different ethnic groups accessible to students.
Gay (2000) states, "The validation, information, and pride it
generates are both psychologically and intellectually liberating"
(p. 35). This freedom results in improved achievement of many
kinds, including increased concentration on academic learning tasks.
Other improved achievements can include: clear and insightful thinking;
more caring, concerned, and humane interpersonal skills; better
understanding of interconnections among individual, local, national,
ethnic, global, and human identities; and acceptance of knowledge as
something to be continuously shared, critiqued, revised, and renewed
(Chapman, 1994; M. Foster, 1995; Hollins, 1996; Hollins, King, &
Hayman, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 1992, 1994, 1995a and 1995b; Lee, 1993;
Lee & Slaughter-Defoe, 1995).
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Reference:
Asante, M.K. (1991/1992). Afrocentric curriculum. Educational
Leadership, 49(4), 28-31.
Au, K.H. (1993). Literacy Instruction in Multicultural
Settings. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Chapman, I.T. (1994). Dissin' the dialectic on discourse
surface differences. Composition Chronicle, 7(7), 4-7.
Erickson, F. (1987). Transformation and school success: The
politics and culture of educational achievement. Anthropology and
Education Quarterly, 18(4), 335-383.
Foster, M. (1995). African American teachers and culturally
relevant pedagogy. In J.A. Banks, & C.A.M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook
of Research on Multicultural Education (pp. 570-581). New York:
Macmillan.
Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory,
Research, & Practice. New York:
Teachers College Press.
Gordon, B.M. (1993). African American cultural knowledge and
liberatory education; Dilemmas, problems, and potentials in a postmodern
American society. Urban Education, 27(4), 448-470.
Hollins,
E.R. (1996). Culture in School Learning: Revealing
the Deep Meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hollins,
E.R., King, J.E., & Hayman, W.C. (Eds.). (1994). Teaching
Diverse Populations: Formulating a Knowledge Base. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Ladson-Billings, B. (1992). Reading between the lines and
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Theory Into Practice, 31(4), 312-320.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful
Teachers for African-American Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995a). But that's just good teaching! The
case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice,
34(3), 159-165.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995b). Multicultural teacher
education: Research, practice, and policy. In J.A. Banks &
C.A.M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education
(pp. 747-759). New York: Macmillan.
Lee, C. (1993). Signifying as a Scaffold to Literary
Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implication of a Form of
African-American Discourse (NCTE Research Report No. 26). Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teacher of English.
Lee, C.D., & Slaughter-Defoe, D.T. (1995). Historical and
sociocultural influences on African American education. In J.A. Banks
& C.A.M. Banks (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Multicultural
Education (pp. 348-371). New York: Macmillan.
Lipman, P. (1995). "Bringing out the best in them":
The contribution of culturally relevant teachers to educational reform.
Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 202-208.
Pewewardy, C.D. (1994). Culturally responsive pedagogy in
action: An American Indian magnet school. In E.R. Hollins, J.E. King,
& W.C. Hayman (Eds.), Teaching Diverse Populations: Formulating a
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Philips, S.U. (1983). The Invisible Culture: Communication
in Classroom and Community on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.
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Shor, I. (1992). Empowering Education: Critical Teaching for
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