What is culturally responsive pedagogy?  Do you see it in your class?

Field Experience Connection:  In my cooperating teacher's classroom, I have observed all five indicators of culturally responsive pedagogy.  My cooperating teacher has high expectations for all of her students.  She demands that they work hard, come in at lunch for additional help, and correct work for mastery.  Although her classes are grouped by ability level, she does not alter her expectations for the different blocks.  My cooperating teacher also has a positive perspective on parents and families.  I have observed my cooperating teacher during parent-teacher conferences, and she seeks to understand the parents' hopes, concerns, and suggestions about the student.  She wants to find out what is going on at home and how that may be affecting the student at school.   The parents and the teacher then work together to find an amicable solution that will improve the student's performance.  She also continues to communicate with the parents via weekly parent letters and occasional phone calls home.  My cooperating teacher also promotes active learning within the classroom.  The students have writing portfolios that they have been continuously adding to throughout the year.  The students will have six perfect pieces by the end of the year, so they will be able to look back and see how much they have improved within their writing abilities throughout their sixth grade year.  Varied teaching strategies also keep the students engaged.  The students are also switching from whole group instruction to individual work to learning teams.  As for socio-political awareness, my cooperating teacher rallies the students to participate in fundraisers, such as collecting pennies for leukemia.  The students are very involved in the fundraising and have chosen to donate their "pizza party money" back to the charity on several occasions this year.  I believe that my cooperating teacher does an excellent job of using culturally responsive pedagogy in her classroom. (For how I implemented culturally responsive pedagogy, please see the personal connection section).

Text/Research Connection:  Culturally responsive pedagogy has been defined by Gay (2000) as "using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them."  Culturally responsive teaching should acknowledge the legitmacy of cultural heritages and build "bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstractions and lived socio-cultural realties."  Culturally responsive pedagogy should also use a wide variety of instructional strategies to accommodate different learning styles.  In addition, multicultural information, resources, and materials should also be used within the classroom. 

For example, in Holler if You Hear Me, Gregory Michie uses a wide range of assignments to accommodate different learning styles.  He asked students to listen to their favorite song and analyze the meaning of the lyrics.  This assignment would interest auditory learners as well as students with a musical intelligence.  Michie designed this assignment after listening to his students' interests.  He had informally asked a pair of students to go home and really listen to the song and then tell him what it was about.  The students had responded with such enthusiasm because "popular music was surely the medium they connected with most passionately" (Michie, 1999, p. 99).  The students had the opportunity to bridge the gap between home and school by choosing a song that they listened to outside of school and use it as a homework assignment.  Students also had the freedom to choose any song that spoke to them, which opens up any cultural song choices.

Personal Connection:  Within my two-week unit, I have tried to make my lessons as culturally responsive as possible.  I realize that I am not a pro at doing this, but with experience as well as conversations with professional colleagues, I will improve my skills.  I did have high expectations for all of my classes and students.  I wanted each student to learn even though I realize that some students will learn at different paces.  I had to differentiate each day based on the different rates of learning, but I still made sure that the students were learning the same material.  While teaching, I had the opportunity to meet several parents as well as write several parent letters.  I share with my cooperating teacher the importance of keeping open communication between school and home.  I wanted to let the families know what we were doing in the classroom, so they can have a dialogue at home about what we had been discussing at school.  I do believe that culturally sensitivity was very important within my language arts class.  I had the opportunity to develop relationships with my students and tried each day to share a little bit about my life, so they would feel comfortable sharing about theirs.   I was even able to make it to one of the school dances, which was a great time.  The students thought it was fun to meet my husband and to see me in a different light.  Relationships are really important to the students.    In addition to learning about the students' backgrounds and community, the literature we selected for the two-week unit was able to tie into to many of the students' backgrounds.  We Beat the Street is an inspirational book about three boys who grew up in a tough neighborhood but were able to achieve their dreams of becoming doctors.  The adversities that these characters face often relate to many of the challenges that my students face on a daily basis.  I use this material in order to engage the students in open group discussion while we read a chapter each day.  Students then have the chance to deliberate between their personal lives and what happened within the text.  I feel that this is part of promoting active learning by making these personal connections.   I also modeled my teaching strategies after my cooperating teacher, so our classroom has a lot of varied teaching strategies, such as: whole class, small group, and individualized teaching situations.  In addition, students were able to use technology, peer teaching, and reader's theater as alternate teaching strategies that would try to accommodate various learning styles.  Within my two-week unit, I made sure that the students were able to make connections from the text to their community or neighborhood.  Could they think of examples of where this happens in their neighborhood?  I want the students to have socio-political awareness, which is the reason for always trying to connect what we learn to their community. 

Future Teaching/Learning Connection:  In the future, I would like to work on writing for action.  A literacy course I had enrolled in last summer taught us how to have students write for action, which would relate to Indicator 5 of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.  If I had more time than just two weeks, I would make sure that writing for action would be a priority in my classroom.  I want students to understand that they do have a voice in the community, and they can indeed be change agents.  Michie allowed his students to write for change by writing to the mayor on p. 137.    Students also connected to the world by writing to author Sandra Cisneros, which encouraged her to visit the school (p. 64). 

I also would like to explore many other teaching strategies that would promote active learning.  I like how Michie was able to incorporate music into his curriculum, and I think that my students would have responded to this as well.  In the future, I would like to tie more of my assignments into my students' passions.  I am excited about having many other opportunities in the future to add culturally responsive strategies to my curriculum.

References.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research & practice. New York: Teacher's College Press.

Michie, G. (1999). Holler if you hear me: The education of a teacher & his students. New York: Teacher's College Press.