My Essential Question

History is boring...Not everyone feels this way...

How can I see things from other people's perspectives/ point of views?

I was having a conversation with myself…

How do I take my students' experiences/ likes/ dislikes/ feelings into account?

I am already open-minded and accepting, consider myself comfortable in regards to cultural diversity and sensitive to others' differences...

What more can I do? I asked.

Then my essential question occurred to me…

How do I teach my content through the eyes of my students?

I came across an article by Geneva Gay entitled Teaching To and Through Cultural Diversity, which talks about culturally responsive teaching; and its message really spoke to me. In the article Gay speaks passionately about culturally responsive teaching; referring often to her 2010 book Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. It helped me begin to think about how to answer my question. The following is by no means in my own words but is also not directly quoted from the article. I collected the parts that spoke to me and pieced them together in the following paragraphs…

Culturally responsive teaching is defined as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them. It is a means for improving achievement by teaching diverse students through their own cultural filters. This form of teaching is contingent on seeing cultural differences as assets; creating caring learning communities where culturally different individuals and heritages are valued; using cultural knowledge of ethnically diverse cultures, families, and communities to guide curriculum development, classroom climates, instructional strategies, and relationships with students; challenging racial and cultural stereotypes, prejudices, racism, and other forms of intolerance, injustice, and oppression; being change agents for social justice and academic equity; mediating power imbalances in classrooms based on race, culture, ethnicity, and class; and accepting cultural responsiveness as endemic to educational effectiveness in all areas of learning for students from all ethnic groups. Culturally responsive teaching: validates, facilitates, liberates, and empowers ethnically diverse students by cultivating their cultural integrity, individual abilities, and academic success.

In the United States teachers are predominately middle class, female, monolingual, and of European ancestry, while students are increasingly poor and linguistically, ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse. These differences make linking culturally responsive teaching explicitly to regular classroom functions even more important. A key mandate of culturally responsive teaching is accessing this internal strength of ethnically diverse students and communities and using it to improve their personal agency and educational achievement. Culturally responsive teaching is at once a routine and a radical proposal. It is routine because it does for Native American, Latino, Asian American, African American, and low-income students what traditional instructional ideologies and actions do for middle-class European Americans by filtering curriculum content and teaching strategies through their cultural frames of reference making it more personally meaningful and easier to master. It is radical because it makes explicit the previously implicit role of culture in teaching and learning and it insists that educational institutions accept the legitimacy and viability of ethnic group cultures in improving learning outcomes. The close interactions among ethnic identity, cultural background, and cognition are becoming increasingly apparent. It is these interactions that give source and focus, power and direction to culturally responsive teaching.

Culturally responsive teaching, in idea and action, emphasizes localism and contextual specificity. That is, it exemplifies the notion that instructional practices should be shaped by the sociocultural characteristics of the settings in which they occur, and the populations for whom they are designed. One of the core tenets of culturally responsive teaching: to respect and respond to the particular diversities in each classroom. It is futile for educators to claim they can attend to the needs of students, academically or otherwise, without engaging their cultural socialization or to expect students to divorce themselves from their cultural heritages easily and at will. Culturally responsive teaching helps teachers to genuinely see and accept culture, race, and difference as potentially empowering factors for educating students, grounding teaching in the notions that success generates success, that competence builds confidence, and that regardless of how marginalized or disadvantaged an individual student or ethnic group may be according to external criteria, there is some kind of capability within.

Teaching To and Through Cultural Diversity by Geneva Gay University of Washington