Education So White? Transforming Your Classroom with Culturally Responsive Teaching

By Zainab Cheema 

The Achievement Gap vs Culturally Responsive Teaching

What is culturally responsive teaching? By seeing students’ cultural differences as assets in their learning process, you can transform your classroom into a culturally rich space that excites students to learn. You can even make a dent in your classroom’s achievement gap. In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the approaches and benefits of culturally responsive teaching and make a case for why you should incorporate it in your teaching tool kit.

When we talk about how to level the achievement gap of higher education, we have to confront the whiteness of education. It’s no secret. Structural inequality’s imprint on the education system can be seen in the racial breakdown of learning paths. Advanced placement classes and accelerated programs mostly cater to white students, catapulting them towards the treadmill of upward mobility and success. In contrast, remedial programs are mostly populated with minority and POC students, who respond to the low expectations and low-quality teaching common to those spaces by sliding further down the achievement pole. As a teacher, I’ve seen the achievement gap play out in my classrooms, where my white students tend to enter the classroom with better preparation in language arts and study skills than my POC students.

But here’s what’s inspiring about culturally responsive teaching. By affirming and supporting cultural diversity in classrooms, teachers like me have noticed that both white students and students of color become more engaged with the material. The achievement gap between different groups of students narrows (and even closes). By the end of the semester, not only do my white students demonstrate a strong learning curve, but my minority students also rocket to achievement levels that are comparable to their white peers. As John Leguizamo says in his hit Broadway show and Netflix special, Latin History for Morons, if you don’t see yourself represented outside of yourself, you just feel invisible. The flip side is that by gaining affirmation for your culture in your learning space, students of color feel empowered and motivated to work harder. Additionally white students feel more invested in the kind of learning that engages the whole classroom and that reflects a more dynamic picture of the world. If you want similar results for your classroom, consider taking a page or two from the playbook of culturally responsive teaching.

What is Culturally Responsive Teaching?

Jeffrey Dessources had described culturally responsive pedagogy as an approach to teaching that “infusing the students’ cultural references in their learning.” In other words, a successful classroom scaffolds learning through cultural materials and approaches that build on students’ cultural backgrounds. The first (and perhaps easiest) way to do this is by reading and multimedia materials. Bringing in culturally diverse texts into your modules is a way to imaginatively recreate the canon in ways  that can stimulate your students to engage in content learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving in real world contexts.

Culturally responsive teaching also means being attentive to the way students’ different learning styles are influenced by cultural backgrounds. As Zaretta Hammond points out, many students of color come from households with strong oral cultures, where learning and transmission of knowledge takes place in richly oral ways. Speaking for own background, my grandparents would often weave in Urdu poetry quotes in their conversation as way to channel reflection and resilience in life challenges. Similarly, Hammond observes students from African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander communities derive from strong oral cultures. “These cultural groups use the brain’s memory systems for turning inert information into useable knowledge,” says Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. “They use memory strategies to make learning sticky, like connecting what needs to be remembered to a rhythm or music (that’s why we still know the [Jackson Five’s] ABC song) or by reciting it in fun ways like a poem, riddle, or limerick.” Cognitive science shows that modeling students’ cultural learning styles can help plant learning on a deeper level. 

One caveat though. Do not confuse culturally responsive teaching with tokenism, that is, pigeonholing students into static cultural categories. Tokenism will absolutely defeat the purpose of this approach. Culturally responsive teaching means that teachers have to actively listen for the ways in which students interpret their own hybrid, evolving identities. It means being sensitive to the way all students have hybrid cultural affiliations. Students are negotiating and innovating their relationships with mainstream culture and their communities on a daily basis, and the teacher has listen for the way they innovate their scripts. Having been incorrectly pegged as “Middle Eastern” in my high school (while my ethnic background is South Asian) reflected in everything from the way teachers mispronounced my name to the stereotypes they held about me. Tokenism will only make students feel more silenced.

UDL and Culturally Responsive Teaching

Some culturally responsive teachers work in oral methods of learning into their lesson plans and assessments. A good approach could be to turn to UDL, which advocates that teachers build maximum flexibility in learning to account for diverse learning styles. If teachers build a relationship with the communities from which their students come, they can become mindful of alternate learning styles and methods. This can allow them to offer alternatives to assignments that allows students to tap into alternate ways of learning and showing knowledge. For instance, it might mean offering an alternative to the written essay that allows students to compose an audio or multimedia version of the assignment to leverage the rich contexts of their cultural backgrounds and the creativity they can leverage in cultural modes of expression.  One of the students in my World Literature class this past Spring was a music major, and conversations about her interests allowed me to tailor a written assignment on South Asian epics for her. The result? A fantastic musical composition incorporating Indian ragas with Western symphony that met the criteria of the assignment but in the context of the music education that the student felt passionate about. I couldn’t stop smiling the whole day after we played her composition in class.

Next week, I will be writing about practical ways of designing culturally responsive lesson plans that can elevate your classroom. Stay tuned for next week’s Part 2.  

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