How to Not White-Out Education? Strategies for Using Culturally Responsive Teaching

By Zainab Cheema 

Disney’s Ms Marvel recently gave a shout-out to culturally responsive education. In Episode 2 of the hit show starring Pakistani American superhero Kamala Khan, her activist best friend Nakia complains about their high school cramming World History and Civilizations in 2 weeks of the school year while spending months teaching English and American History. I can see her point. As a professor of World Literature and English literature, I hear my students of color express a sense of confidence when they have an opportunity to connect with aspects of their cultural backgrounds in class. I also hear my white students’ excitement in learning about new cultural backgrounds and gaining the cultural competencies that they know they need in a globalized world. In our classrooms, cultural diversity has to be the piece de’resistance. It can’t be an afterthought.

Culturally responsive education means seeing your and your students’ cultures as assets in the learning process. Educator Matthew Lynch calls it “a student-centered approach to teaching in which the students’ unique cultural strengths are identified and nurtured to promote student achievement.” The result? “It encourages a sense of well-being about the student’s cultural place in the world.” By contrast, whitening out education means that you are giving “knowledge” from a single perspective that presumes neutrality and universality. I call this whitening out education because we are leaning into forms of knowledge communication that white students generally have high competency with in comparison to students of color (the achievement gap). As author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie would call it, it is a single story. Whitening out education limits the learning process. It also leads to low student engagement in both white students and students of color.

It’s all well and good to say “be culturally relevant to your students,” but what does this mean? Culture involves worldviews, languages, values, beliefs, lifestyle practices and family- and community-based experiences, as Jacqueline Jordan Irvine puts it. Educator Geneva Gay sees culture as the set of filters through which human beings make sense out of the most ordinary things. How do we transform these aspects of our students into assets in the learning process? In my last blog, I promised to give you practical strategies and tips for using culturally relevant education in your classroom. What are some ways you can put it into action? Check out my top 2 strategies.   

Invite Students to Bring Culture into the Classroom.

As the teacher, you have to model cultural openness for your students. In mainstream K-12 schooling, students are taught to maintain a separation between their personal lives and academic lives. They see knowledge as abstract goals that they need for a grade; or inert tools for professional success. This mindset privileges the whited-out model of education I talked about above. Instead, you have to invite them to see the personal as part of knowledge creation. You have to invite them to see value in and share their cultural knowledges (to the point at which they are comfortable).

How to send the invitation to bring culture into the classroom? Share your own cultural experiences and reference points when illustrating concepts and giving examples in class. When modeling how metaphors work in a language arts class, translate a metaphor or saying relevant to your cultural background and tell a short 1-2 sentence backstory about how you discovered it. For instance, maybe you fell in love with a volume of poems in a small French bookstore in Paris when you were on a summer exchange program. Or perhaps your South Asian grandmother had a pet saying about how to deal with difficult people. When teaching them about math problems, use material examples and scenarios that involve Native American or South Asian or African American spaces and material cultures. Alternatively, you can speak any of the languages or share cultural competencies with your heritage students, reference it in class. For instance, if you speak Spanish, you might make reference to Spanish Youtubers’ Nana parody videos when discussing a relevant concept.  

Doing so will signal to students that their cultural backgrounds and experiences are also valuable to the collective learning experience. As Matthew Lynch notes, this applies POC students AND for white students because idea that white students don’t have a culture is a myth. “A common side effect of being raised in the dominant European-American culture is the self-perception that “I’m an American; I don’t have a culture,” says Lynch. Instead, get white students to see their cultural experiences making pirogis with their Polish grandmother are also repositories of learning and experience.  As Geneva Gay says, teachers need to legitimize cultural, linguistic personal experiences as significant sources of knowledge.

Design Culturally Responsive Assignments

Educators know that reflection is a powerful tool that stimulates critical thinking and learning. Consider designing at least one assignment in your course that asks students to channel their cultural and community-based knowledges. When designing this assignment, use these guiding questions that I have adapted from Adeyemi Stembridge. Ask yourself

• In what ways does my assignment encourage reference of culture?
• How does my assignment allow students to draw from their cultural knapsack?
• How does my assignment support students in bridging their social/cultural identities with their academic identities?

These guiding questions can be used to adapt one of your existing assignments on skills or content knowledges. For instance, some writing classes ask students to conduct interviews as a way of teaching them how to use diverse secondary sources. You could adapt such an assignment to give them the choice to interview someone important to them from their family or community (even their sister or brother). When teaching poetry, you might crowd source one of the texts for class discussion by asking students to bring in songs or lyrics that hold cultural meaning for them. Once again, model with a poem or song that holds meaning for you to signal that your classroom embraces cultural as well as mainstream knowledge. You might ask students to generate an oral history or map that visualizes aspects of mobilities and events important to them. This could be used in civics, gen-ed, literature, history, urban studies, and many other classes. For instance, in my lesson on The Odyssey, I might have students create a short oral history or a map visualizing a migration undertaken by an ancestor, family member, culturally significant historical figure or even an invented character. As a resource to help you create more inclusive classroom lessons and assignments, check out this fantastic rubric for Culturally Responsive Lessons and Assignments developed by Jean Aguilar-Valdez.

Try it out and let me know how it goes.

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