Culturally Responsive Teaching

Explore Dr. Keffrelyn Brown’s six-part video Q&A series featuring explanations and resources about Culturally Responsive Teaching.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

What is culture?

Culture reflects the way people talk, interact, create, and make meaning in their everyday social worlds. It includes the materials and things that are created as a result of engagement in social and cultural worlds.

What does it mean to be a culturally responsive teacher?

Culturally responsive teachers provide a holistic learning experience that is responsive to the needs and identities of their students.

Why is it important to be culturally responsive?

Engaging in culturally responsive teaching is important because without it, educators may leave out other knowledge, perspectives, and approaches that reflect other groups and cultural knowledge that has been either ignored, misrepresented, or cast off as unimportant or irrelevant in the curriculum. This can cause students to feel disconnected from the school environment and, at worst, unmotivated and uninspired to learn because they cannot see themselves or their world in the curriculum.

What is the difference between culturally responsive and culturally relevant?

Culturally responsive and culturally relevant teaching seek to accomplish similar goals: to provide students with a quality education that values them, that draws from an inclusive and diverse set of knowledge and teaching practices, and equips students to think critically about themselves, others, and the world around them.

These terms both describe teaching and curriculum approaches that hold similar aims, but were theorized by different scholars using different methods and with different areas of emphasis.

Resources

Learner Profile Conversation Starters
Student Questionnaire Grades K-5
How to use culturally responsive teaching in the classroom – Explore this guide to culturally responsive teaching practices and strategies. See what this looks like in the classroom and get ideas for how to get started.

Q&A

How does culturally responsive teaching improve student engagement?

Culturally responsive teaching improves student engagement when students have authentic, caring relationships with teachers who believe that their students are capable and can learn. When those same students connect with and find that what they are learning is both relevant and representative of who they are, and the communities from which they are apart, those students want to learn.

How does culturally responsive teaching improve outcomes for learners?

Ideally, culturally responsive teaching is focused on making sure that the teacher is accessing and seeking out information about who their students are, what they need, what they like, what they dislike, what they want to know more about, the knowledge that they bring with them to school, their goals, and their aspirations. It is trying to understand the communities that students come from and the ways in which knowledge from those communities has either been rendered invisible in the curriculum or don’t occupy a prominent space in the curriculum.

The outcomes of that will both show up in their grades and in their performance in the classroom, but those are not the only places where that will play out. It will play out in strengthening their own cultural identities, improving how they understand the world around them, how they tackle problems, how they communicate with their peers and how they talk across differences.

How can culturally responsive teaching be utilized to further social justice?

Schools have historically been limited in the kinds of knowledge and experiences that they make available to students and that they draw from when working with students. When we provide students with experiences and knowledge that broaden the curriculum and make it more diverse, we are in fact engaging in a more just educational experience. We are helping students to widen their own perspectives and knowledge base–all students, not only students of color. When we take seriously who our students are and what they bring to the table, we are offering a more inclusive and just opportunity to engage deeply in the school experience.

Resources

Culturally Responsive Teaching – An analysis of teaching standards in all 50 states to better understand whether states incorporate culturally responsive teaching.
Building positive relationships with students: What brain science says – Brain science tells us why positive student relationships can lead to their success.

Poster: Effects of Culturally Responsive Pedagogy - Increased Engagement, Better Communication Among Teachers and Students, Strengthened Cultural Identities, Improved Understanding, Increased Curiosity

Q&A

What are Funds of Knowledge?

Bodies of knowledge, experience, abilities, and assets that a group or an individual holds based on their everyday living and working in the world. Utilizing Funds of Knowledge within the classroom makes schooling more responsive and relevant to students, but also it builds knowledge and experiences back into the curriculum that have historically been excluded.

What does it look like to teach in a culturally responsive way?

Teaching reading in a culturally responsive way means making sure that we have reading materials that are available to students that represent a wide variety of perspectives and cultural knowledges. Some of these will align with who our students are in the classroom but, some will go beyond who the students are in the classroom. It also means making sure that we are respecting, valuing, drawing from, and helping to enrich the reading practices that we know our students bring with them to school. It also means acknowledging the variety of different ways that students have engaged in reading within their own school, within their own community, and home spaces.

What kinds of questions should teachers ask themselves as they choose books/writings for students?

What is my goal for bringing in this literature?
What am I trying to do?
How does this work relate to the students who are in the classroom?
How do the experiences in the book represent the experiences of the children in the classroom?
Do the children get to see representations of people who look like them?
Do the children get to see representations of the communities that they are a part of?
Whose story is being told?
What narrative is being told?

Resources

10 Things to Know About Your English Language Learners – Learn about the importance of getting to know the English language learners (ELLs) in your class. Here’s all the information you can collect to provide the right supports.
5 Ways to Audit Your Classroom Library for Inclusion – Is your classroom bookshelf all that it can be, for every kid in your class? Here’s how to bring it up to speed.
Funds of Knowledge inventory matrix activity

Related Book

50 Literacy Strategies for Culturally Responsive Teaching, K – 8
by Patricia Ruggiano Schmidt and Wen Ma

Q&A

How does culturally responsive teaching support student Social Emotional Learning (SEL)?

When we create spaces where students are valued and where it’s clear that the teacher has strong, authentic, caring relationships built on high expectations, we create an environment where students are learning how to value one another. They are getting exposed to a variety of different kinds of experiences. Because value is placed on learning about difference and being able to talk across difference, critical thinking is also valued, and you are going to create spaces where students are learning how to talk with one another in community.

Culturally relevant pedagogy, in particular, as well as culturally responsive pedagogy, are deeply interested in communal aspects of learning- that it’s not about creating environments that are fostering fierce competition across students with the belief that only some students will be able to be successful, but the assumption is that ALL of our students can be successful and that we’re here to work in the Community.

How can teachers ensure SEL practices are culturally responsive?

When we talk about social and emotional aspects of a person’s life, it’s important to remember that everyone doesn’t understand or address socio-emotional issues in the same way. It’s vitally important that teachers think about how culture may play a role in the ways that different students interact and engage with one another. It’s important that we don’t demonize or cause some perspectives to be seen as bad way to engage with one another. I think it’s important to bring the same sort of socio-cultural lens to the way that we do social emotional learning in the same way that we bring that lens to our teaching and our curriculum practices. We’re always seeking out different approaches that may play out across different cultural spaces and value those different ways of engaging that are useful and that can help us to develop that social emotional capacity for students.

Resources

The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) – A nonprofit, nonpartisan leader in social and emotional learning uniquely positioned to evaluate programming, curate research, inform legislation and partner on implementation.
Making SEL Culturally Competent – Teaching students about oppression and critical consciousness is a vital component of social-emotional learning.
Teaching Diverse Learnings Using Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Fact Sheet

Related Book

Book cover of Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Bain — Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students
by Zaretta Hammond

Q&A

How can teachers create a supportive, culturally responsive classroom community?

How can teachers partner with the families and caretakers of students to further cultural responsiveness?

One of the most important things that you can do is to reach out to parents and to let them know that you not only view them as partners in their students’ learning, but that you actually want to include them in their students’ learning. Bring them into the classroom, bring them into the school. Draw from the perspectives and knowledge and experiences that they hold, and check in with them to find out to learn more. Where do they think their child needs to learn and grow? What are the aspirations that they hold for their students? What are the things that their children love to do and learn, and what are the things that they’re not so keen on? Parents know their children very well and hold big dreams for them. One of the best ways that we can partner with our families in the building of classroom community in school is to find ways to include them in various substantive ways in our everyday teaching.

Resources

Making Students and Families Feel Welcome – How Schools Can Support Immigrant Students and Families
Family and Community Engagement – Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education
Cuestionario para familias
Family Questionnaire

Q&A

What other resources do you suggest teachers check out in this topic/area?

Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings coined the term culturally relevant pedagogy and introduced that work through a book that is still quite popular called “The Dream-Keepers: Successful Teachers of African American Students”. While that particular research study focused on teachers who worked effectively with African American students, the work is relevant to other students of color, and to other students period. She has a new book that will be published soon where she’s revisiting culturally relevant pedagogy (“Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Asking a Different Question”).

Dr. Geneva Gay has also published a book called “Culturally Responsive Teaching” which approaches the idea from a different standpoint.

And then, of course, the work of Dr. Django Paris, who theorized the idea of culturally sustaining pedagogy (which really built on an expanded the idea of culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy) to think about language and other forms of identity.

What are you currently researching?

I am engaged right now in a research project with Dr. Anthony Brown and Dr. Daina Ramey Berry around the teaching of slavery and race, both in the U.S. and Texas context. We’re interested in how teachers think and do that work in the classroom, and in what areas they would like to deepen their practice.

What advice do you have for early-career teachers?

Make it a goal to do this work, recognizing that it is important, and is a lifelong process. Don’t go into the classroom assuming that as a novice teacher, the way that you understand the work today is how you’re going to understand that work in 5, 10, 15, 20 years; it’s not going to be the same. It is going to get deeper as long as you continue to do the work every day.

I am thrilled that we continue to produce teachers who are interested and recognize the vital necessity for culturally relevant and responsive teaching. I applaud you for your efforts and look forward to seeing how you will grow and develop through the Texas Education START program and beyond.

Related Books

**Culturally Responsive Teaching** – Theory, Research, and Practice
by Geneva Gay

Book cover for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies — **Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies** – Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World
by Django Paris, H. Samy Alim

Book cover for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy — **Culturally Relevant Pedagogy** – Asking a Different Question
by Gloria Ladson-Billings

**The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children**
by Gloria Ladson-Billings

Learn more about Dr. Brown.

Email LeAnne if you have questions or would like to connect with Dr. Brown.