Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Quotes

Addressing the cultural differences between teachers and students requires what educational researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings describes as culturally relevant pedagogy.7 This approach to teaching advocates for a consideration of the culture of the students in determining the ways in which they are taught. Unfortunately, this approach cannot be implemented unless teachers broaden their scope beyond traditional classroom teaching.

one consequence of discussing racism only as a historical artifact is that it denies children the opportunity to engage those issues as highly relevant to their own lives and the society in which they currently live.

Fostering cultural competence as conceived by Ladson-Billings (1994) is not problematic if mainstream U.S. culture reflects and resonates with students’ cultural identities. In the instances in which students’ cultural identities and mainstream U.S. culture are not in sync and students’ cultural identities are marginalized, this cultural competence “uses student culture in order to maintain it [student culture] and to transcend the negative effects of the dominant culture” (Ladson-Billings 1994, p. 17).

Although he does not speak for all beginning secondary English teachers, we feel Matthew’s thoughts and experiences speak to the disconnect between understanding the concept of culturally responsive teaching and becoming a culturally responsive teacher. Like many beginning English teachers, he understands the concept of cultural responsiveness; he struggles, however, with how to move from the theory studied during preparation to the practice required for the classroom. There is no easy answer to this disconnect.

our experience in the classroom exposed a core theoretical contradiction of critical pedagogy— what I call the central paradox of critical pedagogy. This term refers to critical pedagogy’s paradoxical aims of, on the one hand, valuing the popular or subjugated knowledge of participants while, on the other hand, seeking to impose particular forms of specialized knowledge on those very participants.

At that time, culturally relevant pedagogy consisted exclusively of urban young adult novels and hip-hop rap assignments doled out to the poor and Black students. Many teachers truly believed that they were offering culturally relevant pedagogy by offering “minorities” and “low-income students” stereotypical cultural activities.

In many encapsulations of culturally relevant pedagogy, three elements are emphasized: (1) academic excellence for all students, (2) the fostering of cultural competence, and (3) the development of a critical social consciousness.

At the risk of oversimplification, one aspect of CRP strives to use learners’ cultural ways of being and knowing as a vehicle for instruction as well as a source of content, while place-based learning takes as its starting point the varying contexts from which learners come—though both certainly can and do draw from cultural and contextual sources of knowledge.

Cultivating an atmosphere of respect through caring relationships is particularly significant for Latino and Latina students (Garza 2008) as it is a critical source of motivation for Latino and Latina students who may feel marginalized by the schooling process (Perez 2000). Ladson-Billings (2009) found that the ability to form positive relationships between students and teacher was one of the most important criteria for identifying exemplary CRP educators. Gay (2000) emphasizes that the actual sites for determining successful learning resides in the interactions between learners—and between learners and their teacher. The fact that this positive student-teacher relationship was missing adds another dimension to the explanation of student nonperformance.

Spanish-language literacy development needs to be contextualized and embedded in real-world experiences that are completed for authentic purposes such as volunteering with Spanish monolingual children or elders, shadowing a Spanish-English court interpreter, or writing an immigration narrative of a family member. Reading and writing thus is not an end in itself, but a necessary means for effective communication, especially if that communication holds meaning for the student. Through authentic practice, students will understand how developing their Spanish-language literacy can be useful to them and may realize that classroom learning can develop skills that are not readily developed through casual conversation.

Could it be that a young, Black, working-class boy is always already perceived as vulgar within the nomos of schooling and therefore in need of harsh punishment to correct such deviant language practices and thoughts and force him in line with the unspoken rules of which he is only beginning to decipher? Whereas a White, middle-class girl who is typically a teacher-pleaser is always already perceived as fitting into the nomos of school, slipping into the context like a glove, and therefore in need only of a raised eyebrow or subtle reminder of the unspoken rules of refinement and civility in school that she already understands completely? Pacing, pacing, pacing.

Shake up the embodied discursive world of teacher education so we don’t produce the same repressed, rigid teachers who will move on to K– 12 settings and construct similarly repressive spaces.