Cultural Competence

"She's just trying to act white." I remember those piercing but confusing words cutting me like a knife. I clinched my Super Reader certificate. My puzzled expression was taken as bravado by the African-American girls, who responded with a threatening question, "Do you want us to fix your face?"

Earlier this year I spoke with a group of teachers who reported seeing a dramatic increase in the number of Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) in their school district. Among their common concerns was a fear of not being able to effectively communicate with the students and their families. These teachers wanted to reach all their students and make them part of their class communities. And, they were very concerned with meeting the adequate yearly progress (AYP).

Teaching can be humanizing work.

This is how it happens.

The Rodriguez family walks down the hall and turns the corner to my room.

The first day of my second year of teaching, a third-grader walked into class, saw another student and punched him in the nose. He didn’t say anything or give any indication that he was going to do this. It just happened. After cleaning up the blood and redirecting the class, I asked the attacker why he wanted to punch someone else. “He’s Mexican,” he said. “He don’t belong in my class.”

At the start of my career as an eighth-grade language arts teacher, it never bothered me when students were described by teachers as “low,” “middle,” or “high” as a way to label their abilities. No disrespect was meant toward our learners; it was just a fast and easy way to describe our kids and get to know them when we had so little time with them.

In January 2010, two Somali men and one Oromo man were killed in a market in Minneapolis’ Seward neighborhood. Their shooters were two Somali-born teenagers, trying to commit an unsuccessful robbery at the corner store.

The news hit my school hard. Somali women cried, both for the victims and for the young perpetrators who had so clearly gone astray. An Oromo man pulled me aside and said, “I do not feel safe in this school. Some Somali guy shoots an Oromo guy, and I have to sit here? No.”  

Imani walked down the hall with a paper cup in her hands.

She stopped and held up the cup to me. Inside of its paper walls were soil, water, and seeds—all those humble and elemental things that build a third-grader's scientific knowledge.

Imani was growing cabbage. 

Consider the humble lunch as one of your most powerful teaching tools.

From the first day of school, Ricky was one of my most difficult students. Defensive, angry, and sensitive, this 7-year-old was constantly putting up walls and “testing” the adults in charge to see if we would respond to his needs. With the lack of a guidance counselor or a full-time school psychologist in the school, I knew that I had to find a way to connect with him, or we were going to have a disastrous school year.