Culturally relevant teachers are trained to focus on individual students' needs, prior experiences, knowledge and dispositions about learning. Culturally relevant teachers adjust their professional knowledge and training to address their students' needs. In helping learners make sense of new concepts and ideas, culturally relevant teachers create learning opportunities in which students' voices emerge and knowledge and meaning are constructed from the students' perspectives. This liberating teaching and learning process is likely to decrease, not increase, instances of stereotyping and labeling.
Culturally relevant teachers do not use teacher-effectiveness research as a set of rigid prescriptions to be modeled. Instead, they contextualize this body of research and use it to inform and guide their teaching practices. Culturally relevant teachers recognize that the research on effective teaching is instructive yet can often be limited by its static, generic and decontextualized nature. These teachers recognize that they do not instruct culturally homogenized, generic students in generic school settings, and that teachers armed with a repertoire of these generic teaching skills often find themselves ineffective and ill prepared when faced with a classroom of culturally diverse students. Consequently, the process of teacher self-reflection is an important aspect of culturally relevant pedagogy.
Reflection
Reflection enables teachers to examine the interplay of context and culture as well as their own behaviors, talents and preferences. Reflective teachers examine their actions, instructional goals, methods and materials in reference to their students' cultural experiences and preferred learning environments. The culturally relevant teacher probes the school, community and home environments, searching for insight, into diverse students' abilities, preferences and motivations. This type of reflection assists teachers in confronting their misunderstandings, prejudices and beliefs about race that impede the development of caring classroom climates, positive relationships with their students and families, and ultimately their students' academic success.
The following videos reinforce the importance of teacher reflection as a tool for addressing issues of racism:
- Hear Dorothy Strickland's view that teachers have power in their classroom and that their power is enhanced by probing and reflection.
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- For Sonia Nieto advises teachers to address the possibility that they are biased or prejudiced by unlearning in order to relearn.
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- Linda Darling-Hammond states that race is one of the predominant issues in our society and suggests that teachers cannot pretend to be colorblind.
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- Geneva Gay thinks that teachers must interrupt their taken-for-granted assumptions about race and think reflectively and critically about their own culture.
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Additional readings:
Teaching Tolerance has published articles that reinforce the points raised in this essay and videos. Carrie Kilman supports the notion that teachers must reflect on their own cultural filters in order to understand immigrant students' school experiences.
Kilman, C. Crossing Borders/Border Crossing, TT28, Fall 2005
