culturally relevant teaching
XPress
XPress contains articles from both research and practice about culturally relevant teaching.
- Culturally-responsive Pedagogy
- Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection
- Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom
- Urban schools: Teacher preparation for diversity
- Culturally responsive pedagogy for African American students: Promising programs and practices for enhanced academic performance
- Hearing Footsteps in the Dark: African American Students’ Descriptions of Effective Teachers
- They Don’t Show Nothing I Didn’t Know: Emergent Tensions Between Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Mathematics Pedagogy.
- INSIDE VOICES: A look at Culturally Responsive Pedagogy through the lens of students
- Critical Media Education and Radical Democracy
Culturally-responsive Pedagogy
AUTHOR
Tyrone C. Howard
ABSTRACT
In light of the changing ethnic, racial, and cultural demographics in the nation’s schools, an increasing number of scholars and practitioners have made the call for teaching practices that are informed by cultural knowledge possessed by students. In this entry, the author discusses culturally responsive pedagogy as a conceptual idea, and a practical way of rethinking ideology, content and pedagogy in a more racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse schools. The author defines the concept, discusses its dimensions, and offers additional sources for greater understanding of culturally responsive pedagogy.
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J.A. Banks (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
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Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection
AUTHOR
Tyrone C. Howard
ABSTRACT
Teacher reflection continues to be part of the teacher education literature. More recently, critical reflection has been recommended as a means of incorporating issues of equity and social justice into teaching thinking and practices. This article offers critical reflection as a prelude to creating culturally relevant teaching strategies. The author outlines theoretical and practical considerations of critical reflection and culturally relevant teaching for teacher education. The author argues that the development of culturally relevant teaching is contingent upon critical reflection about race and culture of teachers and their students.
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Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom
AUTHORS
Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell
ABSTRACT
Critical pedagogy is hotly discussed and highly debated in the academy. Its proponents draw upon important scholars (Freire, 1970; McLaren, 1994, 2003b; Giroux, 2001; hooks, 1994; Darder, 1991; Kincheloe, 2004; Shor, 1992) to argue for an approach to education that is rooted in the existential experiences of marginalized peoples; that is centered in a critique of structural, economic, and racial oppression; that is focused on dialogue instead of a one-way transmission of knowledge; and that is structured to empower individuals and collectives as agents of social change. Increasingly, critical pedagogy is being discussed as a potential component of urban school reform. Again, educators and researchers look to critical pedagogy as they consider ways to motivate students, to develop literacies and numeracies of power, and to engage students and their communities in the struggle for educational justice. We certainly applaud these goals, but we also feel as though the field at present insufficiently explores the applications of critical pedagogy to urban education.
For the past dozen years we have been dedicated to the enterprise of designing and investigating classroom interventions that are built upon the core principles of critical pedagogy. In our joint efforts we have worked across multiple settings, from English classrooms to basketball teams to summer research programs. Our goal in this research is to develop a grounded theory of practice (Strauss & Corbin, 1997), that is, a theory that begins with the core principles of critical pedagogy but uses empirical data from theoretically informed practice to develop a more nuanced and particular theory of critical pedagogy as it applies to urban education in new-century schools. In this chapter we describe applications of critical pedagogy to a secondary English class in Oakland, a Northern California urban center, that we co-taught for three years. We begin with the underlying principles that simultaneously honored the spirit of the discipline of secondary English, our commitment to academic excellence, and our belief in the practice of education for individual and collective freedom.
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Duncan-Andrade, J., and Morrell, E. (2008) The Art of Critical Pedagogy: The Promise of Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. New York: Peter Lang.
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Urban schools: Teacher preparation for diversity
AUTHOR
Karen Hunter Quartz
ABSTRACT
Preparing new teachers for the diversity of students and experiences they will find in urban schools is crucial to their professional success. The term “urban school” is typically used to signify more than its location in a city or densely populated area. It usually refers to city schools serving predominantly low-income students, immigrant students, English learners, and students of color. Preparing new teachers to be successful in these schools involves an integrated program of study and field experience designed to develop the skills, knowledge and attitudes needed to become an effective teacher of these student groups within the context of urban communities and city school systems. This entry describes the diverse characteristics, strengths and needs of students and families in urban school communities, the socio-political context of teachers’ work in urban schools and districts, and common features of teacher education programs designed to prepare new teachers for this work.
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J.A. Banks (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Diversity in Education. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.
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Urban Schools, Teacher Preparation for Diversity (pdf)
Culturally responsive pedagogy for African American students: Promising programs and practices for enhanced academic performance
AUTHORS
Tyrone C. Howard and Clarence L. Terry
ABSTRACT
The academic outcomes for African American students continue to lag behind their White, Latino, and Asian American counterparts. Culturally responsive pedagogy has been purported to be an intervention that may help to reverse the persistent under performance for African American students. This article highlights findings from a three-year study of an intervention program designed to increased college going rates for African American students. The authors document the manner in which overall student outcomes, graduation rates, and college going rates increased when culturally responsive pedagogical practices were used. Finally, this work calls for academic rigor to be a more germane characteristic of the culturally responsive pedagogical framework.
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Howard and Terry (2011), Culturally responsive pedagogy for African American students, Teaching Education, 22(4), 345-364.
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Hearing Footsteps in the Dark: African American Students’ Descriptions of Effective Teachers
AUTHOR
Tyrone C. Howard
ABSTRACT
There has been scant research examining African American students’ perceptions of their learning environments. Nonetheless, the persistent underachievement of African American students merits an investigation into their viewpoints as to what types of teaching and learning environments promote high achievement. In this article, I detail findings from a qualitative case study that examined African American elementary and secondary students’ descriptions of teaching practices and learning environments within urban contexts. The student interpretations identified 3 central teaching strategies that had a positive affect on student effort, engagement in class content, and overall achievement. The 3 key strategies were (a) teachers who establish family,community, and home-like characteristics; (b) teachers who establish culturally connected caring relationships with students; and (c) the use of certain types of verbal communication and affirmation.
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T.C. Howard (2002). Hearing Footsteps in the Dark: African American Students’ Descriptions of Effective Teachers. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 7(4), 425–444.
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They Don’t Show Nothing I Didn’t Know: Emergent Tensions Between Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Mathematics Pedagogy.
AUTHORS
Noel Enyedy and Shiuli Mukhopadhyay
ABSTRACT
This article describes data from the Community Mapping Project, a set of statistical activities and inquiry projects within a summer seminar for high school students. In designing the Community Mapping Project, we attempted to create conditions under which urban students themselves would come to recognize how mathematics is relevant to their lives and their communities. Using mixed methods, we analyzed the pre- and post assessments and final projects of 25 high school students to investigate what students learned from their experience. We also analyzed the data from video case studies to begin to understand how learning was organized. Our qualitative analysis revealed several tensions that emerged between the goals and norms of our instantiation of a culturally relevant pedagogy and the goals and norms of our mathematics pedagogy. We argue that how these tensions are navigated mediate what opportunity students have for learning statistics. This article provides some considerations and lessons learned that may help inform both teachers who wish to rethink their mathematics pedagogy, and the designers who wish to create culturally relevant curricula.
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This is an electronic version of the article published in The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 16(2), 139–174. The Journal of the Learning Sciences is available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10508400701193671#.UZUt4YJ1OAg.
INSIDE VOICES
A look at Culturally Responsive Pedagogy through the lens of students
AUTHOR
Tonikiaa Orange
ABSTRACT
Colleagues often tell me that they know the definition of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) and understand why it makes sense that all students would benefit from CRP, but what they don’t understand is how that translates into the classroom. The question that often arises after a discussion on CRP is, “What does culturally responsive teaching or learning look like in a school?” It is a legitimate question, given that “most of the literature on the theory of CRP far outpaces the research on the instructional practice” (Hollie, 2011, p. 44). What is missing from the research are the examples of what CRP looks and feels like for those engaged in it on a day to day basis. What better way to answer that question than to ask the students of CLAS who live CRP everyday.
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INSIDE VOICES A look at Culturally Responsive Pedagogy through the lens of students (pdf)
Critical Media Education and Radical Democracy
AUTHORS
Douglas Kellner and Jeff Share
ABSTRACT
This article explores the theoretical underpinnings of critical media education and analyzes contrasting approaches to teaching it. Combining cultural studies with critical pedagogy, we argue for a critical media literacy that aims to expand the notion of literacy to include a wide range of forms of media culture, information and communication technologies and new media, as well as deepen the potential of literacy education to critically analyze relationships between media and audiences, information and power. A multiperspectivist approach addressing issues of gender, race, class and power is used to explore the interconnections of media literacy, cultural studies and critical pedagogy. Our version of critical media literacy integrates analysis with production and aims at empowering students to participate fully in their society and thus promotes radical democracy and social justice.
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Douglas Kellner & Jeff Share, (2009). Critical media education and radical democracy. In The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education. Eds: Michael W. Apple, Wayne Au, and Luis Armando Gandin. New York: Routledge. (pp. 281-295)
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