Culturally Responsive Teaching

 CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE TEACHING

 

            One of the unintended consequences of our world evolving into a global community is the necessity to teach students wherever they are about the rest of the world and how cultures differ.  Naturally, because we live in world connected by so many different ways to communicate, we also have students in our classrooms quite often from all over the world.  One can go to even the most far-off places on the planet and meet kids and adults speaking different languages, eating, or wanting to eat different foods and wanting to pick up news from home in a multiplicity of languages.  But cafes, restaurants, tourist spots, schools, bring people together and that cultural diffusion filters into our classrooms.  If we want to make each and every student feel as if they belong so that we as teachers can make a difference in their lives for good, then we need to figure out ways to make our teaching culturally responsive.  What exactly does that mean though.

           Well, first of all, I think it means not painting all of our students with one brush.  For example, since so many students eat at school and share tables as well as conversation, from a very young age, we see children looking at what everyone puts in their mouths.  Gone are the days when every kid had a peanut butter sandwich, some cookies, and an apple perhaps.  There will be any number of different foodstuffs and we should encourage discussions both in and out of class about what the different foods are and where they come from.  Perhaps it would be fun to have a bring your lunch to school day for everyone and encourage children to share what they would normally be eating if they were still where their families were from and what some of the events around lunch time might be. The object of the lessons would be to encourage everyone to share and come to see that although their lunch stuffs might be different, they are still eating for nourishment and pleasure.

             Another way could be to have opportunities for children to share what memories they have from their home countries.  Some of those memories might be harder or more embarrassing to share and this is where cultural sensitivity would come in on the part of the teacher.  He or she has to know what life was like for their students BEFORE they joined their class and ensure that they feel as comfortable as is possible.  Some students might have come from war-torn countries, Others perhaps left their extended family behind.  But we owe it to our students, wherever they have come from and whatever the circumstances of their current lives, to make them feel accepted and welcomed not just by us but by our students as well.

             This list could go on and on, but I will focus on reading materials briefly here since I have addressed this before.  In order for children to want to read and to learn from their reading choices, we should try and find books to include in our libraries, in the classroom and in the school, that share a point of view different from our own. I have made l it my business to read some of the most current literature written by authors telling stories of poverty in India or escape from Syria or dealing with death in a new home in America. There are so many books written by authors who are non-white, African or Asian, who have something important to teach us about life from their points of view.  We can encourage our students, young and old, to read widely about life in distant places and see how although dress and foods and shelter might be different, kids are kids and growing up presents the exact same challenges regardless of where we are.  

          Being culturally responsive means attempting to see the world through the eyes of someone not from the same background as ourselves.  The beauty of that exercise is not only that we learn about different worlds and different cultures and so forth, but it makes us more tolerant because we are becoming broader minded.  That’s the most we can hope for if we wish to continue to enjoy life in a democracy where every person counts and is entitled to be treated fairly and justly.