How Can I Become a Culturally Responsive Teacher?

Question

Answer

Culturally responsive teachers have high expectations for culturally and ethnically diverse students that understand behavior, communication, and learning from a cultural perspective. They respond from a strength-based perspective. They filter curriculum content and teaching strategies through the teacher's cultural frames of reference to make the content more personally meaningful and easier to master. In addition, they search their program for embedded racism and adjust their plans to eliminate it. Look at what you are teaching and how you are teaching it. Look for those potential microaggressions. Look for those biases that are in the books that you are reading or the videos that you are showing. Work to build children's knowledge of differences, privilege, and understanding of social justice. Build their skills to actively question and work against discrimination and bias. Other things you can do to become a culturally responsive teacher include:

• Form authentic and caring relationships.
• Build connections between what children already know and what they need to know.
• Select activities that honor each child’s culture and life experience.
• Shift instructional strategies to meet children’s diverse learning needs.
• Hold high expectations for all learners.
• Communicate respect for each child’s intelligence.
• Make the implicit explicit.

What Can You Do?

Research the heroes and accomplishments of children’s cultures. Introduce culturally relevant topics. Utilize culturally authentic books, songs, dances, and other materials. Buy fruits, vegetables, and canned goods at ethnic markets as opposed to using plastic fruits. Add the empties to the dramatic play area along with dolls, games, menus, clothes, and instruments. Ask parents or families to give you different clothes that they can dress up in. Make use of the colors that represent the countries that the children come from in your displays. Invite families and community members into the classroom to share their knowledge and skills.

Instead of buying plastic food for your housekeeping corner, ask the families to photograph a breakfast, lunch, and dinner plate from their home, and then send it to you. We have all these wonderful abilities that we can do now with technology. Have parents or families send you the picture then enlarge it, print it, laminate it, and use it in the housekeeping area. This allows children to provide a real meal to one another. When you read books to children, do not translate them as you are reading them to other children who might be learning English because it interrupts the flow of the story. If you can, find the same story in another language. Then you can read that through.

Finally, ask questions such as:

• How would you feel if…?
• Can you say more about…?
• Why do you think this happened?

Asking questions such as these can help the children to think about the different gender roles and expressions that they have amongst one another and appreciate their answers. You need to combine a loving manner with tough and rigorous expectations, and most important of all, believe they can all learn. Expect all children to try hard and do well and push all children to do their best.

Successful programs respect and incorporate the cultures and languages of children and their families. There are many ways to do that and it is up to you to find a way to make that important. You cannot learn the languages of every child. You cannot label everything in five different languages. But if you know some keywords, it can help children to feel more comfortable.

Instead of putting purchased multicultural posters on the wall, have children bring in artifacts of their own culture and photographs of their families. Let each child create a poster of where they come from and their families. For the interdependent or group-oriented cultures, have them work together and put many different things on that poster. Now you are truly representing all of the kids in a real way. You are not just putting up a poster of a person who does not even look like anyone people see in everyday life anymore.

It is all about language and culture and every child brings something important. We need to celebrate each child, where they come from and what they bring with them. Everything about them is important and needs to be respected.

This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Opening the Culture Door: Valuing Diversity, presented by Barbara Kaiser, MA.