As a former elementary school teacher, my goal was always to make learning exciting, interesting, and thought provoking for my students. I wanted my students’ learning to be something that would spark their curiosity and stimulate their creativity. I wanted my students to be problem solvers and strong thinkers. Most importantly, I wanted them to be safe in my classroom: physically safe, psychologically safe, emotionally safe, and culturally safe. I wanted teaching and learning for my students to be an extension of their lives outside of the classroom.
This was important to me because I taught in the same community where I grew up, Compton, California. Though communities and circumstances change over time, I knew that many of my students’ realities were similar to mine as a youth, in that they came from hard working, caring, resilient, and loving families. I recognized that theirs was a world where culture, language, and ethnicity were the fabric of their day-to-day realities. Hence, I wanted them to bring all the cultural tapestry that existed in their homes and communities into the classroom.
Much to my chagrin, I was greeted in my third-grade classroom with textbooks, standards, and scripted curriculum that were not culturally inclusive, linguistically rich, or emotionally affirming. My students were required to learn about realities that did not reflect theirs, and the issues and concepts that they were expected to learn were often socially foreign, and culturally unrecognizable. I found myself frequently modifying content, changing the examples, using analogies from our neighborhood to help them learn about decimals, fractions, and percentages. I often brought in outside reading and learning materials that helped them to learn about Black and Mexican American history. I saw my student’s interests pique when they were able to discuss the conditions that they saw in their neighborhoods, or the family dynamics that brought them so much joy. My students would light up when they were given permission to bring their multilingual skills into my classroom and use various modes of speaking and thinking that were accessible in their homes and their neighborhoods. They also took it seriously when they noticed issues around racial injustice happening.
I would find out several years later that this work that I tried to create in my classroom was the essence of what Gloria Ladson-Billings would term culturally relevant pedagogy. Ladson-Billings’ framework of merging culture and pedagogy spoke to me, because it affirmed that it was okay to allow students to maintain their cultural integrity in their pursuit of academic success. It validated the idea that even 8- and 9-year-old students have already begun to develop a critical consciousness about the circumstances around them, their communities, and the world, and connecting that knowledge to school content was okay. Culturally relevant pedagogy spoke to me, because it gave language, offered a framework, and a theoretical foundation to say that culture mattered. Culturally relevant pedagogy allowed me to discuss music, movies, and other popular cultural realties and topics of the day and helped to connect it to science and social studies content.
Twenty-five years later, far too many students do not have the opportunity to connect their home lives to school content. In many ways, students are asked to check their language, their identities, and their rich ways of knowing, doing, and being at the door before they are asked to learn. This is criminal and is not what teaching and learning should be about. James Banks talks about the importance of personal cultural knowledge that all students possess, and how vital it is to helping students become successful learners. Unfortunately, far too many students of color are not provided the opportunities to engage in the complexities of race and racism; culturally relevant pedagogy when done properly allows that to happen. Some teachers attempt to engage in culturally relevant teaching but do so with a very superficial and often reductionist notion of culture which can border on harmful stereotypes. If culturally relevant pedagogy is to be conducted in a serious and affirming matter, understanding the complexity and nuance or culture is essential. Educators must recognize that culture is dynamic, it is in a constant state of flux, and that there is tremendous cultural variability that exists within and across ethnic and racial groups. Culturally relevant pedagogy cannot be reduced to heroes and holidays, foods and festivals.
Finally, culturally relevant pedagogy is deeply rooted in an ideology, a core set of beliefs about how educators see their students, their families, and the communities in which they live. Do educators believe in students’ potential? Do teachers see their promise? Do they hold the highest expectations for them? Do they affirm students’ multiple identities through what and how they teach? Culturally relevant pedagogy cannot be reduced to a lesson, unit, or assignment. Culturally relevant pedagogy embodies how we think about our own identities, requires cultural humility, is centered on how we build trust, knowledge, and understanding of the students that we enter into a teaching and learning relationship with, and calls us to radically rethink what schools often require of us as educators.
By Tyrone C. Howard
Dr. Howard is professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies’ at UCLA. Dr. Howard is an endowed chair and the inaugural director of the new UCLA Pritzker Center for Strengthening Children and Families. Professor Howard’s research examines culture, race, teaching, and learning in urban schools.
Dr. Howard is the author of “Culturally Relevant Teaching: A Pivot for Pedagogical Transformation and Racial Reckoning,” published in the current issue of KDP’s Educational Forum. The article is available free for the month of December.