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Valery Chekmazov EPS 512 Ruth Meyers Personally Dealing With Cultural Responsiveness Being a culturally responsive teacher

has become one of the most important skills for a successful modern-day educator. We are no longer living in an era where teaching is defined by simply raising the academic bar and hoping all of your students somehow will climb it. With the new teaching approaches in pedagogy, educators must acknowledge the unique learning, behavioral, emotional and especially cultural backgrounds of their students in the classroom to make education more relevant, appropriate and meaningful for them. Being able to relate to your students experiences enables you to create an environment of cultural respect and understanding in your classroom, especially when working in an urban environment. In this paper I will draw on both theory and methods of cultural responsiveness, compare them to my prior experiences and describe how I will mitigate my cultural limitations in the future. A good starting point to talking about cultural responsiveness is to establish a clear definition of cultural responsiveness. Gay defines culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through the strengths of these students (2000). I think that this definition provides a very clear map of some of the things that teachers should strive for to optimize the learning of their students. Using cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and understanding the performance styles of each one of your students sets up a foundation for building a strong academic and personal rapport with your student and beginning the road to their success in school.

The first important step to successful teaching derives from an understanding that everyone, including you, comes from a unique cultural background and tends to look at the world through a unique set of cultural lenses. In her book How to Teach Students Who Dont Look Like You, Bonnie Davis begins her conversation about cultural responsiveness by asking you to take some time to examine your own cultural lens (2006). This exercise is designed to lead you to understand and accept the unique cultural background from which you came. This background will inevitably play an important role in how you will see, treat and interact with your students. Davis contends that if we first acknowledge and know our own perspective we can begin understanding that students also have their own unique looks on school and life that are grounded in their cultural upbringing. Understanding your cultural lens enables you to empathize and grasp the unique world that your students come from. As a teacher, you can use that empathy to make your pedagogy relevant to their stories. For example, last year Ive taught English in Latin America in a bilingual school. I knew that teaching them the Western canon books will be irrelevant to their own experiences. To be culturally appropriate Ive included books and short stories in English which I drew from Latin and American-Latin cultures. This made my students feel as though I respect their culture and structure my learning goals around their experiences. To put this into my own experience, I understand how a students whose culture is not acknowledged, valued or fairly represented in the classroom might develop a certain view of learning and education. That experience has really given me a perspective of how as an educator I should approach teaching my students. Once I graduated from college, Ive decided that I wanted to travel and teach abroad for a while. Ive landed a teaching position in Honduras, where Ive taught high school English in an immersion-type course. Ive realized that this was my opportunity to apply what Ive experiences and learned to my pedagogical practice. I went into

the classroom thinking first about the cultural backgrounds of my students. I came to Honduras earlier and began walking the community, trying to learn and soak in the culture that I will be instructing. I understood that It was important that I get to know where my students come from, what are the main customs that they follow, what do they believe, who are their families, what socioeconomic standing they hold and meet their parents before I begin my teaching. I know now that because I gathered all that extraneous data before I began teaching, it made my instruction more effective. Cultural-relevant instruction calls for a deeper understanding of your students culture. Teachers who practice this philosophy demonstrate that they know where each one of their students comes from and how their culture can be represented in the content that you are teaching. That a lot of times this means, looking at the neighborhood that your students come from and asking yourself, what is life like here, what do people do, what is the sense of community here and how do people communicate/express themselves with each other? Once you know that, it becomes easier to communicate or relate to your students because you can begin building trust with them on a more personal level. If you try to understand the life and the community of the student you are beginning to show your students that you are not just some stranger who came here to impose your own worldview on them, but that you are a part of their life, you care for them and that you respect the origin of their own identities. I think that is the best key to make your students respect and trust you in the classroom. When I was teaching in Honduras, I had one student Danilo, who would constantly act out and cause disruption in my classroom. For a long time I was engaged in a constant struggle to get Danilo do his work, stay on task and stop disrupting the other students. I would get mad not only at myself but also at Danilo, often asking myself questions like, why is he not wanting

to learn, what is wrong with him, and simply falling in that negative state of mind. What I didnt realize is that I didnt know that Danilo, unlike many of his other peers, came from a very poor village in the outskirts of town that his father was an alcoholic who often abused his mother and that his mother suffered from a rare ailment. That Danilo had to ride on a bicycle up a very steep hill to get the education that most of his peers bought with their parents money because he was a sponsored kid. Now I wish that I knew that before I was beginning to get frustrated with him I could have talked with him and understood his situation better. After I found out about his situation Ive made some adjustments to how I was treating Danilo academically. I began helping him academically by providing tutoring opportunities for him afterschool and building personal connection with him. His grades eventually improved and his attitude became better too. There was still a lot of things that we worked on that were far from perfect, but I think because Ive demonstrated to him that I wanted to get to know him, he realized that he was valued in my class. I take that experience and a mistake as a learning moment for myself and will use it in the future to prevent similar situation from happening. In the same vein, teachers need to create safe and respectful learning environments that take the culture of their students in consideration and create an atmosphere of mutual respect. One way to do it would be to decorate your classroom with posters of famous, inspiration figures from different paths of life and backgrounds. In the past Ive mounted posters of Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Russian authors on my classroom walls. Doing this sends a message to the students that in this classroom we are open minded to the beliefs of others and acknowledge that the world is filled with different people. It also creates a safe environment for students to express their own culture and a feeling that their culture is being fairly accepted and represented in this environment.

Another important part of cultural responsiveness addresses using students past experiences to guide their learning. If I had to choose one most important factor that lead to successful learning, I think I have to choose this one. Using students past experiences in your instruction is a great tool for activating their prior knowledge content and beginning to make neurological connections between their own experiences and the learning content. This helps them relate to the material in personal way, making learning more engaging and fun. No student wants to sit in the classroom and learn stuff that does not pertain to their life, its a given. Teachers need to learn about their students interests, experiences, and family to differentiate their learning. One good way of doing it is through informal assessment or fun icebreaking activities. At the beginning of the year you can really get to know your students and what they like to do to have a general understanding of what things you can integrate into your teaching. For example, when I taught in Decatur, at an urban Middle School, I knew a lot of my students were into hip-hop and rap, so I would periodically include rap lyrics and hip hop music into my curriculum to make the material relevant to them. The students really enjoyed learning about metaphors and similes in this sort of way and showed their approval of material in their exit slips. Journaling is another great way to let students express their experiences and connect them to a particular lesson. Ive done journaling last years and most of my students have enjoyed it, except the boys, who felt that it was strictly for girls. So there can be gender issues with it. I think another important factor of cultural responsiveness is how you build and structure your curriculum for your students and differentiate your instruction on the same principle. This means asking questions like, does my curriculum incorporate different cultures and perspectives? Are the cultures of my students fairly represented in reading and resources? Asking these types of questions will enable me to start thinking about cultural values of my students and others. In

the past Ive designed my unit plans around the principle of multiculturalism. As someone who comes from a different cultural background, I value the fair representation of cultures and points of views. When I planned my literacy unit in Honduras last year, Ive included a variety of different stories and opinions from different cultures and point of views. For my 11th grade English class, I had a weekly segment called News of the World where students had to read different news articles (in English) from different newspapers and compare perspectives. I really enjoy watching my students explore and analyze different points of views and beliefs that come from different cultures. I think that the teachers who routinely make multi-cultural content a part of their classroom create a safer, accepting and more engaging cultural environment for their students. While Gays definition of cultural responsiveness provides a basic understanding of the things a truly culturally responsive teacher should do in the classroom, I feel like it leaves out one of the most important factors; teachers relationship with the community. After watching the movie and reading the article on Two Towns of Jasper, I began thinking about the role of the school in relation to culture. The article tried to give different perspectives on Jaspers community through the eyes and experiences of both the black and white populations. Their views differed. The white population was quick to deny that racism came from within the community, and that the crime was a product of something outside. The black community saw the event as a buildup of years of subtle and unacknowledged racism. The lesson of Jasper really speaks to the heart of whether racism and racial hate could have been prevented if race was a part of the schools and communities dialogue. As teachers I believe we should strive to create a strong connection to our schools community. If a teacher understand and knows the community of the school, then the teacher will understand from where his/her students are coming from,

what sort of experiences they go over on daily basis, and what sort of things they need to learn in their classroom to make them relevant to where they live. I also believe that teachers should integrate their students learning and involve them into community building. As a language arts teacher, there are numerous projects that I can assign that will involve students exploring and helping their community while also acquiring the necessary academic skills needed. This helps in a couple of ways. One it closes the treacherous gap between learning and living that many students tend to develop. It is the mentality that learning only happens in school, and once I leave the school ground, the learning ends. Community-based activities help students bridge the gap and transfer their passion of learning into the place they live. Another benefit of this type of activity is that it send the message to students that they can make a difference where they live. As culturally responsive teachers we should send our students messages that encourage participation in community. We should encourage our students to take an active role in helping build the community and give back to it.

Works Cited Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, & Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Davis, Bonnie (2006). How to Teach Students Who Dont Look Like You. London: Corwin Press. Dow, Whitney, Williams, Marco (2004). The Two Towns of Jasper. Facing History and Ourselves National Foundation.

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