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Supporting Inclusion with Culturally Responsive Teaching
Culture is the way our brain makes sense of the world, turning everyday happenings into meaningful events. Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is defined as “an educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning-making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content to promote effective information processing. All the while the educator understands the importance of being in a relationship and having a social-emotional connection to the student to create a safe space for learning” (Hammond, 2015). CRT empowers students by focusing on their assets, and by connecting students’ cultures, languages, and life experiences with instruction.
Promising Practices
1. Awareness
Acknowledge the socio-political context around race and language, know and own your cultural lens, and broaden your interpretation of culturally and linguistically diverse students’ learning behavior.
2. Learning Partnerships
Create social-emotional partnership for deep learning by reducing students’ social-emotional stress from threat and stereotypes, giving students both care and push, and by helping students cultivate a positive mindset.
3. Information Processing
Strengthen and expand students’ intellectual capacity by providing appropriate challenges and authentic opportunities to process content, connecting content to culturally relevant examples from students’ communities and everyday lives, and using formative assessment and feedback.
4. Community Building
Create an environment that is intellectually and socially safe for learning; one where rituals and routines reinforce self-directed learning and academic identity, and where students are comfortable taking academic risks.