The Heuristic for Thinking About Culturally Responsive Teaching (HiTCRiT)

Michèle was hurrying to class. How, she thought, could she offer the students in her African American English in Society and Schools class a method of understanding, comparing, and abstracting the studies they had been reading in class? The heuristic described in this study evolved from a desire to capture aspects of several seminal studies that illustrated how African American English was deployed in classrooms for productive work with African American students. Michèle recalled that whenever she asked graduate students or practicing teachers what they, other teachers, and schools might do to improve the schooling of students of color, one of the most consistent responses was Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP). However, when pressed and asked what one would detect in classrooms where CRP is being put into practice, few were able to specify what an observer might see. Specifying the dimensions of CRP and its relationship to the heuristic had not been on Michèle’s mind. Even so, it was during the class discussion that the heuristic’s relevance to CRP became clearer. Jonathan, who had been tapped as a teaching assistant in an English language arts methods class, believed HiTCRiT could be modified to use with teacher education candidates, as a substitute for the standardized lesson planning tool used in the department. He piloted its use with the class the following semester. Utilizing HiTCRiT to explain research and existing practices as well as to assist teachers in creating culturally relevant instruction modified and shaped it, creating a more robust tool. Thus, the HiTCRiT came into being and came to inform our thinking and teaching practice.     

Culturally Responsive Teacher Education for Rural and Native Communities

This article explores the marginalized contexts of rural and Native American communities that have made recruitment and retention in teacher education inequitable in remote areas. Through facilitating a Culturally Responsive Pedagogy workshop series with schools in a neighboring rural county, having a large Native population and a very low student academic achievement rate, we discovered strong resistance from local educators to the notion of “culture” influencing student achievement. Our disappointment in the outcomes of the workshops caused us to examine the services our university provided to rural and Native place-based pre-service educators. As a result, we created a Satellite program to more responsively meet rural teachers’ unique needs and circumstances. By providing greater access to higher education and teacher licensing for students in remote locations, and by embedding equity, diversity, inclusion, and culturally relevant curriculum in all Satellite coursework, we hope to produce teachers who will return to their communities committed to improving schools and promoting equity and social-emotional and academic success for their future students.     

The Intersectionality of Culturally Responsive Teaching and Performance Poetry: Validating Secondary Latino Youth and Their Community

In this article the authors draw from culturally responsive teaching and multicultural education to describe performance poetry as an effective strategy for validating secondary aged Latino youths’ lived experiences. Supported by teacher modeling and the incorporation of community poets, students created and shared their own powerful poems that provided authentic opportunities to engage in critical analysis of the poems and issues of equality, social justice, and equity. Performance poetry is successfully used as a tool for validation, honoring and learning from our community, and transformation. Students in this border community were validated in terms of the identities as members of multiple worlds, learned about their own neighborhood from community poets, and were transformed in their identities as community activists through performance poetry. However, in this era of standardized teaching and high-stakes testing, teaching through performance poetry is often not supported in schools.     

Ethnic and Urban Intersections in the Classroom: Latino Students,Hybrid Identities,and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy

Drawing from data collected through classroom observations and in-depth interviews, this article describes and analyzes practices identified as culturally responsive by Latinos students in an urban, multiethnic/racial context. The findings suggest that culturally responsive pedagogy must be more broadly conceptualized to address the cultural identities of students who have complex identities because of their experiences with peers of many varied identities, those whose urban roots have resulted in hybrid identities, and those who are multiethnic/multiracial. Based on these findings, the article forwards the concept of “cultural connectedness” as a framework for practicing a non-essentializing, dynamic approach to culturally responsive pedagogy that acknowledges the hybrid nature of culture and identity.     

Going Against the Grain in an Urban Arizona High School: Secondary Preservice Teachers Emerging as Culturally Responsive Educators

This one year study examines the journey of two preservice urban high-school teachers in Arizona as they enact Culturally Responsive Teaching in a year-long student teaching residency. Factors that influenced their Culturally Responsive Teaching practices are discussed along themes that emerged from interviews and classroom observations. Recommendations for ways of integrating Culturally Responsive Teaching in teacher education programs are provided.     

Becoming a Culturally Responsive Early Childhood Educator: A Tool to Support Reflection by Teachers Embarking on the Anti-Bias Journey

As children begin to construct an understanding of human differences and similarities during their earliest years, early childhood teachers are challenged to be culturally responsive to the diversity of the children and families. Based on our review of the literature and other existing tools, this article discusses a framework for thinking about this work and proposes critical elements for teachers to re-examine their practice. The article describes a reflective tool structured to provoke thinking about attitudes, assumptions, and knowledge base regarding culturally responsive teaching.     

Culturally and Linguistically Relevant Readalouds

The teacher readaloud is an instructional tool established in its ability to foster children's language and literacy development. Increasing cultural and linguistic diversity and changing standards place pressure on teachers to provide literacy and language instruction relevant to children's everyday lives and learning. This article presents a framework for conducting culturally and linguistically relevant readalouds within two essential components, talk and text, in terms of developing cultural competence, maintaining high academic expectations, and fostering a critical stance. Particular attention is given to the interactive nature of these readalouds and how they can be used to promote children's active co-construction of textually-based meaning.     

Teaching Social Studies for Newcomer English Language Learners: Toward Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Through this case study the author explores how an exemplary teacher utilized social studies curriculum and pedagogy to engage English language learners (ELLs) in learning in a culturally relevant and meaningful way and discusses practical implications for teaching and learning.     

(Re) Claiming Native Youth Knowledge: Engaging in Socio-culturally Responsive Teaching and Relationships

This article reveals Native youth perspectives on socio-culturally responsive education. The authors draw on two studies conducted in the Southwest among Navajo and Pueblo students. Youth convey the importance of meaningful, reciprocal, and transformative learning experiences and relationships at school. The article ends with suggestions for creating a socio-culturally responsive school environment.     

Research on Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Populations

The new millennium has seen tremendous shifts in paradigms and powers in the sociocultural demography of our nation. We can no longer ignore the presence of persons from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds in our teaching, research, and service. To reduce prejudicial presumptions and illusory conclusions, it is important that we revisit "old" ideas through research, respond to changing societal notions through research, mentor potential researchers, and disseminate research information through publications. In this article, I address these important points.     

Developing Culturally Competent Preservice Teachers

An unfortunate, yet persistent, truth in U.S. public schools is the large achievement gap existing between children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and their White, middle-class counterparts. The potential for cultural dissonance between contemporary teachers and their students necessitates that educators must persistently seek culturally responsive practices. Much has been written regarding strategies for culturally responsive pedagogy; therefore, this article moves beyond a review of culturally responsive pedagogy. Rather than providing teacher candidates with more suggestions for culturally responsive teaching activities, the authors provide teacher educators with specific resources for facilitating the development of cultural competence among preservice teachers.     

Culturally Relevant Education: Extending the Conversation to Religious Diversity

Culturally relevant education represents a wide collection of pedagogies of opposition to social injustice and holds a commitment to collective empowerment and social justice. By using culturally relevant education as a framework, we make the case to include religious diversity as a part of culturally relevant education intentionally. We believe that by opening the dialogue to include religious diversity, we are working together as educators to promote social justice in schools that benefits all children regardless of their religious backgrounds. We synthesize successful examples of culturally relevant education in connection to religion. Further, we argue for teacher educators to incorporate discussion of religious diversity as part of multicultural and social justice teacher education.     

Learning Culturally Relevant Practices: Facing Developmental Roadblocks

In the Filipino language, kuwento means “story,” but the concept itself encapsulates more than its literal meaning. Similar to talk story events in Hawaiian communities (Au &; Jordan, 1981 Au, K. and Jordan, C. 1981. “Teaching reading to Hawaiian children: Finding a culturally appropriate solution”. In Culture and bilingual classroom: Studies in classroom ethnography, Edited by: Trueba, H., Guthrie, B. P. and Au, K. H. 139–152. Rowley, MA: Newbury.  [Google Scholar]), kuwento serves as a tool to communicate everyday experiences within groups, especially among family and community members (Eugenio, 1981 Eugenio, D. L. 1981. Philippine folk literature: An anthology., Diliman, Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Folklorists.  [Google Scholar]). It is an abstraction of history, congealing experience into a chain of events. It is what Bakhtin (1981) Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin., Austin: University of Texas Press.  [Google Scholar] would call a unique speech experience—one that is shaped and developed in continuous and constant interaction with others. Kuwento is largely influenced by other people's words and ideas that eventually become incorporated into one's own. Like story and storytelling, kuwento takes many forms and can be used in the classroom during sharing time to construct and activate newer understandings (Cazden, 1994 Cazden, C. B. 1994. “What is sharing time for?”. In The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community, Edited by: Dyson, A. H. and Genishi, C. 72–79. Urbana, IL: NCTE.  [Google Scholar]; Michaels, 1981 Michaels, S. 1981. “Sharing time”: Children's narrative styles and differential access to literacy. Language in Society., 10: 423–442. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In the case of paucity in classroom material, the teacher can engage students to learn through her/his own writing (Vascellaro &; Genishi, 1994 Vascellaro, S. and Genishi, C. 1994. “All things that mattered”: Stories written by teachers for children”. In The need for story: Cultural diversity in classroom and community, Edited by: Dyson, A. H. and Genishi, C. 172–198. Urbana, IL: NCTE.  [Google Scholar]) and her/his own construction of oral stories in different participant structures (Phillips, 1972 Phillips, S. 1972. “Participant structures and communicative competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom”. In Functions of language in the classroom, Edited by: Cazden, C., John, V. and Hymes, D. 370–394. New York: Teachers College Press.  [Google Scholar]). As we shall see in the case of Filipino Heritage Studies, the teacher's use of reflective- and real-time stories conveys the importance of history and present-day realities both in his and his students' lives. Although kuwento is also present in other participant structures, this article focuses on the teacher's whole-class lecture during a unit on the Philippine American War.     

Advancing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy in a Secondary Methods Course

Given changes in the U.S. school-age population, it is crucial that colleges of education prepare teacher candidates to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds. Because diversity constitutes such a small portion of the curriculum in many teacher education programs, it is crucial that teacher educators find creative ways to incorporate diversity into the courses they teach. In this article a teacher educator at a predominantly White institution in the American Southeast describes how she introduces culturally relevant pedagogy and connects it to the content, activities, and assessments included in the remainder of a course.     

Building Trust Through Culturally Reciprocal Home-School-Community Collaboration from the Perspective of African-American Parents

This article presents findings of an instrumental case study that examined the perceptions held by African-American parents on the efficacy of schools in meeting the needs of African-American learners in a North Carolina community. A theme of distrust emerged and evidenced the need for teachers, administrators, and teacher educators to reconsider approaches used with African-American parents, particularly where building culturally reciprocal home-school-community relationships is concerned.     

Storying a Social Drama: How Discourse and Practice Prevent Transformation Through Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

In a sociohistorical moment during which racism has become more widely accepted as a social fact, U.S. scholars and practitioners of education continue to struggle with how schooling might participate in its eradication. In suburban, elite, Midwestern Pioneer City Public Schools, a series of initiatives I refer to as “the transformation” aimed to eliminate racial predictability in standardized test scores through efforts (a) to redistribute children from a racially and economically isolated elementary school across the district's four elementary schools, and (b) to train all district staff in a particular brand of culturally relevant pedagogy. In this article, I argue that Pioneer City School District was unable to address the transformative goals of culturally relevant pedagogy—in part because of irresolvable tensions between an explicitly anti-racist theory and the authoritative discourses suggesting that racism is a thing of the past.